Page 37 of Fundamentals of Chemistry

“You have to stay away from him.”

“I know that.”

“But you’re you, and you’re already thinking about how to get close again.”

I bit my lip, considering my answer before I replied. “I know that, too.”

Back in my apartment, I flopped down heavily on my bed and pulled a thick pillow over my face. If Cooper had already been a problem, now he was ten times worse. I could still feel his breath on my face. My skin still burned in the places where I wished he had touched me. I tossed the pillow and retrieved my vibrator from my nightstand. I didn’t need lube.

Chapter 12

The First Exam

Afew days later, I sat in the classroom staring off into space, my brain completely zoned out while I listened to the soft scratching of pencils on paper. The bell rang, jarring my attention back to reality.

“Pencils down, and turn in your exams at the front of the room,” I called over the noise of scraping chairs and zipping bookbags. “And have a great weekend!”

I smiled to myself as I flipped through the papers, counting to make sure I had them all. This was a champagne milestone—my first exam as a teacher. I snapped a quick photo of the pile of exams and sent it to Silvia with the caption “one down, one to go!” She knew how much of myself I had poured into these exams.

My anxiety had been turned up to eleven all week while I prepared—reviewing with the students and finalizing the questions with Cooper. Since test scores were the main metric that Cooper and I would be graded against, we had to work together to write the exam. And it had been… awkward as hell.

He had avoided me like the bubonic plague all week. You’d think I had threatened him bodily harm instead of merely almost-kissing him. Though, it hadn’t felt like mere anything. My lips—not to mention other places—still tingled at the memory as though something had actually happened.

Sure, I saw him in passing between classes and around campus, but whenever I tried to talk to him, he would just freeze like a marble statue and insist he had somewhere else to be.

He might have been embarrassed, or maybe he simply had more sense than I did. We were competing for the same job. There was no way starting something was a good idea. Either it would go horribly and the rest of the semester teaching together would be even more awkward, or it would go well, but we would have to call it off in a couple of months when one of us (not me) left.

Yeah, he probably had the right idea by staying away, but it made writing an exam together a real pain in the ass. We had no choice but to email and pass notes under each other’s doors.

Of course, Cooper already had an exam drafted up, but I also wrote a few questions that I wanted to include. Plus, we had old exams from Stephens to draw from. Eventually, after a lot of back and forth—emails with attachments named “Exam One draft 18 Final Final?” and sliding printed copies marked up with hot pink pen under his apartment door—we had an exam and key that we agreed on.

I was downright eager to see how the students performed after all that preparation. Hell, I was even looking forward to spending my personal time over the weekend grading.

I was still flipping through exams when I left the classroom, and I ran smack into a hard chest. Cooper. He grabbed my upper arms to steady us, and we instinctively locked eyes. This was by far the closest we had been since those stolen moments last week. My breath caught as I took in the heated expression on his face. He was clearly remembering the same thing.

“Sorry,” I stammered. I wasn’t sure if I was apologizing for bumping him just now or almost-kissing him. I wasn’t actually sorry for either.

He held my arms for a moment longer than was necessary, eyes boring into my soul. When he finally spoke, I was disappointed to hear him say, “it’s fine,” before stepping around me into the room.

I sucked in a deep breath and exhaled slowly to the count of five, taking a moment to collect myself before heading to the library to begin grading.

***

Grading, it turned out, was almost as much of a pain in the ass as writing the test had been. I spent the entirety of second period carefully reviewing questions—correcting mistakes and scoring against the key—and I only made it through four.

Four exams in an hour.

No wonder Stephens only ever drew slashes over missed questions and wrote the total at the top. Going through each question attentively took ages. But I was happy to do it, and I was sure the students would appreciate the detailed evaluation. That, and I would be handing them over to Cooper for a final check before entering the grades.

It wasn’t usual procedure to have another teacher peer check your exams, but under the circumstances, I could see the necessity. It would be all too easy for one of us to grade too easily, thereby boosting our test scores over the other’s classes. Having the other person check our work kept us both honest, even if it did mean more work in the short term.

I was not looking forward to regrading Cooper’s exams, but that was a Sunday problem. I had more than enough to focus on over the next forty-eight hours without adding that to my plate.

I continued to grade the first period exams while the third period students took theirs, all the while trying not to dwell on the fact that I would be fully grading forty-three exams this weekend. I managed to get through five more during third period, bringing my total remaining down to thirty-four.

Maybe if I really focused, I could get them all done this afternoon and evening. The weather had finally turned to fall, and the October Lovers had their first big activity planned for Saturday evening—a bonfire and s’mores party.

The club had done this activity on a small scale in years past, but I encouraged them to take things up a notch this year. The bonfire would now be open to the whole school—a proper sized party. We decided to host it on the Cedar Lake beach instead of in the Grove so that there would be plenty of room for all the extra students.