Tarot Academy 4 - Sarah Piper Page 0,16

the moment my fingers brush his skin, a fresh wave of sadness hits me, full of old regrets and a deep, all-consuming shame.

“You said it was about someone from the past, right?” I ask, trying to remember exactly what he said. “From before you became a professor?”

Another sigh. Another wave of darkness and regret.

I stand behind him, trying to give him space, trying to let him come to me in his own time. But the silence drags on endlessly, and eventually, I break.

“I’m not going to try to convince you to be with me,” I say. “I’m pretty sure you know how I feel. But whatever your reasons, whatever happened in the past, this has to end, Doc. I can’t keep chasing you on this rollercoaster. It’s—”

“No,” he says suddenly.

“No?”

“It’s not from before I became a professor,” he says. “Just before I came to this Academy.”

I blink, my mind trying to catch up with his words. “I thought you’d always taught here.”

“I began my teaching career in Copenhagen.”

“I… had no idea.” I try to picture Doc on another campus, in a foreign city with different students, different landscapes. A younger version of him comes to my mind, his hair jet black without the touches of gray, the lines around his eyes smoother. Maybe he was less troubled then.

But that man is a stranger to me. I can scarcely hold the image.

“It’s not something I usually talk about,” he says, finally abandoning the whiskey bottle back on the dresser. “There’s… history there.”

“What sort of history?”

“Elizabeth Voorhees history,” he says. “She was a student of mine. A first-year. Brightest in the class, so full of life and magick. Potential. Stubborn too, like someone else I know.” A soft chuckle escapes, but then it fades, replaced once again by the darkness. When Doc speaks again, his voice is soft and broken. “She dreamed of working for the APOA, but she never got the chance.”

I don’t know what to say. Clearly, this woman meant something to him. And clearly, something terrible happened to her. Were they close? Together close? Did she pass away?

Why am I so scared to ask about this?

I wait for him to continue, but again the silence drags on. He’s pulling away from me, retreating, but I can’t let him go. Not tonight. Not now.

Steadying myself, I reach out for his energy again, feeling very much like a trespasser chasing him through the coldest, most shadowy places of his heart.

And then I find it. The black core of it all—a guilt so heavy and all-consuming, he’s drowning in it.

I don’t know what happened in Copenhagen, and maybe that story was never meant for me. Maybe forcing him to justify his hot-and-cold reactions to me by digging through his past makes me a selfish, terrible person.

But selfish or not, I’m in this now. Deep. And every instinct inside me is screaming the same dire warning.

If I don’t find a way to pull him back from this tonight, I’m going to lose him forever.

Eight

STEVIE

“Elizabeth Voorhees,” I say gently. “It sounds like you cared a great deal for her.”

“Not in the way you’re thinking, no. But in her mind…” At this, he finally turns to face me, and I can’t help the gasp that escapes my mouth. Moments ago, he was my Doc—rigid, difficult, definitely hiding things. But still my Doc. Still the man I’m falling in love with.

Now I’m staring at a wraith. I’ve never seen him so haunted, and it takes everything in me not to run to him, to silence the rest of this awful tale with kisses before he reaches the inevitable ending.

But he needs to get there. More than he needs comfort, more than he needs healing, he needs to let this go.

“She was infatuated with me,” he says. “There’s no other way to say it. I knew it. My colleagues knew it. And though I didn’t return or even encourage her feelings, I didn’t discourage them, either. She put me on a pedestal from the very first, and there I allowed myself to remain, even basking in the attention a bit. Inappropriate? Perhaps. Though the age difference was minimal then, she was still my student. And in a thousand other lifetimes, under a thousand other circumstances, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Maybe one day she would’ve confessed her feelings directly, and my rejection—no matter how gentle—would’ve broken her heart, but she would’ve moved on. She would’ve found someone who returned her affections. She would’ve built a life for