Page 3 of The Biker and the Professor
I glance around the quiet house. Clean, modern, high-end, and mine.
How am I able to afford a luxury SUV and a home in an expensive neighborhood on a teacher’s salary? Well, the answer is, Ican’tafford to live like this on a teacher’s salary.
I grew up in a fairly privileged family—not affluent, but comfortable. At age twenty, I fell in love with a mogul twelve years older and shrieked, “Oh My God, yes!” when he proposed.
The bliss of our marriage lasted a little over a year before he began cheating on me, repeatedly and unapologetically. If I wanted to maintain my financial security and status, as my friends and family advised me, then I needed to learn to look the other way. “It is what we all do as wives,” they’d said. “Boys will be boys. Especially when they’re loaded.”
Young and naive, I followed the advice of women whom I believed were wiser than me and remained in a hapless marriage for almost a decade. Suffered through three miscarriages and spent the majority of my evenings in therapists’ offices.
The one thing that kept me sane was continuously advancing my education. I’m a math brain, and no matter how many degrees I got, I never felt satisfied or fulfilled. Not even after receiving my Ph.D.
It wasn’t until he knocked up a nineteen-year-old college student, moved her into a mansion on our street, and even began sleeping there a few nights a week, that I said enough was enough. I was the laughingstock of the neighborhood. The idiot wife whose husband had zero respect for her. I couldn’t step outside without people staring and whispering.
I served him divorce papers, which he refused to sign. Nope, not untilhewas ready to sign it. He wanted it to be said thatheleft me, not the other way around. A year later, after he found another young thing and proposed to her, he servedmedivorce papers. I gladly signed them.
Our initial prenuptial agreement granted me 2.5 million dollars for each year of our marriage, along with the mansion we lived in, but with how blatant and careless he’d been with his affairs, he knew if I contested it—which I actuallydidn’tplan to do—I’d walk away a billionaire, so he preemptively offered me an insanely hefty settlement in addition to the original agreement.
Filled with shame and resentment toward the people in my life who, for the love of money and status, had pressured me into staying in a relationship that humiliated me and stole every bit of joy, confidence, and self-value I had, I sold the mansion, rented out the Paris penthouse he’d ceded me in the settlement, donated all my clothes and jewelry to charity, then got into my car with nothing but Marley and a duffle bag, and just drove.
I didn’t know where I was going, I knew only that I needed to find myself.
For days on end, it was nothing but a blissful series of highway speeding, B&B stops, and Rihanna on repeat. I felt…free. Like I could do anything,beanyone.
It wasn’t until my stop in Denver that I felt as if I had reached my destination. The weather, the views, the food, the culture…I was home.
Without second-guessing it, I bought a house, secured a job, and made Denver my haven.
For the most part, I’m content in my isolation. On some days, though, the loneliness becomes weary. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. I do miss my family, my friends, but they are all toxic and insalubrious, driven by greed and status, so I maintain our relationship with distance, communication via email only. None of them knows where I am, and I’ll never tell them. The farther apart we are, the better.
The full-length mirror across the open space of my living area shows me my reflection, a face that’s both content and discontent. At 110 pounds, most would describe me as petite. My dark brown hair barely touches my shoulders in a curly bob—the “new me” haircut I got immediately after my divorce. I’m often described as “Blasian,” much to my displeasure. Quadracial is more appropriate, with my mom being of Japanese and Dominican descent, and my father of Native American, German-American, and African-American descent. But it’s too exhausting to correct people’s assumptions, so I don’t bother anymore.
Since relocating to Denver, I’m slowly regaining my self-confidence. To chase off the self-loathing, I practice self-love by never breaking promises I make to myself.
During the liberating and meandering road trip I embarked on after being freed from my disastrous marriage, I decided to remain single. No more men, no more relationships. I can do life all by myself.
Relationships are sweet and fun and euphoric…until they are not. The brief feelings of happiness, contentment, and tingly, tummy-flipping love we feel in the honeymoon phase of a relationship, are just not worth the pain and heartache that will inevitably ensue. I’m perfectly fine with being single.
On the tail end of that thought, however, azure blue eyes leap across my mind. With a groan, I crash down on the couch next to Marley. She crawls onto my lap.
Confession time: my name is Toni Blume, I am a calculus professor, and I am insanely, irrationally, inconceivably attracted to my twenty-year-old student. I’m thirty-two and freshly divorced. This should not even be a thing! But, because life hates me, it is.
There.
I admit it.
I like Nero Gunnar’s blatant stares. I crave it. Get high off it.
And when I am alone within the safe walls of my home, I allow myself to think about him. It’s wrong and deluded, unthinkable, sheer insanity, and did I mentionwrong?
We have a relationship, him and I. It is silent, platonic, chimeric.
That is all it will ever be. Because not only isany otherkind of unprofessional engagement with mystudentoff the table, but as aforementioned, I’m perfectly fine doing life on my own.
My doorbell rings and I grin down at Marley as she peers up at me with a purr.
Our lemon zucchini bread is here.
Chapter 3
