“Were you ever a Boy Scout?”
“No.”
Gabriel brought his hand up slowly so as not to spook her and gently caressed her cheek. He smiled at her disarmingly, and she found herself smiling back. He pressed his lips to hers, firmly but lightly, and held them there.
Julia waited for him to do something, to open his mouth, to move, anything, but he didn’t. He was frozen still, applying gentle pressure to her lips, until he pulled back and gave her a small smile.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” He chuckled as he traced her jaw line with the tip of his finger.
She shook her head. “Good-bye, Gabriel.”
As the front door closed behind her, he leaned up against the wall and rubbed his eyes, muttering to no one in particular.
After Gabriel returned home from a very unpleasant and slightly col-orful meeting with Christa, he grabbed a Perrier from the refrigerator and dialed the number of John Green, his lawyer. Gabriel hadn’t had need of John’s services for quite some time, and he preferred to keep it that way.
John had some shady clients, but he was the best, and Gabriel knew it, especially when it came to Canadian criminal law. However, John was not a specialist in employment law, which he pointed out to Gabriel more than once during their thirty minute conversation.
“I need to warn you, if observing the non-fraternization policy is a term of your employment, you violate it at your peril and at the peril of your job.
So let me ask you a question — are you sleeping with her?”
“No,” said Gabriel tersely.
“Good. Don’t start now. In fact, my professional advice to you is to keep your distance from this girl until you hear from me. How old is she?”
“Pardon?”
“The girl, Gabriel, the twinkie.”
“Call her that again and I take my business elsewhere.”
John paused. Gabriel was a tough son of a bitch, he knew, and a bit of a brawler. And John didn’t have the energy for a telephone altercation.
“Let me rephrase — the young lady in question, how old is she?”
“Twenty-three.”
John breathed a sigh of a relief. “Good. At least we aren’t dealing with a minor.”
“Once again, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“Listen Emerson, I’m your lawyer. Let me do my job. I can’t give you a professional opinion on your situation until I know all the facts. One of my partners sued the University of Toronto last year; I’ll get her to bring me up to speed. But for now, my advice to you is to steer clear of this girl, but whatever you do, don’t sleep with her. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“And let me be even more explicit. Don’t engage in any kind of sexual activity with her, at all. We don’t want to be drawn into a Clintonian debate about what constitutes sexual relations. Do nothing with her; it doesn’t matter if the activity is consensual.”
“What if we’re involved romantically, but not sexually?”
John paused for a moment and began cleaning his ear out with the tip of his baby finger. “I didn’t quite catch that.”
“I said, what if I’m seeing her socially but there is no sexual contact.”
John laughed loudly. “Are you kidding me with this, Emerson? I don’t believe you, and I get paid to. No one else will believe you, either.”
“That’s not the point. The point is, if I am not engaging in sexual activity with my student, does our relationship violate the policy?”
“No one is going to believe that you’re having a relationship with a student that does not involve sex, especially given your reputation. Of course, the onus is on the employer to provide evidence of the relationship, unless your chiquita files a complaint against you or someone catches the two of you in a compromising situation. Or she ends up pregnant.”
“That isn’t going to happen.”
“Everyone says that, Emerson.”
Gabriel cleared his throat. “Yes, but in this case, it would be beyond the realm of possibility. For more than one reason.”
John rolled his eyes and decided not to give The Professor a biology lesson. “Nevertheless, if you were caught, and there was no sexual contact, you’d likely face only a reprimand for an improper relationship. But I can’t state for certain without reading the policy, and I need to know from my partner what kind of precedents the university has set up for itself.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s your ass and not mine if something blows up here, so be careful.
I get paid either way.” John cleared his throat. “And Gabriel?”
“Yes?”
“I would stay out of trouble for the next little while. No girls, no fist fights, no public drunkenness, or anything of the sort. Any lawsuit with the university will expose your past, remember that. Let’s try to keep the past in the past, okay?”
“All right, John.”
And with that, Gabriel hung up the phone and grabbed his keys, deciding to work out his frustration at his fencing club.
When Julia returned to her apartment, she eagerly searched the now hibernating flower bed for any fragments of Gabriel’s card. Sadly, al she found were a few ripped pieces, far from enough to reconstruct his note.
She spent most of the day skimming Charles Wil iams’ book, making notes that she hoped would help with her meeting with Katherine. She had to admit, Gabriel’s foresight on this point was almost providential. Williams had a mastery of Dante that offered her a lot of suggestions for her thesis.
