My hand covered my mouth, that stolen kiss right before me, before us both. They snapped us right in the middle of it, my arm hooking around Ramses, and his hands on my hips. The evidence was there completely.
We were together.
This evidence caused Ramses’s eyes to close, his hand folding over his face. “Mom.”
“But I think what’s worse,” she paused, ignoring him again, “isn’t that my son or even a colleague lied to me…”
Colleague.
I forced breath through my lungs. “Evie…”
She raised her hand, not finished. “Was that you,” she directed a look at Ramses, “could actually let something like this happen again.”
Again?
Ramses’s jaw pierced his skin. He shot forward in his chair. “This situation isn’t like—”
Her hands lifted once again, still not finished.
“You don’t talk,” she said before transferring her attention to me. She leveled me with a stare so hard I felt it from across the desk. Her teeth ran over her glossed lip. “I’m going to ask you a question, Brielle, and I need you to be perfectly honest with me. Your job depends on it.”
My breath escaped.
Ramses growled. “Mother, you are completely out of line here.”
“I said you don’t talk!” Her face filled with color, beet red on normally fair skin. “You won’t talk. Not until I hear from her.”
From her…
Words like that and “colleague” didn’t sit well, and if this conversation felt bad before, it really did now.
I faced Ramses, and at this point, he had his hands laced on his mom’s desk. Fingers pressed to his lips. He knew something I didn’t.
“Did you take advantage of my son, Brielle?”
I shot my gaze in her direction, completely serious with her question. My lips parted. “What?”
She nodded. “It was brought to my attention this morning by a fellow faculty member Ramses may have transferred out of your class. This faculty member saw your TMZ story and the potential circumstances in which you may have met my son worried him. He came to me. Ramses is currently a student in his class.”
I folded a hand over my face.
Guy Donahue. It had to be him.
He was the only one who knew.
He was the only one I’d told, but before I could speak, Ramses angled in. His teeth bared. “Mom—”
“And my son confirmed with me just now you were his professor.” Her manicured hand raised again. “I asked him that before you came in.”
Ramses swung a glance in my direction, his hands opening. She’d obviously bombarded him with this, or he would have warned me.
I breathed into my hands, and in those moments, Evie leaned forward.
“So, I ask you again,” she said. “Did you take advantage of my son?”
“That’s not how we met,” Ramses ground out. “And if you’d given me a second to speak when you asked me in here, I would have told you that.” He shook his head. “Brielle and I met at December and Royal’s wedding. She had no idea I was in her class. We both figured that out later.”
“And lied to me about it.” The breath eased from her lips. “Continued an affair as student and teacher.”
“We didn’t.”
My voice arrived meeker than I wanted it to, and its presence had Ramses’s hand moving in my direction.
He hesitated in the end, though. He didn’t dare as he shouldn’t. He nodded at me. “She’s right. We didn’t. Brielle cut everything off.” He faced his mom. “We both did once we knew.”
“Well, things obviously started up again.”
“Yeah, once I wasn’t her student.” His eyes narrowed at Evie. “There isn’t anything for you to look into here, Ma.”
“Isn’t there?” For the first time, emotion filled her words, no longer the educator and disciplinarian. This was a woman, a mom sitting in front of her son. Her jaw clenched at me. “Tell me, Brielle, did you know?” She leaned in. “Did you care if you did know? Or are you just another one of those women who takes advantage of a situation? Another professor taking advantage of her young students?”
The words popped the surface of an already heated and emotional conversation. I, personally, had been simply trying to keep up thus far.
But then she said this.
Ramses shot forward. “Mom, it is not like that, and you know it.”
“He’s gotten in trouble before with people like you,” she claimed. “Older women like you who prey and like to take advantage of young men.” She shook her head. “I know you’ve been through a lot of crap, Brielle. I feel for you. I felt for you. I got you this job.” Her voice cracked at the end. “I trusted you.”
I started to protest. I started to say something, anything, but her words locked me in place. The accusatory nature of them, yes, but the fact that I was losing.
Losing her.
And losing him.
I stared at Ramses, at a loss for words beside me. He seemed to just be trying to keep up too, but I read between the lines here. She was accusing me of something that clearly had already happened before. Something that happened involving her son.
Oh, God.
Feeling sick to my stomach, I swallowed.
A soft plead touched Ramses’s eyes, unsaid words parting his lips. I never gave them a chance to sound. Instead, I opted to face my friend. “Evie…”
“Please leave.” She covered her face. “Please go. I can’t…”
And I didn’t make her. Because if what she said was true, I got it.
As much as I hated it.
Rather than deal with any of it either, I got up. I left, embarrassed and feeling like a complete idiot. I rushed from her chairs, out of her office, but Ramses hooked my arm before I even made it out of the building.
“Bri, it is not what she says,” he urged right away. He wound me around to face him, a terror on his face I’d begun to connect with loss. The fear of losing something. Losing me. “What she said isn’t what it sounds like.”
“Am I fetish?”
“What?”
“Am I a fetish?” I backed out of his hands, his eyes twitching wide. “Is this a thing for you? Older women?” I had to ask the question.
I had to know.
Something told me this was the thing that happened to him at Brown. And though he hadn’t lied to me about that. He hadn’t told me about it either.
Would you have stayed if he had?
Probably not, enough odds stacked against us to not think I was also a fetish for him.
His brow launched up. “Of course not.”
“Why of course not?”
“Because it’s not true.”
“How can I believe you?”
“Because it’s me.” His hands cage my face, his brown eyes scanning mine. “It’s me. The man who is so fucking in love with you it fucking hurts. Who wouldn’t hurt you. I’d hurt first.”
My lips trembled, his firm hold guiding my gaze up to clash with his.
“What Mom said isn’t true. Not the way she said it. She’s just scared. She thinks what happened at Brown is happening again.”