Everything in Between (13 page)

“There’s rules here about teachers dating students,” Braden said.

Chip leaned closer to him, and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “Which teacher are you dating?”

Braden’s peculiarly flat blue eyes widened in shock, but his face relaxed once he realized Chip was only joking.

“So are you going out with Prof. Richardson?” Braden persisted.

“We’re just friends,” Chip answered without meeting Braden’s gaze. “She’s one of my karate students.”

“You teach karate?” Braden cracked his first smile.

“At Sheng Li, on Lockwood.” Chip led the way to the center set of double doors at the rear of the lecture hall. “It’s one of the best in the country.”

“Yeah, I saw the International Martial Arts Tournament on ESPN last fall,” Braeden said excitedly. “The final was awesome!”

Braeden recounted the match in detail as he followed Chip to the bookstore, where they both purchased dictionaries before visiting the cafeteria.

“Have you ever seen Anthony Turner compete?” Braeden asked. He fell a few steps behind Chip, and a loud, gregarious trio of students buffeted him out of their way to cut in line.

Chip reached past the young men, grabbed Braeden’s collar, and pulled him ahead of them. “He’s a great athlete and a really swell guy,” Chip said, answering the trio’s glares with a charming smile.

“I like Angela Creutzberger, too,” Braeden said. He glanced at Chip’s selections—a banana, two cups of blueberry yogurt and a bottle of water—then replaced his own soda and chips with fresh fruit and water. “She’s real cute.”

“So you’re a judo groupie, are you?” Chip chuckled.

“Well, I like mixed martial arts, too,” Braeden admitted. He cast a glance at the surly young men who’d pushed him aside. “I’d love to know how to do some of that stuff.”

“It’s not hard, if you work at it.” Chip stepped up to the cash stand and paid for his order as well as Braeden’s, waving off the money the kid offered him. “It just takes discipline. The mind and body connection in martial arts is profound.”

Braeden peppered him with question after question, shadowing Chip, who next dropped by the registrar’s office to submit a form and then returned to the lecture hall. After Braeden had resumed his seat, Chip went to Zae’s desk. He set a shiny red apple on top of a little white card in the center of it.

“An apple for the teacher?” Braeden slapped his hand over his face. “I’ve seen suck-ups before, but man, that’s not even original.”

“You can never go wrong with a classic,” Chip said. “So you want to come down to Sheng Li sometime and take a few classes?”

“I don’t think I can afford it. My mom and I don’t have much money for stuff like that with my tuition and all.”

“Tell you what,” Chip said, stuffing himself into his desk. “You come down and take a week of trial classes. If you like it, then we can work something out. You can help out around the place in exchange for lessons.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure,” Chip stated matter-of-factly. “We’ve had instructors in the past who received college credit for their work at Sheng Li.”

“Wow,” Braeden sighed. “That’s really nice of you.”

For a moment, Chip thought Braeden would shed a tear. But then Zae entered the lecture hall and he turned his attention to the front of the class.

Zae spotted the apple on her desk immediately. Lips pursed in a tiny scowl, she snatched up the notecard beneath it and peered at the class over the tops of her glasses. She dropped her gaze to the scrawled words on the card:

This is a Honeycrisp apple. It’s my favorite, because it tastes like you.

Zae looked up again and found Chip’s gaze. Just in time to see him take a hearty bite of a shiny Honeycrisp apple….

* * *

Zae swiped the heel of her palm across her forehead. The weatherman had promised a pleasantly seasonal cool morning, and it had started out that way. But now, with Chip devouring an apple in her class, the temperature had risen uncomfortably. The harder she tried to tune out the sight of him licking, sucking and gnawing at the apple, the more willingly her gaze drifted to him. The wicked amusement of his grin, a further distraction, left her stammering and repeating herself as she watched him nibble the flesh of the apple, then tilt it up to catch a drop of juice on the tip of his tongue.

“Mr. Kish, ordinarily I’m more relaxed about food in my classroom during the long classes of my summer session, but would you please get rid of that apple!” she yelled, startling a student in the front row out of his seat.

His blue eyes wide with feigned innocence, Chip carefully wrapped the apple core in a napkin and shoved it into his backpack. “I’m sorry, Prof. Richardson. I’ll eat after class from now on.”

“Thank you,” she snapped.

She assigned another student to read from
Narka
, but she didn’t hear a word of it. The students discussed the work, Zae only half listening. She heard herself reviewing the evening’s assignment and answering questions, but Chip and his note occupied her mind. At 11 a.m. she dismissed the class, and in the same breath demanded to see Chip in her office.

Chip had scarcely closed the door behind him when Zae whirled on him, pitching the apple at his chest. “Are you out of your mind?”

Laughing, Chip neatly snatched the apple from the air. “I’m sorry, professor. I couldn’t help myself.” He approached her desk, a mahogany monolith more suited to the Oval Office than the tiny, top-floor corner housing the chair of Missouri University’s English department.

“Well, you’d better help yourself,” Zae warned.

“Okay.” Chip rounded her cluttered desk and took her in his arms. Zae planted her hands on his chest and pushed him. He landed on her desktop, sending layers of papers flying.

“I meant you better control yourself,” she explained. “There are strict rules governing the fraternization between faculty and students.”

“You’re the second person to tell me that,” Chip said, righting himself. “What’s the big deal?”

“Last fall, a professor who is no longer employed here, or anywhere else, was caught having an affair with a woman in his economics class,” Zae said. “It resulted in a grading scandal the school is still trying to live down.” She sat in her chair, a wide wingchair with bold brass tacks and a high, ornate back. The apple Chip gave her sat in the center of her desk, like a paperweight.

“You were kind of hard on your last-minute registrants,” Chip remarked.

