Rider: An MC Club Alpha Male Romance (18 page)

EPILOGUE: FANG

“Okay, Spider Monkeys, line up!”

About a quarter of my kindergarteners on the playground perked up. They dashed off to stand in a neat line beside the dull brick of the school.

“Now, I want to see my Great White Sharks lined up!”

Another quarter. And another, and another. I divided my class into groups named after animals and the kids loved it—it inspired them to behave, to work hard for the honor of their group. If there’s one thing I knew about, it was groups, loyalty, and honor.

The Feds had asked me what I wanted to do once I got to Seattle. They lasered off the tattoos on my face and hands—imagine sticking your hand in a bonfire and then leaving it there for a few hours and that’s getting close to what it feels like—but left the ones that I could cover up. They would also pay for graduate school and that’s what I wanted—they sent me to get my teaching degree and now, I was student-teaching a class of kindergarteners.

This school was supposedly the worst in the district but I never had any trouble. My kindergarteners were little angels once I had a week with them, and I had become the de-facto enforcer of good behavior for the entire school. The seventh and eighth grade boys were particularly wild—or, at least, they had been, until I had a good, hard talk with them and made them run laps around the parking lot until they puked.

After that, instead of hating me, they ended up loving me. A lot of boys just have too much energy and if you don’t let them run around and act a fool, they’ll turn into little monsters.

Speaking of little monsters—the Great White Sharks were pointing and giggling at something off on the street.

“Are we being focused?” I began, raising my eyebrows at them. “I see Jamal is focused… I see…”

“Mr. Watt, there’s a big fat lady coming over here!” one of Spider Monkeys, Keisha, cried out.

I turned around to see who this big fat lady was and my heart nearly stopped.

“Mr. Watt?” Claire asked as she came to a halt in front of me and my students. “That’s what they call you now?”

I recovered my composure right away. I grinned.

“What are you talking about? I’ve always been Mr. Watt.”

“Well, in that case…” Claire said, taking my hand and putting it on her swollen, pregnant belly. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Watt.”

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KAREN

This was where I really belonged. This was better than sex.

“Harriet Jacobs escaped her life of slavery by using the only resources she had as a woman of color in pre-Civil War America…”

My voice rang out over the lecture hall. The students were quiet, for once, their phones down, practically no eyes focused on their computer screens. For once—for one, brief, shining moment, I couldn’t see the pale blue glow of facebook in the reflections on their glasses, couldn’t see their young, otherwise life-filled eyes glaze over.

It was these moments that I live for. It was these moments that made me glad I had become a professor, made all the years of studying, research, and writing worth it.

Yes, this was my career, my calling. It was worth it.

“So, she slept with not one, but two white men? She manipulated them sexually. And she wrote about it. The significant thing about Jacobs is not that she slept with white men to save her children, to save her own life, but that she wrote about it, in her own voice. In her own words.”

The lecture was almost over but no one was moving to leave. And it was one of the last lectures of the semester before Thanksgiving break. All across the university, students were getting antsy, antsy to be leaving, to be going home and seeing high school friends, to be trading stories and gossip, to kiss the boys they had always wanted to kiss in high school, to see favorite dogs and cats back in their childhood bedrooms.

But still, they stayed with me, through to the end.

“White people tried to stop her, tried to silence her. ‘We’ll write the story for you, Harriet,’ they said. Harriet Beecher Stowe—if you remember, she was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which we will not be reading for this course—“ I hated Uncle Tom’s Cabin and I had already written far too many papers about it. It’s an important book that people should still read, but I wanted my students to like me, not hate me after slogging through six hundred pages of overwritten 19
th
century prose. “—even told Harriet Jacobs, a black woman of her own name, that she wouldn’t help her get published—but she would take Jacobs’s story and incorporate it into her own work.”

Grim chuckles danced through the lecture hall as I reached for a sip of water.

“But Jacobs persevered. She was a survivor, and she was published. So, as you read her book, her ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,’ remember her story and her background—how difficult is was for her to get this story into your hands, now, today, over a hundred and fifty years after it was originally written.”

I paused, allowing those final words to sink in.

“See you all on Monday,” I said with a smile, allowing myself a deep breath as the class collectively exhaled and began to rustle around, began to collect their things and trickle out. I took a seat, sighing. Lecturing always took it out of me.

