“Yeah, I’d like that. I had fun.”
“Me too. I don’t have lunch company often either, unless I go with my TA or one of my colleagues, and I’d rather not. I get few breaks as it is, and frankly I’d rather not think of work when I do,” Seth admitted. He stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets and all but scuffed the toe of his loafers against the sidewalk. Adorable. With the perfect slate-gray eyes and stubble and just… everything.
“Okay. What’s your number?” Dev asked, then programmed it into his cell when Seth rattled it out. Dev texted him a generic “Dev here” and waited for Seth’s pocket to ping. “There, now you have my number. If you give me half an hour warning, I should be able to go wherever at any given weekday. If I have something planned at home, I’ll text you in case you want to join me.” Then, because it suddenly struck him, he asked, “Unless you have some fraternization rules? You’re Angel’s mentor, after all.”
Seth chuckled. “I should think it’s okay. I would have working lunch with him too, but I’m not about to hang out with him otherwise.”
“Okay, good to know,” Dev said, feeling relieved. He didn’t want to let go of this… whatever it was quite yet.
“I really need to go. Let’s stay in touch?” Seth dug out his keys from his pocket.
“I’ll hold you to that. Where’s your car?” Dev asked, and Seth pointed the opposite direction from where he’d left the Fiat. “Okay, well, see you around!”
They parted ways and Dev grinned widely. Holy fuck had that been awesome, date or no date.
Chapter Two
SETH HADa bit of time before the lecture, so he used it to make sure he had uploaded the file he needed for one of his demonstrations onto his memory stick. The stick had a dog head and paws in the front and a tail in the back. He rolled his eyes at the gadget, like he always did. It made him smile, though, so the silliness wasn’t unwelcome in the least.
Once he was sure everything was ready—damned perfectionism!—he went to his favorite auditorium to prep some more. Not that he needed to. Antoinette would’ve stopped by to make sure everything was up to his high standards.
Those had started when he’d first begun teaching. He’d been so fucking young that some of his students were older than him by a year or two. He’d graduated high school at sixteen, and teaching had been his trajectory ever since. He was always the youngest to leave a school with a degree in his hand and the youngest to settle into a new job. At least here in Colorado Springs, he felt welcome and was given a lot of free rein. Then again, at thirty-six, he wasn’t a kid anymore and had tenure.
Slowly the students trickled in, and Seth took a fortifying breath or a few, and drank half of his bottle of water to make sure his throat would work fine. He got hoarse sometimes when he had many lectures in one day, and even though he’d only had one today before this one, he’d talked a lot over lunch.
The thought made him smile. He’d had a lot of fun. As serious as people told him he was, he could have fun, right? In any case, Angel Rice’s brother, Devin, was a delightful new acquaintance, and certainly handsome enough to be nice to look at too.
“Hey, Professor Kent, here’s my thing. Sorry I couldn’t get it to you earlier today,” said Miranda Jones, one of his favorite students, looking apologetic as all hell.
“Babysitter trouble?” he asked, accepting the papers.
“Yeah, Bea’s father decided not to show again. Had to take her to my sister’s instead. So,sosorry.” She looked close to tears, and by now, after having her in three or four of his classes in the last couple of years, he knew it wasn’t because of him and the assignment.
“Oh, Miranda.” He sighed, pulling a tissue out of the box on the desk. “You know it’s okay. You weren’t late by more than a few hours.” Well, more like five, but who was even counting? “Go to your seat and we’ll get this show on the road.” He smiled at her kindly, and she seemed to draw strength from the gesture, squaring her shoulders and marching to her seat in the front row.
He was known to be very strict, except for with the single parents in his classes. Those people deserved a break, he’d decided early. If you had to go through raising kids on your own, then it wasn’t for Seth to judge if your assignments were a bit late. He’d only take them in until he was done scoring the last one of the batch, and still didn’t budge on his rule of some things being hand-delivered to him instead of emailed. There were rules. He was fond of rules, always had been. Probably because there hadn’t been too many in his childhood home and frankly he’d never felt fine with that. He’d been an uptight child, he supposed.
“Okay, let’s get to work, then!” he called out to quiet the chatter and clicked his laptop to flip the first slide onto the projector screen.
AS USUAL,Seth was one of the last people in the offices by the time he deemed his day done. He was hungry again, so he called for takeout from his favorite Chinese place, knowing it would arrive only minutes after he made it home.
His drive consisted of trying not to zone out and listening to bad pop music on the radio. Sometimes he loathed to admit it, but he really, really liked the emo music his TA before Antoinette had introduced him to. Occasionally he listened to bands like My Chemical Romance or Fall Out Boy in his office, and he’d been busted by someone who thought it was amusing a professor known for being as strict as him would listen to such music.
He didn’t care, really, but Antoinette liked to tell him it just made him more appealing to his “fangirls and boys.” Yeah, those were the people Seth didn’t like much. He knew what he looked like. Life thus far had pretty much told him he was far too lucky, having both a great brain and handsome looks. Hell, his mother liked to tell him that occasionally. He knew some people in his extended family thought that his homosexuality was payback for those other things. After all, there needed to be something wrong with him, right?
Growing up in Texas had been a hoot for sure. At least his mother had gotten away from the worst of it early enough and learned that the world of art was more diverse than her tiny hometown. His dad had had a harder time with all possible minorities, but falling in love with an artist had taught him things very quickly too.
All in all, the drive home went as it always did for Seth: overthinking the past and analyzing this or that, including the way his great aunt Hannah side-eyed him when he told the family he was gay one fateful Thanksgiving. Yeah, he’d done that in the most clichéd way possible, but hey. Still here, alive, with most of his family intact, and a great life to live. He was one of the lucky ones.
He parked his car in the driveway of the powder-pink Victorian he’d called home for the last eight years. He adored the house, even though it was a bit too large, with four bedrooms and two and a half baths. He didn’t mind much, though. That was why he paid for a cleaning service, after all.
And it had a nice big backyard for the dogs. The thought of the dogs made his happy moment sour. He missed the damned things, but that couldn’t be helped.
Just as he fitted the key to the lock, a familiar puttering sound announced the delivery moped the Chinese restaurant used. He opened the door, then turned around to receive his meal and tip the delivery girl—he chose to ignore the fact that he knew her name was Macy because he ordered in so often, damn it—with a ten he had put in his pants pocket before leaving work.
Coming home to an empty house had lost part of its ability to depress him at some point in the last few years. He didn’t get as sad these days, just soldiered on when he had the house to himself. At least it didn’t happen as often nowadays, and the stretches of loneliness only enhanced the joy he felt when it was filled with sound again.
He turned on all the lights downstairs and took his food to the kitchen. People told him he could get a bit anal about eating takeout, but he preferred food on a plate, even pizza. Everyone who mattered got used to it pretty quickly.
