Mr Malloy: A BWWM Teacher-Student Romance (3 page)

Jason loved being that person. He loved seeing that moment when a person's eyes would light up with sudden understanding and he would feel a warm rush to know that he had put it there. He loved to help students break through when something seemed too tough to comprehend, and then later on, hearing about their exam results somewhere down the line and feeling pride for them. He dearly loved being a teacher.

That is why, despite his brilliance and the lucrative career that had undoubtedly awaited him out in the real word, Jason had decided that rather than living his life as an attorney and returning with years of experience to become a professor, he would accept the offer to teach upon graduation. He want to start teaching young, before life could ebb away at his passion for learning and for the law.

There had been times in the two years since Jason had been teaching, that he had wondered if he had made the right choice. He had second-guessed himself on occasion. He couldn't help but feel a twinge of jealousy when he heard about the mighty legal successes of his friends out in the real world, or thought of all that he could have accomplished as a lawyer.

But then, he would meet someone like Amara, who made all the sacrifice worth it, because she was receptive to his love for the law and eager to learn; like a sponge waiting to soak up all that Jason had to offer the world. It made him feel like he wasn't wasting his life when he was able to help a new student take a step closer to becoming someone remarkable.

Not that Amara wasn't already remarkable -- in their conversation before she left his office, the young woman had told him all about how she had come to the States from South Africa on her own to follow her dreams. She had to stand up to her father to make it happen and turn her back on the way things had been done in her family for generations.

Alongside this girl's intelligence and beauty was a courage that her professor had to admire. She had strength and ambition beyond her years and while she had listened to him with such gratitude for his attention to her work in their discussion that night, it was Jason who felt privileged to have discovered her talent and to be able to be the one to help her climb high.

At last, Jason arrived home, about a ten-minute stroll from the campus. He felt like he was leaving home when he first left university dorms, but he'd had to step away when he graduated and became a professor rather than a student. For him, home would always be the great big tables of the university library or the greens between departments or the Student Recreation Center, where Jason learned to climb, and first discovered a love for track.

Now, he lived alone in a big old Victorian house around the corner with his cat, Felix. Jason wanted a dog, but the landlord wouldn't allow it, so he had settled for a little ginger rescue cat who offered at least a little company when Jason went home at the end of the day. And, although he was rather an aloof creature, who was largely motivated by food, he still liked Jason, and Jason was glad to have him there. Sometimes, it seemed like they rescued each other.

Tonight was another night alone. When Jason had lived on campus, he had always been surrounded by noise and activity and the company of other students; it made the silence of his house seem overbearing and endless. So now, Jason would turn on some music to lift the silence, he would pull out a pile of papers and practice being a scholar alone, away from the campus, which had brought him to life.

Chapter2

Amara stared at the letter in her hands; she couldn't believe it. She had been notified that her visa had expired and had been denied renewal due to “insufficient  evidence of intent to return to South Africa.” She had no idea what that meant. She thought back to her original applications, her interviews and all of the other hundreds of steps she had to take to get where she was and she couldn't figure out what she could have said or done to make anyone think that she was planning to stay illegally in the United States.

Being a lawyer in training, she knew she had to look at the facts and keep her wits about her. She knew she had to focus on a solution, and because of that, she didn't lose her head at first. Amara had already called everyone she was supposed to call and signed everything she was supposed to sign, but she was ultimately told that her questions would only be answered when she had returned to South Africa, at which point, she could reapply.

Her world fell apart in that moment. College placements didn’t last forever and Amara had fought so hard to get there. She knew also that if she returned home, there was little or no chance that she would find her way back to America. She called her parents, hoping that they could help her find a way out of it, or fight for her in her corner from South Africa, where it seemed that all the answers were concealed from her.

When she called, Amara’s father answered the phone. Jeremiah Botha was a stern and traditional man who thought the best way to love his daughter was by keeping her close to her mother and sisters in every way possible. He thought her best possible options for a good life would be to replicate the lives of the women in their family. He was not a cruel man, but Amara thought that he was close-minded in a way that verged on cruelty, at least in the eyes of a young girl with high aspirations. Amara had always tried to tell herself that her father was from another generation and wasn't trying to be unkind in the orders he placed upon her, but when she heard what he had to say that day, she wasn't quite sure that she could bring herself to forgive him this time.

"Amara." Jeremiah said when he recognized Amara's voice. "Why are you calling here now? It is not Thursday. Is everything alright? Did something happen?"

Amara had broken their regular schedule by calling on a Saturday night, and she could hear the impatience and worry in her father's voice to be speaking to her now.

