I wished I’d had a father like Laius. A man who wasn’t afraid to go to prison, who would have protected his children at all costs. Who was ready to be better for their sake and did everything in his power to reunite with them.
Tears pricked my eyes as I listened, but I had my sunglasses to veil them from him and every other soul in here. However, when I saw his own tears, I was going to blubber ugly and didn’t care what everyone would say.
But…just when I was about to lose all caution and fall for the sadness and pain behind his story, self-preservation kicked in. What if Furore was just as good as his son at the shit I taught? What if making up stories was a talent that ran in the family? What if this villain was trying to disguise himself in the tormented anti-hero cloak like he’d tried to sell me the jealous, possessive, student teacher crush narrative earlier? What if everything Furore had been doing to me since we’d met was a calculated measure to reach the real goal he was here for?
Fact check. Unlike the other students, he’d enrolled late in my class. It could be normal, but with his behavior, I was more inclined to believe otherwise. Perhaps he was never interested in taking my class or be better at writing to reach his son like he’d claimed. Perhaps he was ordered to take my class to have access to me. To discover the secrets very few people who lived knew. Had he not been trying to know things about me? He’d figured out I wasn’t Italian, and today he was trying to get me to show my eyes.
Or I was being paranoid, everything he’d said about his son was true, he did want to see my eyes for his perverted reasons or to just win the notorious bet, and he was only riling me up about my identity to get me to lay off his back because I was an insufferable bitch.
Which theory was the truth?
“You happy?” Furore asked.
No. I was confused. My plan to get him to reveal his secret intentions hadn’t satisfied me and left me needing more. “Thank you, Laius, for sharing your work. Disregarding all the swears, it was very good.”
“Right on,” he mocked and glanced at his peers. “Clap, motherfuckers.”
They obeyed, erupting in whistles, cheers and applause. I snorted and gave a little smile. “Thank you, Laius! You can go back to your seat!”
He turned, giving Murphy a wink on his way back to the desk. Then he tossed the notebook on top of it and slumped down in his seat.
“Laius?” I asked when the class calmed.
“Yes, Miss Meneceo?”
I ignored the clench between my thighs every time he drawled my name in his mixed Italian Southern accent. “What’s the name of your son?”
He stared at me for a second, taken aback. Then his gaze held my face steadily. “Rex.”
Rex? Was I supposed to believe that? Assuming that wasn’t a name you gave a dog rather than your own son, had he not lectured me about the Italian alphabet before? Had he not assumed I checked and knew by now what letters it had? Because I had, and x, just like j, wasn’t included.
How stupid do you think I am, Furore?
“Well, I sincerely hope your time here can be of help to reconnect with Rex. I have no doubt you can excel in Creative Writing. Your paragraph while crude is very impressive.” I switched my gaze to the rest of the students, anger coursing under my skin. “What your classmate did here wasn’t just an assignment. He succeeded at using the main pillar of every story out there to make you believe him. He grasped the fundamentals of building a character and outlined our course for us.”
I wrote three letters on the board, hitting hard on the marker, pouring my frustration into a learning experience. How fucking professional of me. GMC. “Goal, motivation and conflict.” I spun and stared at Furore. My student with the accent that made me wet and the eyes that commanded my forbidden orgasms. And my new enemy. “No matter how fictitious or unbelievable your story is, build a character using these three, then give it the right depth with a sad backstory, you’ll have every reader around your finger. They’ll believe and even crave your lies, shed tears for your pain and clap for your talent. That is what constitutes great fiction. It’s magical, isn’t it? But at the end of the day, it’s just another lie.”
