“Hmm. What kind of a woman is she? Does she have friends to talk this over with? She may not, you know. She may have left Ardrossan and closed that chapter in her life. If she has come to terms with what happened and doesn’t want to go probing old wounds in public, I could understand that. It would be her word against his, and who needs all that dirt flung around?”
I feel a pang of guilt for not telling Yvonne about the file. I ought to tell her, and Giles ought to hand over the file to the police.
I do not tell her.
Then the inevitable happens. I am having a coffee with Tim in the Eatery, going over the members of his tenure committee and his likely external reviewers, when Giles turns up at our table.
“Did you get the email?” Yes, definitely still furious with me, and definitely still the most beautiful man I have ever seen. So much for the theory that one night with the ogre would break the spell.
“What email?”
“Semester review. Yours, not mine. Elizabeth wants to see both of us on Friday.”
“Oh, my giddy aunt…”
“No, don’t worry.” Tim waves away my concern as if it was a fruit fly. “That’s all part of the care the college lavishes on its rookies.”
“I don’t think so. I had seven drops and withdrawals from the Comedy class, and this week I got three emails whining for my permission to withdraw late. What’s the policy of late withdrawal?”
“You mean the official one or the actual one we practice?” Tim asks, rolling his eyes.
“I can’t save your tush every day of the week!” Giles has not sat down.
“You leave my tush out of it!”
His eyes narrow, and my heart beats faster because we both remember. The skin of his stomach sliding along the skin of my buttocks; me arching my back to offer him access to the hidden parts of my body and my soul. Two pillows under my belly to tilt me at the angle he wants me, his hard shaft sliding playfully, a little menacingly, down the cleft between my ass cheeks till it finds its slippery way home. His hand burrowing down till his fingers find me.
I guess now I know why you are not supposed to have sex with people you work with.
“You told me to pamper them. Giles told me to be a bitch. Why do I listen to you at all?” I pretend to be more upset than I am, to justify my tomato-colored face.
“Why do you listen to him?” Tim corrects me. “My advice was good! However you conduct your classes later on, in your first year you have to be uber-submissive!”
“We didn’t hire her to be submissive!” Giles fires up. He has flushed, too, with anger or with arousal, perhaps both.
“Of course she has to be submissive! If she values her skin? Yes, she does, and then some!”
Chapter 29
SINCE IT SEEMS INEVITABLE that I will be shot down, my only consolation is that it is Ma Mayfield rather than Matthew Dancey who is wielding the gun. Giles and I are waiting in front of the Dean of Studies’ office, and it’s a toss-up whether I am more afraid of Giles or of Ma Mayfield.
“Giles, I’m sorry. Could we not—”
“Don’t worry about me,” he cuts in, his face like a stone. “I can be professional about this. You do the talking. Ignore me. After all…” He shrugs sardonically.
“Look, I’m truly sorry, but don’t you—”
But we are called in, and he doesn’t want to hear anyway.
“Now, Anna, I regret that your first semester at Ardossan has been somewhat fraught with…difficulties.” Elizabeth seems calm and collected, as usual. “So I would not lay too much stress on this, but I have received written complaints from six students in your general education class.” Elizabeth fans out half a dozen email print-outs on her desk, and I can see that none consists of fewer than two paragraphs of text. “Four of them suggest that your behavior in class could be regarded as sexual harassment.”
At this, my jaw drops. Literally. I lose control over my facial muscles and my mouth falls open.
“Now, look here, Elizabeth.” Three minutes into the meeting, Giles is already riding to the rescue. “You know perfectly well that these accusations are preposterous! I don’t know why these students have it in for Anna, but it’s not because she acknowledges the sexually charged language of Elizabethan sonnets!”