A Longtime (and at one point Illegal) Crush (9 page)

“No we weren’t.
” She looked over his shoulder at Carson and Olivia dancing, at all the couples clinging to each other. “You were lecturing me, and I was ignoring you. I’m not your student anymore. I don’t have to listen to you.”

Kye sighed
, then stopped dancing. She had no idea what he meant by it, or what she was supposed to do now. He wasn’t watching her any more, though. He was gazing at the door. Still holding Elsie’s hand, he led her across the dance floor, weaving around other people.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“We’re going to fix this once and for all.” He kept heading toward the door.

She could have pulled her hand away. Part of her wanted to. It was arrogant of him to assume that she would just walk out of the room with him. But another part of her was
curious. How exactly did he think he could fix this?

Kye took
her down the hallway that led to the pastor’s office. It was dark there, but Kye didn’t flip on a light switch. He didn’t stop until they’d nearly reached the pastor’s door, until the two of them were swallowed up in the shadows of the hallway. People coming and going from the reception wouldn’t be able to see them down here. Elsie’s heart began to beat faster, although what she expected to happen, she couldn’t say.

Kye still kept hold of her hand. In fact
, he took hold of her other hand too. His eyes looked darker here in the shadows, coal-black almost. “Back when you were eighteen,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “you were feeling overly-emotional about me rescuing you, and you did something you regretted. You kissed me.”

Elsie
shifted away from him. “Yeah, I remember. I was there.”

“Don’t interrupt,” he said. “Apparently you’ve been so embarrassed by my reaction to that kiss, you haven’t been able to face me
for the last three years.”

“Maybe I just stopped liking you,” she said.

He took a step toward her, closing the gap between them. A hint of a smile played on his lips. “You’re interrupting again.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“So,” he said, “I have no choice but to remedy the situation, to equalize our positions.” Then he leaned over and his lips came down on hers.             

For a moment she stood there so shocked, she
was incapable of reacting. He let go of her hands and put one of his hands on her back and the other on her neck. The feel of his fingers against her nape sent a shiver tingling down her spine.

N
early as quickly as he’d kissed her, he let her go. “Now we’re even,” he said, stepping away from her. “You kissed me. I kissed you. So you don’t have to feel awkward about it anymore.”

She stared at him, stunned
and sputtering. “What do you . . . ? Why would you . . . ?” He had given her a pity kiss, and in his mind that made things even? Her indignation grew, snapping her restraint like a dry twig. “Do you think this is some sort of math equation and if you add the same variable to both sides, the answer is kept in cosmic balance?”

H
e sighed, and when he spoke his voice was soft, a whisper almost. “No, you’re definitely more complicated than a math problem, or I would have figured out how to make things right between us a long time ago.”

The hurt of the past years welled up inside of her. It was as though she was back
in the nurse’s office at the Mathematics Decathlon, back feeling the blazing pain of rejection again. “This doesn’t make us even. I idolized you for ten years and you rebuffed me like my attentions were an insult, like I wasn’t worthy of your time. You acted like I was some sort of teenage skank trying to get you fired. One conciliatory kiss on your part doesn’t equalize things.”

“Okay then,” he said, “I’m willing to do more.”

She should have expected what happened next, should have moved away. She didn’t, though. She thought he’d give her a longer apology. Instead, he stepped forward and kissed her again. This time his momentum ended up backing her into the wall. It wasn’t a quick kiss like the last time. It turned from gentle to insistent in seconds. He wanted this, she realized, wanted to hold her and press his lips to hers. This wasn’t just about evening the score so she could get over the bad ending to their first kiss.

It didn’t matter what he wanted anymore
, though. It wasn’t his choice now. She wasn’t a groupie he could kiss whenever the mood struck him.

Elsie
put her hands on his chest meaning to push him away, but then somehow ended up grabbing his shirt front and holding onto him instead. Kye had not only awakened the rejection she’d felt three years ago, he’d awakened the desire too. That part of her seemed to have a mind of its own. It wanted this too. She let his mouth move against hers, answered his kiss, melted into his arms.

He ran his hand down her back, pulled her closer. He was apparently more than willing to try to give her a kis
s equal to ten years of longing, and he was doing a good job of it. Everything else seemed to melt away: the hallway, the music filtering out of the reception, the chill in the air. There was only the warmth of Kye’s arms around her, his lips caressing hers, teasing a response from her. Or maybe just making a point about his power over her.

Finally she pushed him away. By that point h
er heart was knocking against her chest in a frantic rhythm. This was absolute madness. She’d gone from the girl who’d had a foolish crush on Kye to the woman who was willing to make out with him outside the pastor’s office—which had to be some sort of sin in and of itself.

“T
his is your way of fixing things between us?” She took a deep breath and smoothed down her hair in the places where Kye had been running his fingers through it. “Now I’m not supposed to feel awkward when we run into each other?”

“You
never needed to feel awkward.” He was near enough to her that he didn’t have to step closer to put his hands on her shoulders. She hadn’t realized how tense they’d been until he gently massaged them. “You were eighteen and vulnerable. I knew that. It would have been wrong for me to respond to you, even if I wasn’t your teacher. The fact that I was your teacher made the idea unthinkable.” He kept massaging her shoulders, kneading away the tension there.