Before she went to sleep, she sat on her bed listening to her iPod and thinking about Gabriel. He’d uploaded two songs for her; the second song was Dante’s Prayer, also by Loreena McKennitt. It was a profoundly moving piece, and listening to it made Julia weep. She fell asleep that night with the photograph from her underwear drawer under her pillow once again, while she pondered a number of things.
Gabriel was a drug addict. She knew without doubt that if his addiction ever overtook him, it would overtake her as well, dragging her down to depths she did not wish to inhabit.
Furthermore, any relationship with Gabriel had the potential to taint both their careers. Once their connection was discovered, he’d be the gifted young professor who’d tapped a piece of ass he found in one of his seminars, making him the subject of tantalizing innuendo at faculty cocktail parties.
She would be the young slut who spread her legs to get her degree because she wasn’t smart enough to do it any other way. It didn’t really matter if they waited until the semester was over or not, the gossip would tarnish them both.
Finally, she had fallen in love with Gabriel Emerson when she was seventeen. Perhaps it could be explained by their intense connection, or the way he looked at her, or the feelings he invoked when she was in her arms. Whatever the true basis for her crush, she had fallen for him and fallen hard. She tried to suppress her feelings when he didn’t come home; she tried to kill them by developing feelings for someone else. But snuggled in his arms the night before, a wave of emotion had crashed over her, and all her little defenses were carried out to sea like a toppled sandcastle. The love she had for Gabriel was still there, a small flame burning brightly that not all the water in the ocean could extinguish.
So perhaps it was the case that she had no choice now because she had made her choice then. She’d made her choice when he asked for her hand and she’d offered it without question. Once he touched her, she knew she was his. Afterward, he had always been there in the shadows, like a ghost who would not leave. And now the ghost had decided that he wanted her.
But Julia believed that he would never, ever love her.
The next morning, she checked her cell phone and was surprised to find a message from Gabriel. He’d called after she’d fallen asleep,
“Julianne, you promised you’d answer your phone. [Sigh.] I’m assuming all is well and that you’re in the shower or something. Call me when you get this message.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t take you to dinner this evening, but I would like to have dinner with you tomorrow night. Can we at least talk about it? [Pause…]
Call me, principessa . Please.”
Julia immediately saved his number on her phone, but entered his name as “Dante Alighieri.” When she called him back, she reached his voice mail.
“Hel o, it’s me. Um, I’m sorry I didn’t get your message last night. I fel asleep. Of course it would be nice to see you, but I think dinner is too risky. I want to get to know you again, Gabriel, and I’m hoping we can find some safe way to do that. Sorry I missed your call. I’ll talk to you later.”
She spent most of Friday working on her thesis proposal. She kept her cell phone on, just in case. But Gabriel didn’t call her. She did, however, receive a call from Paul. Their conversation was cut short because he was interrupted in his study carrel by Professor Emerson. Since Emerson seemed in a much better mood, Paul had only a slight reticence in believing that he’d gone easy on Julia. And Julia did her best to eliminate that reticence.
Crisis averted.
After her very interesting meeting with Katherine, Julia came home and fed herself a modest meal of cream of tomato soup. After dinner, she showered and wrapped herself in a purple towel that barely covered her from breasts to bottom, wandering over to her closet to choose a pair of flannel pajamas to wear to bed. In view of the chill in the late October air and the proximity to Halloween, she decided that jack o’lantern pajamas were in order.
Tap, tap, tap.
Startled, Julia yelped. A muffled voice from outside her window started speaking rather loudly, and the tapping noise continued in earnest. She ran to the window, threw back the curtain, and looked down into the worried face of Gabriel.
“You scared the hell out of me!” she screeched, unlocking the ancient window and trying with one hand to pull it upward while anxiously clutching her towel with the other.
“You wouldn’t answer your phone. Or the doorbell. I thought something was wrong. I walked into the backyard and saw your lights were on.”
Gabriel noticed that she was struggling and slid his fingers underneath the window. “Let me do this.” With one movement, he lifted the window and proceeded to hand her a couple of paper bags.
“What’s this?”
“Dinner. Now stand back, it’s cold out here.” He placed his hands on the windowsill, trying to hoist himself up.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m crawling through your window. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“I could let you in the front door like a normal human being,” she protested, putting the paper bags on her card table.
Gabriel eyed her somewhat hungrily as he swung his legs through the window. “Not undressed like that you can’t.” He closed the window tightly, locked it, and pulled the curtain closed. “You should put some clothes on.”
Julia trembled as he reached out a finger to stroke the skin of her bare shoulder.
Smooth, soft, wet, and warm, he thought .
She wrapped the towel more tightly around herself as he averted his eyes. She was barely covered and damp from the shower, and the sight of the two together…he twitched. More than once.