You see, I’m honestly pretty introverted. That’s what you get, I guess, growing up the daughter of a fierce lawyer. My mother is far more the gung-ho, take charge type. She demanded that I be allowed to skip a grade in grammar school when my standardized tests showed that I was reading at more than three grade levels above where I should have been at. She demanded that I be allowed to take seven AP classes at a time in high school, and that I be allowed to take time off to travel to Europe to compete in violin competitions. She’s always been my biggest booster and maybe, as a result, I haven’t had to advocate much for myself.

But no. I’m a woman in academia. Virtually every one of my colleagues is a man, or a woman nearly fifteen years older than me. I have to advocate for myself, for the very worthiness of my existence, every single day.

“That was incredible,” Masha, one of my graduate students and teaching assistants, murmured to me, leaning over from her desk at the head of the class. “You managed to keep them in their seats for five minutes after the end of class—I didn’t see a single lacrosse players sneak out.”

I allowed myself a grin.

“High praise when even the lacrosse players want to hear what you have to say.”

“I’ll let you know if anything comes up in the discussion section,” Masha said, rising. “Have you heard anything more about the budget for next year?”

I froze. The department budget for next year. God.

What a shit show.

“No. Have you?”

Masha shook her head sadly. “No. Just, you know, rumors. But from other graduate students. Not from anyone… In the know.”

I raised an eyebrow. I was, supposedly, in the know—even if I were only a twenty-nine year old junior professor barely beginning my second year of teaching—and I hadn’t even heard the rumors.

“What kind of rumors?”

“Oh… Nothing… I mean…” Masha sighed. “Rumors that we might be combined with Modern Languages and Literatures. Or that the university might hire a team of consultants to come in and ‘restructure’ us.”

At the sound of the word ‘restructure,’ my heart stopped and my stomach churned. Restructure. I hated the influx of disgusting, corporate terminology into education—education should be about students, about students learning and discovering themselves and great writing, great reservoirs of knowledge. Not about profit margins. Not about… Structures and restructuring.

“I haven’t heard anything like that,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t pay it any mind. This is still one of the largest, one of the best English literature departments in the country, even with the lawsuit. These things happen. The longer you spend in academia, the more you’ll see that this is just a phase.”

A pained smile took hold on Masha’s sweet, young face. She was only twenty-four, which made her only five years younger than me. I was charmed and little frightened that she was able to look at me with such trust and confidence, her eyes wide—literally, wide!—with admiration.

“Karen, you’re totally right. I won’t worry about it. I’ll email you before Monday.”

She gathered her things and glided out of class, leaving me alone with my empty lecture hall.

My name is Karen O’Lowry, PhD. I got my degree a year and a half ago, at Harvard, in American Studies with a focus on American literature. Since graduating, I’ve been teaching here at Silliman University, one of the finest in the country—a rival to Havard in so many ways, and a school that even surpasses my alma mater in others. I’m in the English department, one of the few professors who focus on American women’s literature and, in my personal and very humble opinion, a welcome addition to a world of mostly male academics determined to talk themselves to death about Shakespeare.

The big reason I’m here, the reason I even got the job in the first place, is that my mentor, Anthony Kennedy, another scholar of American literature, was just appointed Chair of the Department. As one of his first orders of business, he began a faculty search, looking for fresh new voices focusing on areas of literature that weren’t old, weren’t traditional, weren’t boring.

He had been a fan of my work ever since I first began going to conferences and doing presentations. When I took harsh criticism from the male scholars I found myself engaging with, he offered me advice, taught me how to outthink them, out-argue them. Everything I have today—my job, my career, the book deal I just signed with Oxford University Press last week, everything—it’s all due to him.

But it could all fall apart, if the university fell apart. If the department fell apart. God. Scandals.

I began to pack up my things. I noticed on my phone that it was almost four-thirty. There was a departmental meeting at five I was scheduled to go to. Maybe I would find out more about the budget, about the bankruptcy. Maybe.

There was also a text message from Tyrone, my ex. A picture of his abs: chiseled, and dark, like chocolate melted over a marble statue sculpted so perfectly by one of the Renaissance Italian greats. I found myself hesitating for a moment.

He did have a great body.

I could just…

No. No, I needed to focus on my own life. On my own interests. On my career. I couldn’t be Tyrone’s babysitter anymore. I wouldn’t stand for his cheating, for his immature bullshit anymore.

“I want u back” the text said. I replied. “It’s still over.”

And then I blocked his number. Boy, that felt good. Almost as good as lecturing.

Almost as good as sex.