Chapter 5: The Fall Reception

The faculty club smelled exactly the way it had when I was twenty-one and carrying trays through it.

Wood smoke, furniture polish and expensive gin.

The long dining room had a fire going and two hundred people in it.

Professors, their wives and husbands, the deans, the trustees in a cluster by the fireplace like a flock of grey birds.

I'd worn the green dress.

The one Eliot had bought me the week we got engaged, and the one I hadn't worn since.

He hadn't said anything when I came down the stairs in it.

He'd just stood at the bottom with his car keys in his hand and looked at me for so long that I'd had to walk past him to the door.

"You're on leave," I'd said in the car. "Are you even allowed to go?"

"I'm on leave. I'm not dead." He'd kept his eyes on the road. "If they're going to fire me, they can do it to my face."

Now he stood beside me with a glass of water he wasn't drinking, and the room parted around us.

"Is that her?" someone murmured behind me. "The waitress?"

"She was the waitress. Now she's the wife."

"Well. She'll be the waitress again soon enough."

I knew that voice.

A department wife in a navy wrap dress, who had once sent back a crème brûlée of mine because the sugar was "too assertive."

I didn't know her name.

Nobody had ever told it to me, in four years of serving her.

I turned around, smiled at her and said, "Good evening," until she looked away first.

Eliot's hand settled at the small of my back.

Just for a second.

Then it was gone.

The old bartender caught my eye from behind the bar and lifted his chin at me, the way he used to when I was twenty-one and somebody had been rude.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Professor's Captive Wife from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.