She supposed she should have always known that Kye wouldn’t respond to that first kiss. But still, it had hurt to be unloved, unwanted by the guy she’d loved so desperately. Now with his hands making ripples of pleasure across her shoulders, with the taste of his lips still on hers—raspberry sherbet punch—all her anger at the event drained away. Instead she knew she had to be honest. “I didn’t kiss you just because you saved me. You sent me away at the dance, so I went with that Bono guy to make you jealous.”

Kye’s fingers froze on her shoulders.
“You . . . you what?” His voice rose, incredulous. “That was a stupid thing to do.”

“I know,” she said. “I realized
that pretty quickly.”

Kye went back to massaging her shoulders. “
You didn’t need to do it. I was jealous before you ever left with him.”

Elsie
cocked her head, checked his eyes to see if he was teasing her. The amusement that played at the corners of his mouth so often was absent now. He meant it.

Kye
pressed his fingers into the tight muscles along the bottom of her neck. “You were smart, beautiful, and could discuss any subject and make it seem interesting. You had everything I wanted in a girlfriend except for the right amount of years.” His hands moved up her neck, caressing the skin there. “And every day you sat in my class and stared up at me adoringly. You’ll never know how hard it was for me to push you away when you kissed me. It made me feel like some sort of predator. I had to make frequent calls to Carson to remind myself that he would tear out my entrails if I so much as touched you.”

Elsie
felt her heart lift, saw the memories of that time in a new light. He hadn’t thought she was a pathetic groupie. He’d been attracted to her—he still was, judging by the way his hands were massaging her neck.

“Why didn’t you say anything to me after I graduated?”

“You were still so young.” One hand left her neck and went to her face. His thumb traced the curve of her jaw. “I figured you would go to college, look around, and realize you could do better than me.”

That had never happened.
She had met plenty of guys who would make more money than Kye, but she had never met one that made her forget him.

She s
lid her arms around Kye’s waist, liking the fact that she could take that liberty. Instead of pulling away from her, he leaned into her, nuzzling the hair at her temple. “I kept tabs on you through Carson. I’ve always cared about how you were and what you were doing.”

“When did you realize I still had feelings for you?”

“When you kissed me back just now.”

“Only j
ust now?” she asked. She had been sure it had been there on her face every time she looked at him. It was the reason she hadn’t wanted to meet his eyes.

“
Yes, although I realized I still had feelings for you as soon as I saw you sitting in your car trapped by my cattle.” He smiled lazily. “You make an appealing damsel in distress. I had to call Lisa and tell her not to come.”

Elsie might have made a comment about that, and not one that showed much sympathy toward Lisa, but Kye kissed her
again. This one was soft, gentle. One that said they had time.

“So,”
Elsie said when he finally lifted his head, “I guess you’ve stopped worrying about Carson ripping out your entrails?”

“You’re three years older
, and I know for a fact that Carson is busy right now.”

Kye
took her hand, and they walked slowly back down the hallway. “We’ve got some more dancing to do, things to discuss—like when you’re coming back to Lark Field again.”

“I really should start coming home more,” she said. “Maybe every weekend.”

“
And I’m pretty sure I’ll need to go to Missoula on business trips a couple of times a month.”

“I might be able to find a job here during the summer.”

He ran his thumb over the back of her hand. “If you can’t, I’ll hire you myself.”

“As a ranch hand?”

“Don’t knock it. The job comes with perks. You’ll be able to wrap your boss around your finger.”

“Sounds tempting.”

He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it softly. “Good. I plan to tempt you a lot.”

“A job on your ranch . . .” she said, mulling over the idea.

"Come back,” he said. “Stay where you belong.”

It was a familiar request.
This time she was going to listen to it.

THE END

####

Author’s note and dedication:

When I first got the idea for this story, I hesitated writing it. The heroine kisses her teacher—which is certainly not behavior I would ever advocate for teenage girls. A teacher-student romance just seemed tainted with the sort of creepiness that should be avoided at all costs.

And then I remembered my husband’s grandparents: Leo and Lucile Rallison. By the time I entered the family, Lucile was a white-haired widow who resembled Mrs. Claus.
(And was as perpetually cheerful and chatty as I always imagined Santa’s wife to be.)

Leo first met Lucile when she was a senior and he was an agricultural teacher at her high school. As soon as he saw her, he was interested in her. He wasn’t sure whether she was another teacher or a student, but he was interested. When he found out that she was a top scholar, he went out of his way to be friendly to her. One day after a basketball game he asked her if he could walk her home.
Lucile told him that she had come with a friend and she would be walking home with her friend, so Leo walked them both home.

At school, Leo would smile and wink at Lucile just to see her blush. Although it generally wasn’t permitted for a teacher to date a student, at the end of the year Leo got permission from the principal to ask Lucile to the prom.
Permission was granted, and it was her first date. (She said she felt pretty smug going to the prom with a teacher.)  At the dance, one of the other teachers joked with the boys that they needed to dance with Lucile now because the next time they saw her she might be a married woman.

The prediction wasn’t too far off.  They married two years later, settled down, and proceeded to have nine children.  She said of Leo, “He was all I had dreams of for a companion: tall, dark, and handsome; and he loved me.”
My husband’s father was their oldest child. Their descendants now number into the hundreds.

I’ve always thought their romance was a sweet story.  It avoided the whole creepiness issue because the two so clearly loved each other. He wasn’t using his position of authority to get something that was improper.  He didn’t hide his courtship—and he didn’t kiss her until they had been seeing each other for six months. He had real and honorable feelings for her, evident by their marriage.