Page 36 of Misadventures with a Professor
“But then—oh.” I can see as she puts it together. The timelines, the evidence of infidelity. “Oh.”
“She didn’t want it to be mine. She was very blunt about that. She was very blunt about…well, lots of things. She’d been unhappy for some time, hence the cheating.”
“That bitch,” Zandy mutters, and her ferocious loyalty makes something in my chest impossibly light but tight too, like a balloon.
“Well, it was partially my fault. We’d grown into our bedroom games together, you see, and sometimes when something happens organically, you forget to communicate about it. And that’s what happened with Rosie. I was happy, so I thought she was happy.”
“Would she have been happy without the kink, you think?”
A fair question and one I’ve asked myself every day since that fight. All the names she called me, all the reasons she didn’t want to raise a child with me, they’ve rattled around my mind for so long that they’ve become part of me, like a tree growing around a fence.
Degenerate.
Deviant.
Pervert.
“It’s hard to say. I offered that too, to give up the professor games, but she refused… I think she resented me too much by then. The last time she spoke to me was an email informing me the test had proved the baby was his.”
“Did you want the baby to be yours?”
I sigh. “I don’t know. Yes…and no. I think the idea of a child with a woman you love always seems thrilling, but in retrospect, she didn’t love me and I’m not even sure I loved her. Not in a lasting way, at least.”
She moves her head, nodding against my shoulder in understanding, her hair sliding all silky and sweet smelling over my skin.
Either the memory’s teeth have blunted over the years or something about Zandy eases the ache, but I find that I feel okay about the past. About Rosie. It’s hard to feel upset about anything that led to this moment, with Zandy’s soft curves tucked against my side and her hands on my body like it belongs to her.
“What happened after you broke up? Did you do the kink with anyone else?”
I think back to the intervening years between Rosie and now. I was a mess, both personally and professionally, and I owe a lot to the friends who saw me through, like Zandy’s father, who helped me in every way he could. “I saw a few people, nothing serious. The kind of hookups you arrange online, that kind of thing. It got old after a while because it wasn’t the same without someone I also liked and respected on an intellectual level.”
She grins up at me. “Does this mean you like me, Professor Graeme?”
I give her a playful scowl and tug on her hair. “Don’t push your luck, Miss Lynch.”
She nestles back into me with a little yawn. “That explains why you’re such a stickler about the condoms,” she says. “The baby thing.”
“Precisely so.”
“Do you want babies someday? Or has that all been ruined?”
“So blunt, Miss Lynch.”
But she’s not asking in a fishing way—rather like she genuinely wants to know, and I think about it. About how Rosie was recently promoted to department head at my university and how there was no avoiding her then. No avoiding the very pregnant belly with her third child inside and her giant wedding ring. I took this sabbatical right after.
Deviant.
Degenerate.
“No,” I finally answer. “I think that door has shut for me.”
“That’s sad,” Zandy says sleepily.
I suppose it is sad, but I can’t imagine going through all that again. The hope and the joy, and then the shame and the disgust…the heartbreak. Better just to avoid it entirely.
After a few minutes, I say, “I don’t think kinky professors get to have babies and wives,” and I’m rather proud of myself for saying the word kinky out loud…until I realize the girl next to me is fast asleep and snoring against my chest.
Chapter Eleven
