“You made a joke.”
His mouth curved in another of those slight, surprisingly effective smiles. “Maybe you needed to come to Ireland,” he suggested. “Maybe this is part of your journey.”
We sat awhile longer in the car, in the quiet, listening to the rain on the metal roof. Our breath fogged the glass. I was sweating.
“Did you ever read that book by Oscar Diggs?” he asked.
“Not yet. I will. I have to read one of his Shivery Tales first. For his seminar this term.”
I found myself glancing sideways, noticing little details. The cowlick in his short, thick hair. A prickle of rash on his throat from shaving. He had very fair, fine skin. Sensitive.
I cleared my throat. “This is a nice car.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s awfully big for the city,” I said brightly. “It looks like you should be tootling around the countryside, delivering baskets to the peasantry on your estate.” I was babbling, I realized with a fresh wave of humiliation. But he didn’t seem to mind. “Possibly with a footman,” I added. “Or, I don’t know, maybe a Labrador.”
“My mother has Labs.”
It was another detail, a piece of himself, offered like a gift.
Or maybe I was projecting again, seeing what I wanted to see, making a big deal out of small talk.
I gestured vaguely toward the house. “I should probably go in now.”
“All right, then?”
“Yeah. Better.” I smiled. “Drier, anyway. Thanks.”
He nodded shortly—the lord of the manor accepting the curtsies of his tenants. Or maybe... like a kind, shy, decent man, uncomfortable with being thanked.
—
And so...” I took a deep breath, pleating my fingers together. “I’d like you to supervise my dissertation.”
Maeve Ward regarded me across her desk without any perceptible change of expression.
My heart beat furiously. Maybe Sam was right. Probably he was right. “Don’t expect her to care one way or the other.”
“If you still want to,” I added.
She may have rolled her eyes. Or possibly that was a twitch. “Very well. Let’s see how you get on. It takes time to develop a portfolio topic.”
“I want to finish my Kansas story.”
Yep. Definite twitch that time. “You’re still shaping yourself as a writer. Concentrate this term on your required modules. You have all summer to work on your final dissertation.”
“You asked me what I had to say for myself. Well, this is it. This is my story.”
“Are we speaking autobiographically?”
As if I could simply rewrite the story of my childhood. And maybe that’s what I’d done, what I kept doing, re-creating a pattern I knew too well—the girl who loved someone who didn’t love her back. Who convinced herself each time that if only she could make it work, if she could convince this one to love her, it would be enough.
Maybe that’s why I’d fallen for Gray. He was exactly my type. Charming, exciting, emotionally unavailable. This was love, as I knew it. The kind where you felt anxious and untethered andblamed yourself when the person you loved inevitably walked away.
These were not the sort of thoughts I should be having in my supervisor’s office.
But the thing was, I didn’t need Maeve to like me. She’d never pretended to like me. No surprises. No sabotage. I wasn’t at the mercy of her feelings. Or my own.