"I need your help, Pa." Amara told him tearfully. "They won't renew my visa. The government here says that I cannot prove that I will return to South Africa. I don't know what I did wrong."

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, before Jeremiah told Amara his cold confession. "They called us." He revealed. "We were interviewed about your visa. I told them that my daughter did not want to marry a South African man and was trying to find an American to marry. I said that my daughter thinks she is above the traditions of her family and will likely never return to her home, her family, and her country."

Amara felt her blood run cold and her stomach felt as heavy as a stone. She knew her father had disagreed with her decision to come to America and to study in the States rather than settle down in South Africa. She knew his hopes were that she would marry whomever he choose but these hopes had been dashed when she had left. Yes, Amara knew that her father was angry with her, but she had never thought he would try to rip her dreams from her because he was so adamant she live her life according to his edict. It was just like her father to speak his mind, but to say those kinds of things to immigration agents just defied belief.

"Pa!" she gasped. "Why would you do that? They are going to make me return! I will lose everything I have worked for!"

"It was not a sensible dream, Amara." Her father replied calmly. "Maybe you would have graduated, I don't know, but how would you have been a lawyer with children or when your mother grows old and needs the care of her daughter? It is better this way. Now you can come home and marry Matthieu as planned."

Amara was  speechless. She was so shocked at the behavior of her father that she hung up the phone and stared at the wall in a daze as tears stung her eyes. Her whole life was falling to pieces. She could feel the hopeful eleven-year-old child inside of her dying under the weight of a demanding father and old-fashioned cultural traditions that bewildered her.

Amara had dreams. She wanted to fight injustice, save lives, and make a better future for so many others. If she returned to South Africa, she would be made to marry Matthieu, the son of her father's business partner and she might be lucky to find an office job at a failing company.

The only student Amara had spoken to at any length since she'd arrived at the university was Casey, but she certainly wouldn't have considered her classmate a friend just yet. In fact, there was nobody in this place Amara could consider her friend; but she desperately needed someone to talk to, someone to help her try to figure it out and find a solution. The only person she had grown close to in the six weeks she had been studying here was her professor, Jason.

Yes, he had been there for her in those difficult first weeks in this new country when the schedule was confusing and friends were hard to find. He'd taken her under his wing to help her find her place on the campus and to help her flourish in her studies. He was the only one who knew her and the only one likely to care at all that everything she'd worked so tirelessly for was about to be stolen away from her by her jealous father.

With nowhere else to turn, Amara headed to his office and knocked on the door. He called her in and she found him sitting at his desk, grading papers, as he usually did. He looked up when he saw her and smiled with pleasant surprise.

"Amara!" he greeted brightly. "I'm afraid I haven't had a chance to grade your latest assignment yet. It's in this pile somewhere..."

Amara shook her head sadly. "It's something else, Professor." She said with a miserable undertone.

Jason could hear the worry in her voice and he stood up to come around the other side of his desk to better listen to her and look her in the eye.

"What is it?" He asked, with concern filling his voice as his tone consoled her subtly.

"My father has sabotaged my visa application!" Amara told him tearfully. "It's being revoked! He's doing this so that I have no choice but to go back to him in South Africa!"

Jason was stunned by her words, and as the shock washed over him, his face fell in sorrow and disappointment. He laid a gentle hand on her shoulder for comfort. Although he was behaving calmly on the outside, inside he was fuming. How was it right that a bright, inspirational young woman like Amara could be pulled away from all of her dreams just because one man in another country far away wished it to be so? Even if he was her father, what gave him the right?

"It's going to be alright, Amara." Jason promised her adamantly, looking at her with a determined expression. "We'll work this out." he withdrew his hand from her and began to pace swiftly back and forth across the old wood of his office floor.

"I'll speak to the Dean! We'll start a petition. We'll write to the consulate." He turned sharply and looked at her with fire in his eyes. "I'm not going to let anyone remove you from this place. It's where you're meant to be! You have so much potential! They just can't take you out of here. What a tremendous loss that would be for you and the field of law!" he raked his hand through his blonde waves and sighed in exasperation.

Amara wiped at her tears and shook her head helplessly, collapsing into the chair in front of Jason's desk as though all the strength had gone from her body.

"Even if there was something that could be done, I'd have to go back to South Africa and wait for it to be processed." Amara predicted. "I would lose my place here, and once I am back there, there would be no way my father would let me leave again. His mind was made up before I left! He would keep me there and I would be forced to marry that awful Matthieu at my father's command. I don't want to end up like my mother. I'm meant for so much more than that in my life!" Bitter tears coursed down her dark cheeks.

