Right With Me - Stacey Lewis Page 0,26
I feel, the words are escaping me.
Hailey’s waiting for me to speak, to tell her what’s going on in my head, but I don’t know how to start. Needing to say something, I blurt out the first thing that comes into my head. “You make it impossible for me to think rationally.” As soon as I say it, I regret it because Hailey closes in on herself. “Shit. That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean then?” she asks, her voice barely a whisper of sound.
I fun a hand through my messy hair and try to think of how to explain it to her. “When I’m around you, my brain just stops working. All I can think about is touching you, the way your hair smells, the way you feel against me.”
Her face softens, and I breathe a sigh of relief. Now I’m finally getting somewhere. “I came over here tonight to find out about your day. Hailey, I find myself wanting to know everything about you. I want to know what you’re thinking and why, how you feel about things, what your opinions are. Being around you is intoxicating.”
The smile she gives me lights up the entire room along with every corner of my soul. “Oh Mitchell,” she sighs. “That’s the sweetest thing anyone has said to me in a long time.” Her smile falls as she thinks of something and she doesn’t make me wait to find out what it is. “But I’m your daughter’s teacher. We can’t have this type of relationship. It’s not right, or fair to the other kids in my class.”
“I don’t think the kids in your class will care who you’re dating, Hailey.” She’s crazy if she thinks I’m going to give her up now that I’ve found her again. That’s not going to happen, no matter how much her being my daughter’s teacher upsets people. I don’t think it will though, as long as we aren’t flaunting the relationship during school hours, which wouldn’t happen anyway.
She huffs out an aggravated breath and I grin, loving that I’m getting to her. “It’s not the kids I’m worried about, Mitchell, and you know it. It’s the parents.” Biting down on her lip, she thinks about what she wants to say next and I wait impatiently, wanting to hear what excuses she has for why we can’t be together so I can dispute them. “This is my first year teaching. I can’t risk my career just because you’ve decided we should be together.”
Okay. Now I’m offended. “I’m not asking you to risk your career, Hailey.” My words are clipped, and I sound more pissed off than I am. “The only thing I’m asking you for is a chance. I want the chance to show you how good I think we can be together. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you for a year, and I spent most of that year trying to find you. None of the people at Patsy’s would give me any info on you, and the information on the form you gave when you dropped your car off that day must’ve been your old address because I couldn’t find you that way either.”
Hailey’s mouth has dropped open and she’s staring at me like she can’t believe I’m real. “You looked for me?” I nod, unable to say the words a second time. I already sound like a fucking stalker. Her expression changes, eyes widening and a wide smile spreading her lips.
She looks like I just handed her the world and all I did was say a few embarrassing as hell words. Her body turns so she’s almost facing me and I watch as she sets her glass down on the coffee table before bringing her hand up to cover her mouth. The trembling is obvious and I almost reach out to grab it, but manage to keep myself still. If I’d known telling her I went looking for her would have this kind of reaction, I would have opened with that the last time we were sitting on her couch like this.
“What did you expect, Hailey?” I finally ask her. “Did you think I would just forget you that day? That it wouldn’t matter to me? I already told you it did, that you mattered.”
She looks away from me and shrugs. “I don’t know, I just didn’t expect you to put forth that kind of effort. Not for me.”
The way she sees herself pisses me off, especially when I know