Page 72 of Loved

"That isn't why I don't think things can go back to normal. At breakfast, Tyler warned me that it was going to be bad. Apparently everyone loves you. Which makes sense. You're very loveable."

I lowered my eyebrows. Did that mean people were upset with Penny?Ah, fuck.I wanted all the blame to be put on me. But I was worried about how other students would react to Penny, especially when the article said I was still married.

"Everyone's mad at me. I was hiding in the bathroom before Psych and I overheard these girls talking. People are upset that your classes are canceled. And it's because of me. Because I'm a slut and a whore. I ruined your career. I ruined your life."

She couldn’t be more wrong. "You saved me. Penny, I was drowning. Don't you see that? I'm not a professor. I was never meant to be a professor. It was an escape from my life back in New York. It was just like everything else I've ever done. It was just another escape."

"But you loved teaching. You were a great professor."

I was a pretty shitty professor. "I didn't love teaching.” I liked it, yeah. It made me happy for a time. I needed it when I was going through a hard time. But I didn’t love it. “The only thing I think I've ever truly loved is you."

"I don't want to hold you back from..."

"Stop. Please stop. I don't understand why you won't accept what I'm telling you. You're all I want. You're all I care about." She was everything to me. Dr. Clark thought that was a slippery slope. But I didn’t. There was nothing wrong with being obsessed with something that was good for me. It was being obsessed with things that were bad for me that got me in trouble.

"I just feel so selfish,” Penny said.

I rubbed her tears away with my thumb. "You're it for me. I don't know how else I can tell you." I ran the tip of my nose down the length of hers.

She sighed like the action was the most comforting thing in the world.

"If you're going to keep going to class, you need to ignore what other people say. Because I don't like seeing you cry."Or we could just move…

"That wasn't it. That wasn't what made me cry. It just got worse from there."

Fuck.Whatever it was…it was bad. I just wanted to take her pain away. I could take it. I was used to living in pain.

"I got to Psych late because I was upset about what I heard in the bathroom. The professor called me out and asked me to talk to her after class. No one wanted me to sit with them. Luckily Tyler had called one of his frat brothers who had saved me a seat."

That was actually really nice of that shit head. "I'll have to thank him for that," I said calmly.

"After class I went to talk to the professor. She told me my grades were slipping. Which I already knew. But she implied that she thought I had been getting perks in my other classes because of our relationship."

I sighed.Seriously?I barely even spoke to any other professors. What did her Psych professor think was going on? That I called all of my professor bros, told them I was hooking up with a student, and they were like cool, I’ll give her an A too?Fuck off.

"I told her I had gotten to class early, but had been hiding in the bathroom because I was trying to avoid hearing what everyone was saying about me. And she basically said that she wasn't sympathetic and wasn't friends with you, so that she would have no problem failing me."

"What is your professor's name?" I needed to have a talk with this idiot. She clearly wasn’t very good at psychology, because she had no idea what the hell was going on around her.

"I don't want you to talk to her. I feel like that will just make it worse."

"You know that I can find out without you telling me."

Penny sighed. "Professor Thornton. But please don't talk to her. I'm going to get my grades back up. When you weren't talking to me I just fell apart. But I have the rest of the semester to fix it."

Right.The rest of the semester. I wanted to do that thing I’d just joked about in my session. I wanted to just buy an apartment in New York City tonight and whisk her away to it. But that wasn’t exactly putting her needs first. Or being a team. I’d mentioned leaving town several times now. Penny wasn’t biting. I had to just face the fact that we were staying here.

I nodded. "Okay. I won't talk to her. Honestly, I don't even recognize her name. I don't think I've met her. There probably isn't anything I could do anyway. I don't know that many professors outside of the business school."

She just stared at me. And she still looked upset. She hadn’t told me the worst thing yet.

So I didn’t say a word, waiting for her to continue telling me about her day.

She sighed. "My intro to marketing class was the worst. It's what made me cry. I didn't expect anything like this to happen. I didn't expect any professors to even talk to me. And I was already upset about everything else. I got a paper back in that class. I got a C-. So when Professor McCarty mentioned an extra credit assignment, I wanted to do it. But apparently he had already explained it in the class I missed on Wednesday. And I hate raising my hand in class. It makes me all nervous and..."

"I know." I picked up her hand and kissed her palm. "You ramble when you're nervous too. It's incredibly cute." I kissed her palm again.

Penny looked like she was going to start crying again.

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