“I have one hundred and fifty students in my Comp II class alone.” She held up her hands. “I’ve only got two of these. I can’t hold three hundred hands, and I’m not running a day care. I expect my students to show up prepared.”

“Even so,” Chip argued, “it’s the first day. You could cut us some slack.”

“Slack is what some of those kids do best,” Zae snorted. “Today didn’t come as a surprise. They all knew they had class today, and they got themselves there. I shouldn’t have to remind them to come to class prepared on the first day, the last day, and every day in between.
You
were prepared.”

Chip sat on the front edge of Zae’s desk, careful not to disturb her haphazard piles of papers, books and knickknacks. “Yeah, well, I’m an adult.”

“They aren’t children,” Zae declared, pitching her voice higher.

He stroked the apple with the tip of his middle finger, eliciting a deep sigh from Zae. A wink of light from her crystal desk lamp glinted off the unblemished red skin.

“So you believe a student should respect his or her instructor enough to show up with the proper equipment for learning?”

“That’s right,” Zae stated decisively.

“And properly dressed.”

“Exactly.” Zae took off her glasses and set them on her ink blotter.

“So they shouldn’t be wearing jewelry and nail polish, and they should have their
obis
properly tied?”

“I don’t have a problem with jewelry or nail—” Zae ended abruptly with a squeak.

Chip grinned.

“Why don’t you go someplace?” she snapped, wrinkling her nose.

“I don’t have another class until two. Would you like to get some lunch?”

“It’s still early for lunch.”

“It’s quarter after eleven.”

“Chip, it’s not a good idea for us to see each other socially on campus,” Zae said, her voice quiet. “I don’t think you should remain in my class, either.”

He went to the overstuffed sofa propped beneath her windows. After rifling through his backpack, he brought her a pink slip of paper. “I have to agree with you, professor, although it was awfully tempting to cash in that automatic ‘A’ you promised me at the wedding.”

Zae recognized the paper as a transfer slip. “Great minds…” she murmured.

“I picked up the form this morning, before class, and turned it into the registrar during the break. Dr. Bligh has already signed it. I just need your signature.”

Zae picked up a fountain pen. Her hand poised over the proper signature line, she paused. “This is dated three days ago. I could have signed it long before today.”

Chip shrugged a meaty shoulder. “I wanted to see you in action.”

Pressing back a grin, Zae signed her name with a flourish. “You mean you wanted to give me a taste of my own medicine.”

“That, too.”

“There.” She gave him the form. “You’re now in Dr. Bligh’s Comp II class. Which starts twenty minutes earlier than my class, so have fun.”

“Thanks, professor.”

“I can’t say I’m happy about you switching classes,” Zae said, “but it’s the right thing to do. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“You can join me for lunch.”

Putting on her glasses, Zae replied, “Actually, I think now, I can.”

Chip had eagerly agreed to help Eve and Dawn move into their MU dorm when Eve asked him. He and Zae hadn’t shared an intimate moment since their interlude in the whirlpool several weeks ago, and he had looked forward to the chance to get her alone—something she had stringently avoided.

Just as patience was key to good pancakes, it was crucial for a relationship in transition. Chip had never bothered to build a friendship with a woman before jumping into a sexual relationship with her, and he was both shocked and delighted by the ease with which he and Zae had progressed to that point. But he knew it was different for Zae. Accepting him meant letting go of Colin once and for all, and there was safety in clinging to the memory of her first husband. Colin remained a built-in excuse for her not to risk her heart on another man.

Zae and her children meant too much to Chip to pressure Zae into moving any faster. Her hesitancy actually worked to his advantage in giving him the time he needed to rearrange his own life into something that closer resembled adulthood…and worthy of Zae and her children.

“How do you like Dr. Bligh?” Eve asked, breaking Chip’s reverie. She hiked up her end of the futon mattress she and Chip carried into the dorm room she’d share with her twin. “I had him last summer for Comp. I and II, and I couldn’t stand him.”

Once through the narrow doorway, Chip took the full weight of the slouchy mattress and set it on its frame, which sat against the wall nearest the bathroom. “He’s all right,” Chip panted, wiping sweat from his brow. “He’s duller than a bag of rocks, though. His reading list puts me to sleep faster than Ambien.”

“Mom picks different books every year, and she always chooses authors I’ve never heard of,” Eve said. She moved two big boxes with
dawn
scrawled on them, pushing them closer to the futon.

“I liked
Narka
, the first book on your mom’s list. I finished it, even though I had to read
April Morning
for Dr. Bligh when I switched to his class.”

“Get used to the war stories.” Eve smiled. “Dr. Bligh’s got a thing for combat.”

“Did you take any other MU classes last year, when you were still a senior in high school?”

“Psych 101, American History, French and Fencing,” Eve said. “I wanted to get the freshman requirements out of the way so I could hit the ground running this term. I want to combine my senior year with my first year of medical school, so—”

“That’s a mighty ambitious plan, kid.” Chip chuckled.

“Have you met my mother?” Eve teased. “She graduated from college when she was twenty. Ambition runs in the family.”

“I’m taking it slow and steady,” Chip said. “I just want to get through the classes I’m taking this summer, and then tackle the fall.”

“I got an A in Bligh’s class. You can borrow my notes from last year, if you want,” Eve offered.

“No, he can’t,” Zae said, entering the room carrying a box of small appliances. Her son, CJ, followed her, carrying a black tote bag filled with groceries. “Reading someone else’s notes isn’t the same as learning the material firsthand.”

“I agree with the professor, kiddo,” Chip said. “I gotta learn this stuff on my own.”

“I imagine that with your military background, you can offer unique insights to Dr. Bligh’s reading assignments,” Zae said. “If Dennis Bligh is smart enough to take advantage of it.”