Air echoed through the empty cavern of my chest each time I drew breath, ricocheting off the hollow cavity where my heart used to be. I felt like everyone could hear the sound of my heartbreak, could see it like a dead thing in my eyes, but no one commented on it, not even Tayline, who only watched me with deep, dark eyes while we drank our morning coffees in the teacher’s lounge that morning.
My students felt it even though they didn’t know what it was. It made them quiet and slightly loopy as they breathed in the noxious fumes that flowed between King and me. He sat at his desk right before me but did not look at me, not once through the first forty minutes of history class. I found myself dropping things just to make a clatter that might draw his eyes, talking loudly so the volume would magnetize his eyes to me. Nothing worked and as the class drew on, I could feel myself becoming more despondent, my soul crushing into dust under the heel of his disregard.
It grew more impossible to believe I had done the right thing by giving him up with every moment that passed that I wasn’t in his arms. It had started as soon as he’d left my house and the now beautiful-to-me sound of his motorcycle disappeared.
Now, I hated myself so much I felt sick with it, nauseated and feverish, constantly about to faint. Every time I caught sight of his beautiful face, the breadth of his shoulders strong enough to hold up my sky as it threatened to come down around my ears and the halo of hair that crowned him like the king he was, I ached with such ferocity, I lost my breath midway through my lesson.
There were only ten minutes left, I told myself as bile surged over my tongue, and then I was going to go to the bathroom and throw up the little lunch I’d eaten.
“Did Eve do the right thing by giving into temptation?” Margaret asked as we reviewed their Paradise Lost papers.
“Of course,” Benny answered before I could. “If she hadn’t eaten the apple, she would have been Adam’s slave for ever. When she chose to eat the apple, she made her first autonomous decision from Adam.”
I pursed my lips, finally drawn into the conversation in a real way, both because he’d made an interesting point and because Benny had been back in class since the start of term but I couldn’t get used to my joy at seeing him there, sitting healthy and, unbelievably, happy.
“No, she switched one man for another and listened to Satan,” Carson said. It had taken him a while after the fight to get back into class discussions, but he always sat beside Benny now, and his boyfriend was excellent at drawing him into the conversation just as he was now.
“Sure, Satan influenced her, but Adam was her master and even in choosing to obey Satan and not him, she became independent. She did a bad thing and was, ironically, freed by it,” Benny said, his eyes on Carson’s, his thumb swiping back and forth of their joined hands.
It was obvious he was speaking allegorically about their relationship.
It was also obvious that I could do the same for myself. I’d been held to William by invisible social shackles I’d worn since birth, with no idea that I wore them but for the vague sense that I didn’t fit properly in my own life. Then King had appeared in the parking lot, bright, dangerous and shiny as a forbidden fruit and, unbeknownst to me, I’d take that first, delicious bite. By the time I knew how taboo it was, what repercussions that act would reap, it was too late. I’d tasted the kind of life and freedom I’d always wanted to have and just as it was for Eve, there was no turning back
I turned sharply to look at King who, for the first time all class, was staring at me. Our eyes locked with the vibration of a thunder strike and I rocked back on my heels as it resonated through me. I opened my mouth and I knew exactly what I was going to say (that I loved him more than my next breath) and what that would mean (my immediate dismissal from EBA, the instant dissolution of my impeccable reputation) and I did not care.
I opened my mouth to speak, but was interrupted by a knock at the door. It took me a moment to realize that two uniformed policemen stood in the entrance to my classroom.
“Can I help you, gentlemen?” I asked, my manners overriding my disorientation.
My gaze skittered over to King and found him still watching me. I shivered and watched his hands flex into fists on his desk, wondering if that meant he wanted to touch me or wanted to throttle me.
“Sorry to disrupt, Mrs. Irons—”
“Miss Irons,” the class, led by King, recited at the same time.
The cop from the town meeting, Officer Danner, the beautiful one with tawny blond hair and Clint Eastwood vibe that had most of the girls in the class tittering self-consciously, stepped forward. “Miss Irons, we are here to arrest Kyle Garro for the possession of illegal narcotics. Mr. Garro, stand up and put your hands behind your head.”
The air in the room solidified and I watched in shock as the officer moved through it as if through plasticine towards King who was already up and out of his seat. Still, his eyes were on me even as he remained quiet and calm while they patted him down and cuffed him.
“There must be some kind of mistake,” I said, finally snapping back to reality and stepping forward. “King is a bright, good student. There is no way this can be true.”
There was a way, given that The Fallen were the biggest weed distributors on the west coast, but there was no way that King would be caught with any, let alone hardcore narcotics at school.
“We had an anonymous tip that Mr. Garro was keeping narcotics on his person, Miss Irons,” Danner’s partner told me as he located King’s backpack tucked under the chair and unzipped it.
Everyone gasped as they caught side of the huge bag of white powder nestled between the textbooks there.
