After class, I take my time packing my stuff while the other students file out. Wes lingers the longest, hanging in the doorway, and for a second I think he’s waiting for me to catch up with him so we can walk out together. But he’s just pulling headphones out of his beat-up canvas messenger bag, untangling the cord before plugging them in.
I wait until Wes is gone to approach Alex. “Professor—”
He turns around and hits me with that aggressively friendly smile again.
“ ‘Alex’ is fine,” he says. “Something I can help you with, Carly?”
“It’s just…” I trail off, wringing my backpack strap. “Well, should I be in this seminar? I didn’t know it was for upperclassmen.”
Alex sits on the edge of the desk and laces his fingers. “Do you want to be here?”
He doesn’t seem annoyed, only curious. Like he finds me curious. I shouldn’t have tried to talk to him. I should have just left, gone straight to the registrar and switched into a different class. Stupid, so stupid.
“I’m not sure… I mean, I don’t want it to be—”
“Because you absolutely deserve to be here,” he says. “Your application essay was one of the strongest pieces of writing I’ve read in years.”
I glance down at the toes of my sneakers, my cheeks coloring.
“How about this?” he says. “Let’s give it a few weeks. If you’re struggling with the assignments, or have any questions—if you need anything at all, I have office hours every Thursday and Friday. Sound good?”
“Okay,” I tell him, even though none of this sounds good at all. “Thanks, Prof—”
“Alex.”
He pushes off the desk and stands up. The room feels smaller than ever.
“Alex,” I say. “Th-thank you.”
Tears are already pricking the corners of my eyes as I hurry out into the hallway. I am not going to cry, not here where people can see. Back home, I’d go to my bedroom, lock the door, and let this all pour out of me in private. But for all I know, if I go back to Whitten now, Allison will be there, still asleep. Or worse, awake and watching me with those sparkling, too-blue eyes.
The Oak Grove is teeming with students now, and sunlight streams through the trees, turning all that red searing. I wish I could disappear, but all I can do is hunch my shoulders again and duck into the flow of foot traffic. If I can’t be happy here, at least I can be invisible. After all, anything’s better than going back home.
5 SCARLETT
The sultry music thrumming through my study is almost, but not quite, enough to drown out the Friday night revelries from the student housing down the street. That’s the price I pay for living so close to campus.
The house itself is nothing special: a tiny Tudor with sloping floors and a roof that leaks every spring. I bought it when I first took the teaching position at Gorman, and this study is the room that sold me. It’s the largest room in the house, with built-in bookshelves lining two entire walls. Now that it’s October, the weather is finally cool enough to ignite the gas fireplace set into the corner between them.
As soon as I got home after my last class, I changed out of my work clothes and put on my favorite black satin nightgown and matching robe. My feet are bare, my hair tumbling loose over my shoulders. The glow from the fire turns the copper waves almost crimson.
My application for the Women’s Academy fellowship has been all but complete for weeks, but I’m reviewing it one last time prior to submitting—still more than a month ahead of the deadline. I have to make sure every detail is perfect. Getting this fellowship could change everything.
When I hear the front door open, I don’t bother looking away from the laptop screen. Only one person other than me has a key to this house, and I’ve been expecting him.
My graduate assistant, Jasper, takes the steps two at a time but comes to a stop on the study threshold, rapping his knuckles on the open door. I make him wait until I’ve reached the end of a page before shutting the computer and motioning him inside.
He has to bow his head to avoid hitting it on the doorframe. Jasper’s height is unusual even now; back when this house was built, it was practically unheard of. He’s carrying a stack of library books in the crook of his slender arm.
“These five came in.” He sets the books down one by one on the corner of my desk, adjusting them so all the spines line up. A lock of light brown hair falls over his cheekbone, emphasizing its sharp slant. “But the volume of correspondence you wanted is still in transit. I’ll follow up with PALCI if it doesn’t arrive next week.”
I exhausted the relevant texts in the Gorman library years ago, so now most of my research materials have to be shipped in via interlibrary loan. Even then, it’s difficult to get hold of what I need. But if all goes according to plan, I won’t have to content myself with the Pennsylvania academic library system’s paltry selection for much longer. I’ll be able to go right to the source, review the primary materials. The Women’s Academy archive has boxes full of actual letters between Viola and her contemporaries, in their own handwriting.
It’s enough to make me salivate—but it’s not the only reason I’m so keen to win the fellowship and spend a year in London. I need to get out of Gorman, at least for a while.
Not that there aren’t enough deserving men to murder here. That’s the problem: there are plenty, but to avoid attracting attention to myself in a town as small as this one, I have to sit on my hands for months at a stretch, wait until sufficient time has passed between deaths. Watch them keep hurting people without consequence, until the time is right.
When I was in graduate school in Chicago, I could probably have killed a man every other week and gotten away with it. London is three times larger. It would make the perfect hunting ground.
Jasper finishes straightening the books and looks at me. The flickering firelight turns his green eyes darker. “Will there be anything else tonight, Dr. Clark?”
Holding his gaze, I push my chair back from the desk and part my legs. The satin slides away from my skin like water.
Every time I fuck Jasper, I feel a pang of guilt over my hypocrisy. But I’m nothing like Kinnear. Jasper is a grown man, less than a decade younger than I am, not a wide-eyed teenager who doesn’t know any better.
Besides, back when our affair started, he wasn’t even working for me. During the first year of his PhD, he was Kinnear’s assistant; after Kinnear took the interim chair position, Jasper was passed along to another professor—and he made sure it would be me. I had my doubts about the arrangement, but he’s proven himself professional and discreet thus far. Besides, this is the closest approximation of a relationship I can risk, given my secret.
By the time we’re done, Jasper’s careful stack of books has toppled across the desktop. He reaches over to right the pile, lining it up perfectly again, then gathers my robe from the floor and hands it to me.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” he says as he’s tucking his shirt back in.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
The classes Jasper TAs for me meet Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and we often see each other on Friday nights, but rarely later in the weekend. I have no idea what he does when we’re not together. I figure it’s not fair of me to ask. After all, he’s entirely in the dark about my extracurricular activities.