She looked down at her plate and blushed. She laughed like she didn’t believe me and then took a bite of the vodka chicken. "This is delicious."
"Thank you."
She looked back up at me.
"Do you have any more questions for me, Penny?" I truly wanted to be able to answer them. For her. I wanted her to know that I was serious about her.
"Only a million more."
I laughed.
"Tell me about your family."
I slowly finished chewing the bite I’d just taken, trying to figure out how to word a response. "Well, I have an older sister and a younger brother."
"Tell me about them."
"My sister lives in New York." I finished off my glass of champagne and poured myself another. I didn’t want to talk about Rob. Hopefully he was out of prison by now. That didn’t seem like a great first thing to say about him. She already had enough reasons to stay away from me.
"And what does your sister do?"
"She's a writer."
"Has she written anything that I may have heard of?"
"Probably not." She mostly wrote boring articles.
"And what about your brother?"
I wasn’t going to get into this. "The last time I heard from him, he was in Costa Rica." True enough.
"Wow. What does he do there?"
"Nothing as far as I know. He's been taking time off to travel."
"Well that's fun."
Not the way he was doing it. I needed to call him later to make sure he was okay. I half expected him to show up tonight unannounced and ruin my night. But luckily that hadn’t happened yet. I needed this time alone with Penny. Who was I kidding, all I craved was alone time with her.
"And your parents?"
"What about them?" I didn’t mean to sound terse, but this conversation was going from bad to worse.
"Well, where are they?"
"I'm not close with my parents." Every question she asked made me feel more and more tense.
"That's a shame."
I laughed. "No, it's not." I shifted in my chair. I needed to divert the conversation back to her. I already knew how fucked up I was. I just wanted to know about her. "And what about your family, Penny?"
"I'm an only child. Growing up, I was really close with my parents. But not as much since I started college."
"And why is that?"
"I don't know. I feel like some of the best things about college are just things you don't really talk about with your parents."
"You mean like me?" Penny didn’t feel like a breath of fresh air at all tonight. She was stifling me. I was finding it harder to breathe. I didn’t want to talk about family. I wanted to talk about us. What we could be. Before she had a chance to realize I was wrong for her in every way.
"Yeah," she laughed. "I mean, I can't exactly tell them about you. I don't even like to imagine how upset they'd be with me."
"So you're ashamed that you're fucking your Comm professor?" The words just came out of my mouth. I wasn’t even sure why I was suddenly so pissed off. I clenched my jaw so I wouldn’t say anything else rash.
"That's not really the way that I think about it. I'm definitely not ashamed. I really like you, Professor Hunter."
You don’t know me. And if you did, you’d be ashamed. You’d fucking hate me.
"If that's the way that you think of me, then I guess you've gotten all that you want from me." She folded her arms across her chest, putting a distance between us that I didn’t like, and looked down at the table.
I’d pissed her off, but fuck. She was pissing me off too. I wanted her to want me without worrying about all this other nonsense. Wasn’t that enough? "I knew I wanted you since I first ran into you in that coffee shop. But I wasn't going to pursue you because you're a student. When you showed up in my class it complicated things, though. Every time I saw you, every answer you gave for the daily assignments, and every time we spoke made it impossible for me to get you out of my head. I knew I wanted you. I thought if I let myself give in to the temptation I could move on."
She abruptly stood up. It looked like she was going to flee.
"Penny, sit down." I was trying to open up to her, didn’t she see that? I was doing my best. This was hard for me too.
She didn't move, and that just pissed me off more.
"Sit down, or I'll make you sit down." Breathe.
Her throat made that adorable squeaking noise. She sat back down in her chair and stared at me.
"I don't understand why you're upset,” I said. “We've already talked about all of this. Everything is different now. I couldn't move on. I don't want to move on. You’re all that I think about." I ran my hand down my face. "Geez, you have this way of crawling under my skin."
"Why, because I want to know more about you? That's what people that are dating do! I don't know why you always get upset when we try to talk."
"Because I don't want you to know what kind of man I am."
"I think that you're exactly the kind of man that I want."
That couldn’t possibly be true.
She grabbed her glass and took another sip of champagne. "Can you please just try to answer a few more questions without exploding?"
I took a deep breath. "I'm sorry." I was. But I couldn’t talk about my family right now. Or the fact that I was wrong for her on every level.
"Are your parents wealthy?"
Jesus Christ. I sighed. "Yes. But everything I have is because of the choices I've made. I don't want a cent from them."
She looked a little frightened.
"Penny, do you enjoy pushing all my buttons?"
"You're always so in control. It's a little fun to see you squirm."
I raised my left eyebrow.
"I just feel like you're hiding something from me. And I don't understand why. I told you that I trusted you. Don't you trust me?"
I stared at her. Had she looked me up online? Did she already know everything I was trying so hard to hide? If she did…wouldn’t she just say it? No. She doesn’t know. Or else she wouldn’t be here. And that wasn’t why she was asking. As Dr. Clark liked to remind me, relationships were built on trust. And I wanted to build a relationship with Penny. Desperately. "I do trust you," I finally said.
"So what happened with your parents? Why are you so mad at them?"
Breathe. "It's complicated."
"Well, you're a professor. You should be good at explaining things. Make me understand."
Fair point. And for the first time since this conversation started, I almost smiled. I sighed. "My whole life they put so much pressure on me. To the point where I felt like I didn't get to make any of my own choices. It took me far too long to realize. And when I finally did, my life was no longer mine at all. I felt like I was drowning. Becoming a professor was the first thing that I decided for myself in a long time."
"So screw them," she said.
I laughed. "Penny, being here, with you...I finally feel like I can breathe again." I didn’t want to talk about my past because I just wanted to be here with her right now.