of scanning badges and telling people where the locker rooms, basketballs courts, and indoor track were.
“Hey, do you need a bathroom break or anything?” Patti asked just after I’d gotten started. “You’re going to be really busy and I won’t be able to relieve you for another hour.”
The good thing about working noon to two p.m. was that the gym was busy. Like really busy. And that meant I was busy. My shifts passed quickly.
I was about to tell her I was fine, but something stopped me.
“Um, yeah, let me run to the ladies’ room. Be right back.”
I’d only looked around the gym once before when Patti had given me a tour. But this time, I headed straight for the weight room.
I couldn’t lie. I wanted to see Adler.
And there he was, soaked in all his sweaty beauty. Sure, he was surrounded by younger, equally fit men, but something about him stood out. He moved with a confidence that the average college guy hadn’t yet developed, and a maturity that some of them never would.
He had a white gym towel draped around his neck and occasionally wiped the sweat from his eyes. His mid-thigh workout shorts draped over a muscular ass, and his biceps tested the limits of the faded Wellshire T-shirt he wore.
Holy crap.
He set his weights down and grabbed the bottom of his T-shirt, pulling it up to wipe the sweat from his face.
His abdomen was probably the most perfect six-pack I’d ever seen.
And as he did, he turned and looked right at me.
Shit.
I ran back to my post.
Chapter 12
PROFESSOR CHASE BALDWYN
“Bonjour.”
Benno smirked at me from behind his desk in Wellshire’s English department, and motioned toward a seat.
“You pronounce that all wrong, you know,” I told him, getting comfortable in the creaky wooden chair opposite.
He shrugged. “What can I say, Chase? I teach English, not French.”
“And an English teacher you will stay.”
I looked around Benno’s office. This is what a full professor got. It might not look like much at a glance, with its crowded bookshelves, piles of papers, half-dead ivy plant, and one dingy window, but that wasn’t the point. To have your own space in a university? It meant you’d arrived.
I, on the other hand, as an adjunct teacher, got a shared desk in a windowless room stuffed with a bunch of other academic wanna-bees. It was noisy, smelly, and impossible to get anything done in.
“Hey, I see you’ve acquired the obligatory Shakespeare poster. Tell me, do they require everyone in the English department to post one of those on their walls?”
He glanced over at it. “It was here when I moved in. I suppose I could replace it. But I’m not much of a decorator. How are things over in the bullpen?”
That was the perfect name for the insufferable ‘office’ I’d been given to share. “Same old, same old. I spend as little time there as possible. I basically come to campus, teach, and go back home.”
Adjuncts didn’t have to offer office hours like real professors did. If a student wanted to meet with us, they had to set something up by email and we’d meet in the library, student union, or outside in one of the school’s quads. It was one of the many ways the university underscored the hierarchy among its teaching staff and saved money. It was all good though.
Well, it had been good until recently.
“Dude. The language department head came by and read me the riot act for how I dress.” I looked down at my jeans, faded concert T-shirt, and flip-flops.
He had a point.
Benno, by contrast, was wearing standard professor fare with his white button down, khakis, and tweed jacket. All that was missing were telltale elbow patches.
That shit was just not my style.
“He said he didn’t want me looking like a student. I don’t understand the big deal. I’m not much older than the students, and besides, what does he expect me to do on an adjunct’s pay?”
Yeah, I was perpetually broke. Always had been. Probably always would be at the rate I was going.
Benno nodded sympathetically. “It’s rough, man. One of the things I don’t like about academic life is that they treat full professors like gods and most everyone else like slaves.”
He wasn’t kidding. The pecking order in universities was legendary. It was amazing that someone like Benno even hung out with me, that’s how stratified the system was. But we’d met through the university running club, along with Jamie, which put us on equal footing.
Well, not