Page 5 of Tomorrow Belongs to Us
“Honey,” she says in that irritating, sweet-as-candy voice she often uses when she knows she's got the advantage. “Please stay here for a little longer. I'll take good care of you.”
I would rather be shot in both my arms ten times over than move in with her. I struggle to sit up. “No,” I reply testily, then hear Cassie’s singing about the toffee flavored popcorn she’s made.
“Please let us watch this film in peace,” I beg. The only reason I’m staying tonight is because my daughter asked me.
Vivian isn’t a part of my life, and I don't want her to ever think we have a chance of getting back together.
Chapter 3
MEGAN
It's been a few weeks since Lance Turner catapulted into my life from nowhere.
Because of the campus shooting and his part in it, he’s now become Boston's hero. In the day following the incident he was all over the local papers and on TV. I kept hearing the same old story of how he saved the student's life, of how he's a professor of mathematics. The media is obsessed by his looks and his brains and referred to him as the ‘hunky hero.’
Even at work, my colleagues talked about him just because his story is heroic, and people always like heroes. I stayed quiet, or pretended to be busy so that I didn't have to suffer their glowing admiration for the man.
Even if I wanted to forget him, I couldn’t.
But then, I’ve never been able to.
Arla doesn’t stop talking about him, even though I've forbidden her to bring up his name. She already has a knack for talking too much, but now she’s worse. She has this ridiculous theory that the universe has a grand design for me and Lance, that the chances of him ending up in the same city as me are so remote that fate must have had a hand in it.
Once upon a time it took all my resolve to rid myself of his memories. It wasn’t easy at the time. I struggled, like any teenage girl would; a teen whose life had changed after her mother overdosed. I became the caretaker for my younger sister and brother.
Perhaps it was a good thing that I was stretched so thin; that I couldn’t go to college, and had to stay at home, doing courses in order to make up for the college degree I’d lost out on. Because my grades had suffered, I didn’t get the academic scholarships I was hoping for.
My life took a turn for the worse. I don’t ever want to put myself through the pain of abandonment again. Lance Turner wasn’t just a teacher to me, over time he became something more. A friend, a confidante, someone I turned to because he understood me. He could see that I was falling apart, despite my best efforts to put on a strong face.
Mr. Turner saw me.
I’d heard of Lance Turner from the moment he first started at Overton High School. It was a year before he became my math teacher, but he was already the talk of the school. The girls in my class were crazy about him.
Luckily, I wasn't one of them. Arla was tongue tied, like the others, but I had far weightier things going on in my life, and I hadn’t been reeled in.
Not then.
While other girls tried hard to get Mr. Turner's attention by asking lots of questions and staying behind after class, I never did because I’d always been good at math. That is, until my grades started to drop. And that was right around the time Mr. Turner became concerned about me.
He approached me at the end of a lesson and asked me what was wrong. He’d said he was concerned about my grades falling, but I hadn't been able to give him a proper answer then. How could I have explained that my father was having an affair and my mother had fallen apart?
I didn't want him to know of my personal hell. That my parents’ daily fights were becoming more difficult to bear, and that I couldn't concentrate on my studies, and that my younger siblings were struggling even more than I was with the constant screaming and shouting.
Although I didn’t take his offer of help, he still tried to do what he could, giving me extra worksheets, or a textbook that no one else had, or by going over things in class that I was struggling to grasp.
I came to rely on him. It was comforting to know that someone cared. And then things changed. Over the coming months, our friendship blossomed into something else.
It was forbidden, to have such feelings for a man who was so much older and in a position of authority and trust. I didn’t see his beauty, not at first. I was with Shaun, my boyfriend, and I never, ever, looked at anyone else.
It happened slowly, then all at once. I experienced sensations I’d never had before, and an emotional connection I was desperate for. It’s something I’ve never been able to find again. Over time, especially when my family life imploded, it was to him that I turned.
I became obsessed.
Mr. Turner held back.
I couldn’t. I was a mess. But he was strong, and guarded, and concerned, yet he kept his distance. At times I could see something in his eyes, that he was struggling to deny this invisible bond that was building between us.
It was in the way I caught him staring at me when he thought I wasn't looking, it was in the way his gaze would settle on my lips when we laughed, it was in the way his face twisted when he tried to hold back that night I tested his limits.
