“What happened to the cease-fire?” Audrey couldn’t help but laugh. The man was charming, smooth. Yet kind. The kind of man she’d always been attracted to and yet would forever and always be out of her league.
Behind them, the noise of students trickling into the room reminded Audrey that they weren’t alone. She instinctively took a step back, as though she’d been caught doing something wrong, even though there was nothing at all wrong with approaching her professor before class.
Don’t you mean Ronan?
His name echoed in her head. What exactly about this man had turned her into a puddle? Maybe it was simply because he embodied the things she wished she had in her own life—success, education, an upward trajectory. Combine that with a delicious-looking package and of course she was attracted to him. It was biology.
An elephant’s penis is so big it can rest on it like an additional leg.
Why exactly had she chosen that fact to share in the car ride to school this morning? Deanna had erupted in giggles, and there was a chorus of eews from the backseat, but clearly Audrey had sex on the brain.
That’s what happens when you go for three years without having a boyfriend. It’s like sugar cravings—the more you ignore it, the worse it gets.
And she’d never been too good at ignoring cravings, sugar or otherwise.
“Anyway, thanks for your time,” she said, awkwardly taking another step back, even though it felt like her whole body resisted it. “I’m really looking forward to this class.”
Audrey didn’t wait for Ronan to respond, but she felt his eyes boring into her back the entire way until she grabbed an empty seat. She’d chosen it carefully—not right at the front, because she didn’t want to seem too eager, but not in the back, because she didn’t want to get distracted by the slackers. She always picked an aisle seat if possible, since her hips required a little more room and she didn’t want to get wedged in.
Plus, she needed to make a quick exit as soon as the class was done. Her father thought she was doing an extra shift at Kisspresso tonight, and they closed half an hour before the class ended, so she needed to hustle home in order to keep her cover from being blown.
One day you won’t need to hide what you’re doing.
That day would come the second Deanna graduated from high school and went off to college. Then all her siblings would be out in the world, and Audrey could finally live her own life. It would come soon…ish.
She leaned back in the chair and watched as Ronan introduced himself to the class, her stomach still twisting and turning as attraction wound through her system. Maybe it would be better if she concentrated on taking notes instead of looking at him. But for the next hour, she felt her eyes drawing upward at the sound of excitement and passion in his voice.
And whenever she did look up, she could swear he was looking directly at her.
Audrey pulled into the driveway of her house as quietly as she could, letting the tires roll slowly over the cracked concrete, headlights off and her radio silent. When she killed the engine, she sat for a minute in the darkness, quietly listening to an occasional passing car or dog barking. When nothing stirred in the house, she reached over to the passenger-side seat and grabbed her pink Kisspresso polo shirt.
She was now adept at the “quick change” in confined spaces and the pretzel-like contortions it sometimes required. Working quickly, she whipped off the cute white blouse she’d worn to class and swapped it for the uniform polo. Then she stuffed the blouse into her bag and put her apron on top to hide the evidence. Glancing at herself in the rearview mirror, she wiped her lipstick off with tissue and messed up her hair a little. She needed to look like a person who’d worked a fifteen-hour day and not like someone who’d thought way too much about whether they looked cute enough for class.
Audrey got out of her car and slung her bag over one shoulder. This was always the most difficult part of the day—coming home and having no idea what kind of wreckage she would find. It was the very reason she persisted with the cloak-and-dagger approach to her night classes. They kept