He wheeled on her again, facing her with a look of shock and horror on his face. "Is
that
why your father did this?" Jason asked her in amazement. "Just to force you to return to your country so that he can make you marry a man he wants you to marry?"

Amara nodded weakly. "He's so fixated on tradition. I thought when I had finally made it here that I was free at last, but it turns out that he just found another way to put me in a cage."

"You can't leave!" Jason insisted. "You're brilliant, the law needs you! The world needs you to be a lawyer. They can't take that away from you. And for what, for marriage? For an arranged marriage to a man you obviously don't love or want to spend the rest of your life with? That's unthinkable! Your life would be wasted!"

There were many things in his life that Jason did not feel strongly about, but Amara's plight was something that struck him to his core. Amara would indeed be wasted in the life of a housewife. She was brilliant in every way. When she spoke about the law, it was as someone who was destined to redefine it in so many ways.

When she spoke about injustice, it was as someone with a heart for what is right. She was headstrong, determined and sophisticated in her work, thought and character. Jason made a living studying and teaching the effects of injustice and now the consequence of injustice was sitting right here in front of him and she was a nineteen-year-old young woman with tear-stained cheeks.

Jason sat down heavily on the edge of his desk in the same defeated way that Amara had sunk down into her chair. He tried to think of a way to make this right. Never in his life had he met someone whom he believed in quite so much. To lose Amara as a student would devastate him and this college, not to mention the industry of law at large. He thought for a long, long time and his mind wandered back to the first time that he had laid eyes on Amara, when she had offered him a challenge with a steady gaze. Her question then had been how much a teacher would sacrifice for one of his students, and he began to realize that the question now was the same, and so was the answer.

"Amara." he began tentatively, looking up at her with a pensive look on his face. "I have a radical idea and it would be dangerous to you and me, and it would definitely be crossing a lot of lines, including legal lines. It would affect your morality and character, but it may just keep you here so that you can finish school and become the enormously successful woman that I know you're destined to be."

"What are you saying, professor?" Amara asked him uncertainly. "What’s your idea?" She felt a little nervous about what he was going to say because of the way he had just introduced the idea to her. But, at this point, she was desperate and willing to listen to any concept that might give her a way to stay in the States and finish her schooling.

"Have you ever heard of a green-card marriage?" Jason asked, biting his lip slightly.

"You mean a sham marriage for a visa?" Amara's eyes widened incredulously.

"Yes, essentially."

"Well, yes, I have heard of those kinds of things happening, of course, but I don't know how I could make anything like that happen. None of the other students even speak to me, let alone would they offer themselves as a fake husband for my sake," she stated flatly.

"I'm not talking about a student." Jason said pointedly, his gaze intense and steady on her.

Amara's eyes widened even further, when she realized what he was suggesting to her. "
You?
" she gasped in shock.

"Me." Jason agreed. "Think about it, Amara. I have my own property, a good job. We could show the immigration agents that I would look after you and they would not need to worry about you draining resources, or whatever it is that immigration agents worry about. We're similar in age and we have been spending a lot of time together. We could pretend that it started a long time ago, even right after you arrived here."

The young woman didn't know what to say. She didn't know whether to be touched by his suggestion or alarmed. Why would he do something like that for her? She needed to know his reasoning before she could even begin to think about such an offer.

"Why would you do something like that for me?" she asked him in confusion.

Jason paused for a second as he tried to think of how best to explain it to her. "I studied law because I saw it as a way to fix injustice." He walked over to her and knelt before her as she sat in the chair. He lifted his hands and held on to the arms of the chair, curling his fingers around the old wood and looking up at her with his light, serious eyes. His voice was soft, but his words were adamant. 

"I became a teacher because I wanted to help brilliant students change the world. In front of me right now, I have a gross case of injustice and a singularly brilliant student. Everything I believe in is on the line. If I don't help you now, then everything I've preached for all these years has been meaningless. If I can't act on those things I say I believe in, then I'm nothing but a fraud. I really want to help you, Amara and this is the only way I know how to do it."

Amara listened carefully and as she looked at Jason's sincere expression and intense eyes, she knew he was telling her the truth and that he simply wanted to help her because he was a good man with ideals. If she hadn't been a good and idealistic person herself, perhaps she would never have believed anyone could be so selflessly kind. But her heart was bigger than her home continent, and she could see Jason clearly for what he was trying to do for her; it touched her to her soul, but the cost was too great.