Page 38 of Fundamentals of Chemistry

Due to the scale of the event, I enlisted a few other teachers to help chaperone. The October Lovers seemed like a good group of kids, but I remembered what I had been like in high school. There were definitely going to be a few teens trying to sneak in booze or sneak away to make out in the woods.

These exams needed to get graded and off my plate, so I could direct all of my focus on making the bonfire a success.

By Friday evening, I had the first period exams completely finished, and I was halfway through the third period exams. I tried to push them out of my mind as I met up with Ashley and the hens for a quick bite, before we all headed out to the stadium for the Friday night football game. I hadn’t missed a single home game while I was a student, and I didn’t intend to start now.

Cooper sat a few rows behind me with his friend Alan Rathbone, the physics teacher, who he had been using as a human shield to avoid me for the last week. With a shaved head and a toothy smile under a thick beard, Alan was one of those amiable guys that had never met a stranger, and he seemed more than happy to run interference for Cooper.

“What are you looking at?” Ashley asked when she caught me peeking back for the third time.

I swore I felt eyes on me more than a few times, but each time I looked back, the men were both watching the field. “Nothing,” I replied with a sigh.

Ashley regarded me with a raised eyebrow, but didn’t mention it again.

Paranoid. I was being paranoid.

Just because I was thinking about Cooper (constantly) didn’t mean that he was thinking about me. I needed to get over myself. I rolled my neck and flexed my fingers closed and open, trying to expel the feeling, and turned my attention back to the game.

Watching the game was a lost cause as distractions went. I hadn’t cared about football when I had been a cheerleader—we always faced the crowd, not the field—and I still didn’t give a shit now. In my youth, I would have just been biding my time until I could see my football-player-boyfriend after the game.

Now, I was looking forward to going back to my cozy apartment and crawling into bed under a mountain of blankets. Alone. And definitely not thinking about the tall man with dark eyes across the hall—who was also alone.

Ugh. I was hopeless.

When I finally did make it back to my room, I went through my nighttime skincare regimen on autopilot, and only paused for a moment when I thought I heard a door close in the hallway.

Luckily, I fell asleep quickly. Unluckily, I had a highly inappropriate dream about the time I hooked up under the bleachers my senior year. But instead of my then-boyfriend, Travis, it was Cooper pushing me back against the concrete pylon.

Cooper’s stubble rasping at my neck.

Cooper’s fingers sliding under my cheer skirt and the elastic of my panties…

I woke up gasping, my sleep-shirt sticking to sweat-dampened skin and my core throbbing at the apex of my thighs.

I splashed some cold water on my face and gulped down a couple of mouthfuls straight from the tap for good measure. It did little to cool my heated body. Back in bed, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, debating whether or not to employ my vibrator. Again.

This little crush was getting out of hand. He was an itch in my brain—and other places—that I just couldn’t scratch, and it was starting to cause problems. My sleep was being impacted, which was unacceptable.

I used to have a lot of sleep issues when I was younger. I would fall asleep fine, then randomly wake up in the middle of the night unable to fall back to sleep. Concerned about my development, my parents took me to doctors and sleep clinics. Nothing helped. I was perfectly healthy. Doctors gave me meds to help me sleep, and later, I self-medicated with alcohol. Neither worked. I would just wake up groggy or, worse, hungover.

It wasn’t until I had been living on my own for a while that I was able to sleep through the whole night consistently. It didn’t take a sleep clinic to put the clues together. The problem wasn’t me. I was carrying stress from my parents, and it was keeping me awake.

The situation I was in now wasn’t like that. Cooper wasn’t stressing me, per se. But the net result was the same. I was lying awake, listless, with my brain flipping through progressively more inappropriate thoughts at one hundred miles per hour. And tomorrow, I would be groggy and dragging if I couldn’t sort myself out.

The October Lovers deserved better than a groggy zombie chaperone. I was the one that pushed them out of their comfort zones with the scale of this party. They were counting on me to make sure everything ran smoothly, so they could relax and enjoy themselves.

I rolled over and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to push thoughts of Cooper—and his mouth and his hands—out of my mind. I was never going to sleep if I couldn’t relax…

Fuck it.

I huffed in exasperation with myself as I retrieved my vibrator from my nightstand.

It took less than five minutes of stimulation, my brain conjuring visions of a dark-haired man thrusting into me, before a wave of pleasure rolled through me, and I was finally able to relax. It didn’t mean anything, though. It was just a little crush. I just needed to get some sleep.

Chapter 13

The Bonfire

Despite my middle of the night wake up, I felt pretty damn good when I rolled out of bed at 10 a.m. on Saturday morning. I tried not to think about Cooper while I went about my morning routine and finished grading my students’ exams. Overall, my two classes performed well. The mean distribution was a little lower than I would have liked, but I felt confident in the classes’ performance.