opening the entire school system had was the theater department. And, to be honest, I don’t really have an interest in theater. But it was a job to get my foot in at the school.”
“Then tell them that you want a different class. What can it hurt?” he asked.
What could it hurt?
Well, it wouldn’t be like they’d fire me from the position because I wanted to change classes. They’d ask why, and they damn well knew why, so then they could either say ‘I have no openings’ or say ‘I have an opening.’
“Just ask,” he suggested. “That’s the only thing that you can do.”
I did know of one teacher leaving at the end of the year. Her class was senior English.
If I could stick it out until the end of the year, I didn’t see why I couldn’t get that particular class. All of the other teachers at the high school were well liked and loved their classes. I doubted that they’d leave because they wanted senior English.
“Okay, I’ll ask in the morning. I’ll leave early and do that before school.” I smiled. “And I don’t really want to go home. I’m just going to go lay on this mat over here until class. Then I’ll move up to the office to get some paperwork done that Flint is too much of a little bitch to do.”
“I heard that,” Flint grunted in between pull-ups. “And just so you know, it’s not that I don’t like doing the paperwork. It’s that I don’t like listening to you bitching that I’m doing it wrong. Those are two different problems.”
I snickered as I went to my tiptoes and gave Croft one more kiss.
It was as I was pulling back that I saw how sweaty he was.
“You’re really sweaty,” I found myself saying.
When did that happen?
Now that I thought about it, I did feel sort of sticky from where he’d touched me.
“I was working on lower body,” he promised when he saw the narrowing of my eyes.
I gave him a ‘you better watch it’ look and went to the mat.
For the next forty minutes, I watched as two of my favorite people in the world got a workout in.
Well, mostly my eyes stayed on Croft, but occasionally they’d stray over to Flint to make sure he wasn’t doing anything stupid, either.
When he was hurt a couple of months ago, my heart had all but shattered. I was glad to see that he was almost one hundred percent back to normal.
It was at one of those moments, when my eyes weren’t on Croft, when the glass behind my head shattered.
Shards rained down over my head, and I ducked my face to the mat almost on instinct as I blinked and tried to make sense of what was going on.
A grunt and a curse had me blinking my eyes open to see a brick landing on the mat beside my head.
I stared at it, then looked over my shoulder just in time to see Karen hurrying through the window as if she broke them every day to get into where she was going.
She all but stepped on me in her haste to get through, and I slipped sideways on the mat, falling between the wall and the thick mat that everyone liked to use as a bed.
As I did, I ended up concealing myself mostly, if inadvertently.
Everything in the room went silent as all movement stopped.
“I cannot believe you, Croft,” Karen hissed, standing on the mat as if she did it every day. “How could you do this to me?”
I saw Croft scan the room for me but not find me, and I popped up a bit more to show him where I was.
He saw me, tagged me, then swiftly looked away.
“I don’t think I know what you’re going on about, Karen,” Croft said. “Would you care to share?”
Karen snorted. “You don’t know… you lost me my job! Both of them!”
Croft looked over at Flint, then back to Karen. “Karen…”
“I asked for my job back because I didn’t get what I needed from you, and then you wouldn’t give it to me. Is it because of her?” Karen demanded to know.
“Who is her?” Croft asked.
“Her being that bitch that you couldn’t take your eyes off of. She asked you to fire me, didn’t she?” Karen snarled. “That stupid fat gym owner that could never compete against me. But no, Croft has to find the ugly duckling appealing. Her! Not me. How does that make any sense?”
What