I Kissed a Stranger to Spite My Cheating Boyfriend, and Monday He Was the Professor With a Rule Against Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Dock
Liv finds Caden with a girl on the boathouse bench in front of eleven phones, kisses the stranger at the foot of the stair, and the next morning takes the front seat in his lecture hall.
Caden had a girl in his lap and his hand up under her team jacket, and eleven of his teammates were filming it from the dock.
I stood on the fourth step of the boathouse stair with a box of my mother's lefse in both hands.
It was his twenty-first birthday.
My mother had spent two days rolling that lefse thin on the griddle.
I had carried it up from the ferry in the rain.
Nobody on the dock said a word.
Somebody's phone made the small chirp it makes when a video starts.
Caden looked up over the girl's shoulder and saw me.
He didn't move his hand.
"Don't make it a thing, Liv," he said.
"You never put out anyway."
A couple of the boys laughed.
They knew the joke.
He had been telling it since March, in the locker room and in the group chat, and I had been the last to find out.
I was nineteen, and I had never kissed anybody but him.
The girl on the bench looked at her knees.
The box shook in my hands, so I set it down on the step.
Then it slid, and the lid came off, and my mother's lefse rolled into the dirt.
The man at the foot of the stair had been standing there the whole time.
He was tall, in a charcoal rain shell with the hood down.
A canvas field bag hung from his shoulder, and he seemed to be waiting for the last ferry crew to finish tying up.
He had watched all of it.
His face hadn't moved once, and his eyes were a pale, steady blue.
I looked at Caden on the bench.
Then I looked at the stranger.
I walked down the steps.
I took a fistful of his collar and pulled his head down.
I kissed him hard, with my whole mouth, in front of every phone on the dock.
It was the first kiss I had ever chosen for myself.
It was supposed to last two seconds.
He didn't pull away.
His hand came up slowly and settled flat against the side of my jaw, warm and dry and broad.
He kissed me back.
He did it slowly, as a man does who has decided to.
His thumb rested under my ear.
The rain ticked on the dock boards, and the dock went completely silent.
My knees stopped working properly.
I held his collar harder so he wouldn't know.
Then he lifted his mouth from mine and stepped back one pace.
"That is not how I would have chosen to meet you," he said, low.
His voice was dry and even and very quiet.
I let go of his collar.
"Then you'll be fine," I said.
"You don't know me."
I walked past him and past the bench without looking at it, and Caden said my name once, but I didn't turn.
I left the lefse where it lay.
At the end of the dock I heard the stranger say something to the team in the same even voice, and I didn't catch it, and I didn't care.
Freya found me in our room at the end of the hall, sitting on my bed in my wet hoodie.
She took one look and shut the door and sat down beside me.
"The whole island has the video," she said.
"It's been twelve minutes."
"Good," I said.
Freya turned to stare at me.
"Liv."
"I mean it," I said.
"I'm not sorry."
I wasn't, either, which surprised me more than the kiss had.
I took my watch strap off the nightstand and buckled it back on over my left wrist, the wide brown leather one I never took off.
My hands were shaking.
Freya watched me do it and said nothing.
I barely slept, and in the morning I put on a clean sweater and walked across the quad to Rathbone Hall with my folder under my arm.
Tidal Systems 301 was the one course I needed to keep my scholarship.
My father had paid for my first year with two seasons of crab.
I was not going to lose it over a boy and a bench.
The lecture hall was steep and half full.
It smelled of old wood and wet wool.
I took a seat in the third row.
People turned around to look at me, and I let them.
Then the side door opened.
A man in a charcoal rain shell walked down the aisle toward the lectern, carrying a canvas field bag.
He set the bag down and turned and looked up at the room.
He found me in the third row at once.
His pale eyes rested on me until I understood who he was.
Behind him on the screen, the first slide read: Dr. Elias Reinholt, Tidal Systems 301.
The room hummed.
Somebody in the back said, "Oh my God."
I could have stood up and walked out, and nobody would have blamed me.
Instead I stood up, walked down to the front row, and took the seat directly in front of his lectern.
I opened my folder, uncapped my pen, and set it on the desk.
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