Page 77 of Prosecco with My Professor
42
Santo
The knockon my door mid-afternoon has me leaping to my feet, sending Zola scrambling and hissing up to her loft. Emma hasn’t reached out, despite my offer to help her study, and I’ve been respecting her request for distance. I think she’s had her tests by now, but I haven’t heard anything from her, from Vincente, or from any of my former colleagues at the university.
When I open the door, though, it’s not Emma but Bell on the other side. As soon as she’d heard about my firing, she’d come over to console me, but I hadn’t talked to her in a few days.
“Not the person you were hoping for, I see,” she says when she steps inside. Hearing her voice, Zolamerowsfrom the loft. After scratching Zola’s chin, Bell takes her jacket off and drapes it over the arm of my couch before sitting in the corner. “How are you?”
I slump down next to her. “I was thinking about going out to Castel Gandolfo for a few weeks. Once Emma moves out for her internship, nothing is keeping me here. Except you,” I quickly amend.
Bell faces me, propping her head up on her fist. “Have you talked to her?”
“No.” Zola’s head appears, her whiskers raised while she sniffs and considers whether Bell will give her more scratches. I flick my fingers to encourage her, but she turns away, rubbing her chin against the table and turning away from me, tail straight up in the air.
“Why not?”
I sigh and lean my head back. “I offered to help her study, and she hasn’t reached out. Because of me, her opportunity is gone. And maybe her reputation. I don’t know who knows what, and I think maybe it would be best to just not interfere.”
Bell shifts and glares at me. “Do you love her?”
“I, ah…no. I don’t love her.” I close my eyes. “But I think I could. She lacks confidence in a lot of things, and when I look at her or talk to her, I think that I’ve found this undiscovered gem, that I see something other people can’t see.” I open my eyes and look at the closest thing I have to a daughter. “But she’s leaving anyway, and she’s angry and hurt.”
“What about getting your job back?”
I scoff. “That will not happen.”
Bell folds her arms, and her glare intensifies. “There was that case last year where the judge ruled in favor of the teacher getting his job back, claiming that they were in love, so it didn’t matter that the student was seventeen and the teacher was forty-five.”
I look at her, incredulous. “I am not a pedophile.”
“Iknow,” she says, exasperated. “If that horrible man was able to use a broken system to validate his relationship, then you can use a broken system to do the right thing without guilt. Your university doesn’t even have a policy.”
“How do you know?”
She wiggles her eyebrows. “I have my ways.” I roll my head over to glare at her. “I called and asked. A woman in the human resources department was very helpful.”
“Be that as it may, I don’t want to fight to go back to a place I'm not wanted, and I don’t want to make it harder on Emma.”
“Well, then what’s next?”
I grunt and sit forward, putting my head in my hands. “I don’t know. How did I let this get so messy? How did I become my father?”
“Shut up. You are nothing like your father.”
“People keep trying to tell me that, and I still don’t think it’s true.”
Finally, Zola commits and jumps up on the couch, rubbing her face against Bell’s proffered hand and, once again, pointing her ass at me. She really knows how to kick me when I’m down. Bell gathers Zola up and puts her in her lap. “Okay, so if you were your father, what would he do in this situation?”
“Give her a lot of money to go away, tank her career, and never speak of her again.”
“And what’s the opposite of that?”
“Give her no money, boost her career, and talk about her all the time?”
“Exactly.”
“That makes no sense. The first one is done, the second one she doesn’t want my help with, and who would I talk about her to?”
