of his head. “I thought you were finally taking this seriously.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not Halloween and I’m not a stripper.”
Ronan tried a pout as his next resort. “But I put on a shirt,” he complained. “I even buttoned my shirt.”
I snatched up the laughably small shirt from the table. “Yeah, but your shirt isn’t chopped in half.”
Ronan eyed his own shirt tucked tidily into the waist of his trim slacks, and I saw the boyish idea light up his eyes as if by a goddamn light bulb. He grinned down at me. “If I—”
“No.”
“But then—”
“No.”
“Why not?!”
“No.”
Ronan went silent as his eyes darted between my hips and the skirt, hips, skirt, hips, skirt. “So what I’m hearing from you is that we’ll revisit the uniform later?”
I snatched the skirt from him, balled it up (though there wasn’t much to ball up), and threw it over my shoulder.
“There will be no uniform,” I announced, sweeping the rest of the clothes and shoes off the big round table and dusting my hands.
When I looked up, Ronan was eyeing me excitedly.
“That does not fucking mean I’ll be naked,” I said, jabbing my finger into his chest.
Ronan’s face fell into a disappointed frown, but I ignored him.
“What is all this shit?” I asked, waving my hand over the arrangement of glasses and plates. “It looks like a grandma’s china cabinet.”
There were half a dozen glasses, four plates, and more silverware than my six roommates and I had between us all during senior year of college. I was staring at the fine crystal that twinkled with coloured light from the ornate stained-glass ceiling of the library when a narrow black pointer extended into view. I nearly went cross-eyed staring at the tip a mere inch or two from the end of my nose.
My eyes slid to Ronan, who was holding the long pointer as if it were a lance in a bout of jousting.
“What the fuck is that?” I asked.
Ronan grinned and moved the pointer to tap twice on the seat of the chair directly in front of the table arrangement.
“Class is commencing, Ms Evans.”
I shoved aside the pointer with a bored sigh and was about to take my seat when I felt a little smack on my ass. My head whipped around to spot Ronan darting away with a childish bout of laughter.
“Do you intend to always be this immature?” I asked, roughly pulling out the chair.
Ronan was rolling an antique lectern from the corner of the library and shouldered it into place by the table. “I do hate to disappoint.”
Ronan disappeared behind the lectern and re-emerged with a World’s Greatest Teacher mug. He sipped from it daintily with a raised pinkie.
“I’m guessing it’s not coffee in there,” I grumbled.
Ronan winked down at me. “Smart cookie.”
“So what is all this shit? Why are there like four wine glasses?” I asked, reaching for a random wine glass, a small, almost miniature one, only to yank back my hand to my chest when Ronan smacked his pointer smartly across my knuckles.
“Ow,” I complained. “What the hell was that for?”
Ronan eyed me over the lip of his mug. “Schooner,” he said.
“What?”
“Schooner. It’s called a schooner.”
“A schooner?” I repeated dumbly.
Ronan nudged the glass back into place with the tip of his pointer. “It’s for sherry.”
I blinked up at him in confusion. “Sherry?”
When I looked back at the weird little wine glass again Ronan smacked my elbow with the pointer. I howled angrily and rubbed at the spot as I glared up at him.
“Ow,” I complained, emphasizing my protest even more this time.
“Sherry,” Ronan repeated before smacking me again, this time on the side of my ass. “Schooner. Sherry. Schooner.”
“Ow, ow, ow,” I shouted. “Why are you hitting me?”
Ronan could barely hold back his shit-eating grin as he drummed his pointer against his open palm and explained, “In my preparation for teaching you the ancient ways of society’s elite, I read many books discussing various pedagogical theory.”
He began to pace back and forth behind the lectern. I groaned and slumped forward with my elbows on the edge of the table. This earned me two more slaps of the pointer.
“Elbows, Ms Evans!”
“Stop hitting me!”
Ronan ignored my complaints and continued to pace as he continued, “During my extensive reading—”
I interrupted him with an amused snort.
“During my extensive reading,” Ronan repeated, “I learned that the brain may build stronger long-term connections with information consumed during periods of extreme emotion.”
I stared up at him and shrugged my shoulders. “So?”
Ronan stopped his pacing.