Teaser Tuesday!

Join the revival! Tease from old stories, new ones, sekrit projects, whatever, and let us know over on AW that you've posted. We will bring this back!

This week, I've got another teaser from my WIP, Criss-Cross. In semi-related news, I just learned that there's a film noir movie of the same title, which I now must find on Netflix...

Meantime, from the chapter right after where the last teaser left off!

After the final bell, school becomes a different place. Sure, there’s pockets of life scattered around – the yearbook kids sequestered in Ms. Davis’s classroom, crammed around the only three functioning computers. The lacrosse team warming up in the gym. The soccer team roaring forth from the boy’s locker room to race each other to the pitch. Other club meetings – the GSA, the knitting club, the chess club, the orienteering group comparing their newest maps.

And me. All alone, standing in front of the same closed classroom door where I’ve come to wait for four years now. The door I won’t ever have to see again, once school lets out on Friday. The door I was almost free from.

I knock once, count to three, then knock four more times. Sharp, practiced raps. Our signal.

I remember the first time he showed it to me, against the blackboard. Everything was new and exciting back then. His smile, his eyes, his jokes that bordered on raunchy, but never quite crossed the line. Everything was a coded hint, a message meant just for me. Even in class, one secret, shared glance could set me on fire for an entire day.

Six months passed before he made the first move. It was in one of our after school “study” sessions, which mostly consisted of us opening our textbooks and then chatting about anything else that came to mind. He was sitting next to me in one of the student desks. Twenty-three at the time. Close enough to my age, at 14, to be appealing. Old enough to play the mysterious bad-boy. A perfect combination.

We had the book open to the page with the diagram of the plant reproductive system. He made some joke about flowers and pollination. We laughed. All normal.

Then his hand dropped. He’d touched me before – brushed hair from my eyes or eyelashes from my cheeks. This felt different. His fingers landed on my bare knee, brushed the hem of my skirt. Just enough so that it couldn’t be an accident.

He stopped. That was my favorite part of the memory, for weeks to come. He stopped, as if to make sure it was okay. And it was. It was more than okay. It felt perfect. Out of every student, teacher, faculty member in the school – because let’s be honest, he could’ve had any one of them – he chose me.

I shut my eyes. Hard to reconcile that tender moment with the man I know now. Easier not to think about it than to explain how someone so sweet and gentle could turn so cold. Was it me? Did I drive him away, with my teenage problems and my daydreams and my promises?

Men don’t want promises for the future, I’ve learned. They don’t want to hold your heart in their hands. They gobble you up in the present, and by the time you realize that the heart and soul you gave them have been tossed aside in the fervor, it’s too late. You have nothing left for yourself.

P.S. - Happy Valentine's Day (Massacre) everyone! Please do not take the theme of this post as a comment on my jadedness... ahem. I love love! Just not commercialized holidays that tell you you must kill lots of flowers in order to prove you are a good significant other! I mean... What? :)