“Let me go, please,” she said in panic.
He released her immediately and took a step backward to give her the space she obviously needed. Her fingers were shaking as she massaged her forehead with them. The tortured expression on her face and the agitated way she shook her head plainly indicated her distress.
“Thank you for walking me home. I have to go in now.” She turned, but was caught by his hand clasping her upper arm.
“Shelley, please don’t run from me again.”
“I’m not running.” She avoided his eyes. “I have a lot to—”
“You’r
e running,” he interrupted. “I couldn’t pursue you before, but I won’t let you go this time without an explanation. Did I come on too strong, too fast? Are you still in love with your husband?”
She laughed then, but it was an ugly sound. Unhealthy mirth. “No. I assure you that is not the case.”
“Then what?”
She looked at him, defeated and dispirited, her shoulders slumping. “Grant,” she whispered half angrily, “you know why we can’t … why this must never happen again. I started thinking of you as my teacher the first time I walked into your classroom ten years ago. In the course of a few hours I can’t change the image I formed of you then. In my mind you’re still off limits to me. And whether you want to admit it or not, I am to you.”
His eyes fell away from hers to her mouth, then to her shoulder. His reluctance to hold her gaze told her he knew she was right. He relinquished her arm and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“You have a chance now to make a new career for yourself. This,” she said, sawing her hand back and forth between them to indicate the entire situation, “isn’t worth risking your reputation.”
His eyes swung back to hers. “I’ll decide that.”
“I’ve already decided. We can’t let this go any further. It would spell disaster for both of us. It just isn’t right. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now.”
Before he could say another word, she had unlocked her door and whirled inside, slamming it shut behind her. She leaned against the door for a long time, until she heard his slow, dejected footsteps fade down the sidewalk.
The tears that had threatened for so long were finally permitted to fall.
CHAPTER 3
You look wonderful, Shelley,” she muttered to the tear-swollen face in the mirror over her bathroom sink. She dabbed at her red-rimmed eyes with a tissue and leaned over to rinse her face again with cold water. When she dried it, she pressed the velour towel against her eyes, hoping to block out the ever-present image of Grant Chapman.
If you haven’t been able to do that in ten years, what makes you think you can do it now? she asked herself. He was more charismatic, more handsome, and to her discerning woman’s eye, more virile than he had ever been before. As the object of an adolescent infatuation, he had posed a threat to her well-being, but not half the threat he posed now.
The man she’d never been able to forget had stepped back into her life and she didn’t know how she was going to cope with that. As she poured cereal and milk into a bowl she chastised herself for enrolling in his class. There were seven thousand students at the university. The chances of their running into each other would have been slim. Yet she had purposely made it necessary for them to see each other at least twice a week.
Her supper snapped, crackled and popped, but she didn’t taste any of it as she chewed mechanically. She had cooked very little since her divorce; as a result she had shed the twelve pounds that had crept up on her during her five years of marriage. Once the divorce was final, she had sworn never to cook a meal for a man again. For no matter what time Daryl came home from the hospital, he had expected her to have a hot meal on the table waiting for him.
Disdain for the obedient servant she had become was like a bad taste in her mouth. Angrily she rinsed her bowl out in the sink, washing half of the cereal into the garbage disposal. “Never again,” she vowed.
She had met Daryl Robins at a sorority rush party her first week at O.U. She was straight out of Poshman Valley, and to her a good-looking premed student was the height of romance.
After their first dance, they didn’t switch partners the rest of the night. The way he held her during the slow dances made her nervous, but after all she was a college girl now. Besides, he wasn’t overly aggressive. His dimpled smile and blond handsomeness were heart-melting in their guilelessness.
He pinned her on Homecoming weekend. By Christmas their dates had become little more than skirmishes. “For godsake, Shelley, will you grow up?” he hissed at her from across the backseat of his car. “I’m going to be a doctor. I know how to keep you from getting pregnant if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“It’s not that,” she sobbed. “I don’t think a woman should until—”
“She’s married,” he mocked. His crude expletive indicated the depth of his frustration. “Where have you been living? In the twilight zone?”
“Don’t make fun of me or my convictions,” she said, showing a flare of spirit. “I can’t help feeling the way I do.”
He cursed again and stared out the window for a long time. “Hell,” he sighed at last. “Do you want to get married? If I ask my dad, he’ll help us with money.”
Shelley didn’t even care that the proposal wasn’t exactly poetic. She catapulted herself across the car and threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Daryl, Daryl.”