“Do you have a warrant?” I demanded, scrambling to think of any way to stop them.
The cops ignored me as they bracketed King and began to lead him through the desks.
The students all started to whisper to each other and a few of them began to speak up against what was happening, including Benny and Carson. The latter was even standing up and moving out the door with them.
“No way King would do something like that,” he was saying, his voice rising to a shout as they moved away from him and down the hall, which was filling with students. “No fucking way!”
I braced a hand on the doorframe to steady myself as I watched King being escorted out the doors, aware of the students and faculty flooding the halls, of the fact that King was gone, gone to prison, gone away before I could tell him I was stupid but also in love, so goddamn in love with him that I would die an excruciating death every day for the rest of my life if it meant I could be with him.
It started with a sound in my head, a cacophonous shatter and crash as my insides collapsed like demolished house. Every single thing I’d once been and thought important was in that house: my morality polished like Waterford crystal in the cabinets, my poise and elegance painted on the walls with my preconceived notions hanging like designer garments in the closets. I lost everything to the blast, everything razed to my truest foundation.
And at that foundation, I found the Cressida I’d become with King, one strong enough to give into temptation without guilt, one who fought for the things she wanted and spat in the eye of the people who judged her. It was that Cressida who felt fury light her up like the 1st of July and it was that Cressida who started off down the hallway towards the Headmaster’s office.
I ignored the looks of shock and the gossip about King, the staff that reached out to me as I powered passed them, Tiffany Calloway’s cry as I flew around her desk and burst into Headmaster Adams’ office without waiting to be announced.
He sat behind his palatial desk smoking a cigar.
I fought hard against the urge to put it out in his eye.
“Mrs. Irons, what in heavens are you doing?” he asked me.
So, I told him. Or more like shouted at him.
“You allowed the police to illegally search a student and arrest him during my class? Even if they came to you with their suspicions, you should have urged them to speak with him first, or at the very least, wait until after school hours to take him in for questioning. That you would allow this kind of thing to happen to one of our students is reprehensible. And don’t say that you would have act this way for anyone. You clearly hate the Garro family for their way of life and you decided to humiliate King because of it.”
“I would lower your voice and think before you run that mouth of yours anymore, Mrs. Irons,” he encouraged me.
“It’s Miss Irons,” I shouted. “You could look the other way for Carson Gentry because his father owns half this fucking town and look where that left us? His habit went unchecked and it ended with beautiful Benny Bonanno having a drug overdose in our hallways. Yet, you’re looking for any opportunity to toss King out on his ass even though he’s an exemplary student, a wonderful young man who cares for his fellow classmates and the only crime he’s ever committed is to be born the son of The Fallen MC.”
“I told you to watch yourself, Miss Irons, and I meant it. Do not think that you can just storm in here and tell me what to do. I am the Headmaster of this establishment, not you. And just because Zeus goddamn Garro thinks he runs this town and blackmailed me into letting his good-for-nothing-son attend this school, do not think that I will continue to turn a blind eye to the fact that you and he are having an entirely inappropriate relationship.”
I blinked at him, my heart pumping too much blood to my head so I couldn’t think straight.
“Excuse me?” I whispered.
His smile beneath his thick mustache was slick and cruel. It made him look like Santa Claus stumbled into a horror flick. He crossed his hands slowly and propped his fleshy face on them.
“You heard me. I know all about what you and that disgusting thug get up to in ‘detention’. Warren first told me about it weeks ago. You should go home tonight and kiss his father for holding my affair over my head or not only would you be out on your ear without a job, I’d have you investigated.”
“But you can’t,” I said, trying to see through the panic and focus on the good. “You can’t do shit because Zeus is blackmailing you…”
I’d well and truly snapped, obviously, because I threw my head back the way King would, and burst into laughter.
When I was done, and I took my time, I wiped my eyes and smiled at the Headmaster. I could feel the expression stretch my lips too wide, my eyes giddy with mania like I was the female incarnate of the joker. I felt crazy, wild and just as dangerous, so I didn’t care.
“You are a weak, pathetic man with no real power,” I told the seasoned administrator before me. “You’re owned by the rich and blackmailed by the corrupt. This may be one of the best schools in the country but a weak man with a narrow mind runs it and I don’t want to be a part of that. You can’t even fire me when you know I’ve been fucking a student, who is absolutely delicious, by the way.” I shook my head and turned to walk out the door. When I was at the doorframe, I shook my hair out behind me dramatically and turned to him again. “So, it’s my fucking pleasure to be able to tell you that I quit.”
I left his garbled response behind me, ignored Tiffany Calloway’s gaping mouth and the students who called after me as I stormed through the halls of EBA for the last time and pushed open the doors to the parking lot. My mind was preoccupied with only two things: getting to Street Ink Tattoo Parlor, and then, getting King out of prison and back to me.
