While You Were Teaching

Chapter 13- Guilt and Other Useless Emotions

"Good afternoon everyone. Instead of me lecturing for the next hour and a half, we are going to work on limit problems today.  The last test scores were a lot lower than you or I would have liked, so we are going to spend today practicing until you guys are able to do these with your eyes closed." Dominic pointed to the white board and the entire class collectively groaned.  Lectures may be boring, but nothing is worse than actually having do work while in class.

"Yeah, yeah." Dominic smiled briefly at the class and continued on, "I want everyone to have all the problems complete and correct by the time class ends today. And no working with partners. I want it dead quiet in here." Another groan from the class and Dominic moved out of the way so that we could get started. The two white boards were completely filled with Dominic's child-like scrawls. This is going to be a long two hours.

I looked up and made eye contact with Dominic.  This was the first time I had seen him since my drunken episode and since he had shut me down.  I turned my head fast in the other direction and started copying the problems into my notebook.  I was not going to look at him like everything was okay.  In fact, I didn't feel like looking at him at all.

I heard him sit down in his chair and start shuffling papers loudly around on his desk.  I have this thing where I can't work unless a room is completely silent, so I stopped writing and glared at him.  He kept rummaging around oblivious to my annoyance, frowning until finally he found what he was looking for and smiled to himself.  He glanced my way and found me staring at him. Sorry, he mouthed. I rolled my eyes and went back to working.

A few moments later, my phone vibrated quietly in my purse and I discreetly slouched over in my seat to grab it.  I didn't want Dominic to catch me texting while in class.  The last time he caught someone on their phone he kicked them out of class and told them to come back when they were serious about their future.

Dominic: Are you mad?

My mouth flew open and I looked at him shocked. Why was he texting me?

The last thing on earth I wanted to do right now was talk to him. I made a big show of deleting the text and then threw my phone back into my purse. Bzzzz. Bzzzz.

Dominic: Avery?

Avery: Sorry I'm in class right now and can't be disturbed. The teacher has a strict no cell phone policy.

I pushed the power off button, returned my phone to my purse, and went back to work.  Let's see what he does about that, I thought, smiling to myself.

I scribbled away on my paper, graphing polynomials and finding limits, extra cautious to not look too far to the right and meet Dominic's eye again.

I don't want to think about him right now.  I know that we shouldn't be together.  I've had many sleepless nights, thinking of all the ways our relationship could go down in flames.  I don't want to be the reason his career is destroyed, and I don't want him to be the reason why mine never starts.  But the little voice in the back of my mind keeps asking me, what if? And no matter how hard I try to tune it out, the damn thing just won't shut up.

What if we were able to keep anyone from finding out? What if we were extra cautious and actually tried to see if it would work? Would I be willing to take the risk? Or maybe he doesn't like me like that. Maybe he only sees me as a student now. That could be why he didn't want to answer my question Friday night.  He didn't want to offend me. But would he have gotten out of bed at 1am in the morning to help just any of his students? Ughhh.

These thoughts raced through my head the entire class, causing me to mess up multiple times on the problems and having to redo them again.

When I finished, I gathered up all my things and walked down to Dominic's desk to hand him my answers. Even though I didn't want to look at him, I really wanted to look at him. But looking at him would bring back all those feelings from Friday night, and that was the last thing I needed right now.