Page 8 of Working for the Teacher

“Ryder...”

The way she says my name goes straight to my cock.

Then something changes in her expression. She pulls her hand free.

“I… I should go. I have… papers to grade.” She grabs her bag off the table so fast she nearly knocks over her glass.

It's a shitty excuse and we both know it. She won't quite look at me as she slips past, but her cheeks are flushed and those fingers are curling together again.

Then she's gone.

I stand there staring at the empty doorway, my hand still warm from where I touched her.

3

CHARLOTTE

Ican't stop thinking about Ryder the whole drive home, which is officially the dumbest use of my brainpower all week, and that's a competitive category lately.

I should go, I have papers to grade. That's what I said to him. Papers to grade. As if I'm the kind of woman who flees a bar because of grammar homework and not because Ryder Kane had my wrist in his hand and I forgot how to be a functioning adult.

I stop at Kinkaid's on the way home because I never actually ate dinner. I unwrap the burger at a red light, take one bite, and immediately drop a glob of ketchup directly onto my sweater.

“Great,” I say out loud, to no one. “Perfect. Excellent night.”

I dab at it with a napkin the whole rest of the drive, which does nothing except spread the ketchup into a wider, sadder stain.

I pull into my driveway still thinking about Ryder. More specifically, his hand around my wrist. Which is ridiculous. It was a hand. On a wrist. People have survived far more intimate contact without thinking about it for the entire drive home.

Apparently, I’m not one of those people.

Then I walk inside and hear water.

Not rain. Water, inside my house, somewhere it has no business being, a steady drip that I follow up the stairs with a rising sense of dread until I find it seeping into the hallway outside the guest bathroom.

“What the hell,” I say. There's nobody around to hear it, but the situation feels like it deserves company.

I push the bathroom door open and the bath mat squelches under my shoes. I stand there for a full minute just staring at the damage, willing it to be less bad than it looks, and it does not become less bad.

I call my mother because she is closer than I am to knowing what to do about a house, and because some habits from being someone's daughter never fully die no matter how many years you spend paying your own bills.

Mom arrives twenty minutes later with a man named Hank Mullins in tow, which is exactly the kind of thing my mother does—brings solutions with mustaches.

My mother has known Hank for years. If a road needs repaving or a water main needs fixing anywhere within twenty miles of Forge Creek, Hank is already coordinating it before the rest of the town wakes up.

He crouches in the doorway of my ruined bathroom, flashlight in hand, and shakes his head like it's personally disappointed him.

“Clearly, you're gonna need a plumber,” he says. “And a contractor. Wall's gonna have to come open.”

“I'll call around in the morning,” I tell him.

“Good luck with that.” He clicks off his flashlight. “Every contractor in Forge Creek is booked solid for months.”

“Great,” I say.

I thank Hank and he waves it off, already on the phone with someone else about something else before he's even out the door.

I stand in the hallway a moment longer, staring at the damage like a Rorschach test for exactly how badly my year is going. Homeownership might have been a decision made by a slightly skewed version of myself. A version who believed that buying a house with her own money, on her own terms, would feel like proof that she'd landed on her feet.