“Who’s this, then?” he asks, his tone unreadable.
Which is, I guess, an improvement on anger.
Maybe he’s letting the whole spying-on-him thing go.
“Gizmo,” I tell him. “Named after the Gremlin. Say hello, Gizzy.”
Gizmo is already saying hello, pawing madly, and Tanner looks at me with a questioning tilt of his head. Somehow – like we’re animals in a mating ritual – I read the gesture and nod. He leans down, coming close enough for me to smell the muskiness of his cologne and then another smell, a manly scent drifting all around me, tempting me.
He holds Gizmo to his face and lets him give him a lick and a sniff, and then laughs deeply, the most wonderful sound in the world.
He’s tall, he’s handsome, he’s intelligent, he’s ripped as hell, he’s successful, he’s rich … and now my freaking dog loves him.
How am I supposed to stop these crazily unrealistic thoughts?
I notice several of the other students glancing over jealously, but luckily we’re all spread out enough that I can’t hear their mumbled criticisms.
“So it seems I’ve got no other choice, Tess,” he says, slowly kneeling and then sitting down next to me on the grass. “We’ll have to work on this activity together. Unless Gizmo here is an especially clever dog?”
“Oh, he’s clever,” I say, a bantering note in my voice, ignoring the shivering eel-like frenzy of my pulse in my neck, ignoring the annoying redness spreading predictably. “But he hasn’t quite mastered English yet.”
“So it’s decided, then,” Tanner declares. “Let’s get started.”
A two-pronged pang sounds inside of me as Tanner stares at me, first because Gizmo has settled comfortably into his lap and secondly because this can’t freaking be happening.
I try to bolster myself with comforting words, that I can do this, that sitting opposite my idol and my writing teacher doesn’t provoke a series of nerve-tingling sensations to riot all over my body.
Gizmo is oblivious, squirming, and making his unique purr type noises as Tanner absentmindedly strokes him.
“He likes you,” I murmur.
“I’ve always loved dogs. We had one … Well, that doesn’t matter now.”
But I already know.
They had a dog when the home invader broke into their house, and sadly the dog met with a bloody end, just like his parents. Tanner was in his bedroom when it happened, a terrified teenaged boy, calling the cops and then doing what any sane person would do, hide.
And yet I’ve read Promenade countless times and a passage returns to me now, sometime after the main character’s parents’ death, widely agreed to be based on Tanner and his mom and dad.
Shame, he wrote, was what the boy felt as he stood there, the rain hammering the promenade behind him. It was an all-consuming shame and as he stared out onto the sea, the rain lashing like Valkyries were dashing through the air and ignoring him, he saw a thousand scenarios shape in the raindrops, a thousand ways he could have saved them. But he hid. He hid and he hated himself and he hated himself more when he realized he wouldn’t end it, wouldn’t join them. He was scared. That was the truth.
I force the passage from my mind, and also force the insane instinct to reach across and place my hand atop his, telling him it’s okay, he doesn’t have to be ashamed.
I face him with as much bravery as I can, screaming at myself to stop biting my lip.
“Do you want to start?” he asks.
“No,” I blurt, without thinking.
His smirk tics and I imagine him thinking, So first, you spy on me and now you’re going to make this difficult.
His forearms are bulging with some repressed something, anger, impatience, the muscles pulling on his skin like vines or roots, primeval and powerful.
Claim me, a mad thought roars, claim me now, Tanner.
“Okay, I should rephrase that,” he says. “You’re going first, Tess.”
“Is that an order, professor?”
He winces slightly at the use of the word professor, as though it makes him feel old. The desire to tell him I don’t care about his age rises within me, that I love how much older he is than me, the silver in his hair making him look sophisticated and experienced.
But of course, he doesn’t care what I think about his age.
He probably wasn’t even wincing.
It was just me reading too much into things like I always do.
“Yes,” he growls, eyeing me closely. “It’s an order.”
I open my notepad and pick up my pen, hand trembling slightly. “Okay, I will be the scribe, then?”
“Sure.”
I swallow and hover my pen over the page. I notice him staring firmly at it, and I wonder if he’s thinking about his writer’s block, which has been the talk of the literary world for over a year now, ever since he failed to publish his thirteenth novel.
It’s not ready, he’d told a reporter. And I’m not sure it ever will be.