Excerpt from Summer Term
by Molly Ringle
published by The Wild Rose Press, 2010
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Chapter One
The possibility of finding a film star among her students didn't even enter Paige Huntley's head on the first morning of Linguistics 101. As she set her backpack on the table at the front of the classroom, her brain was busy going over the lecture and hoping she had brought all the right pieces of paper. She had served as a teaching assistant for this course five times now, but this was only the second time she had taught the course herself. On the first occasion she'd felt about as graceful and collected as a cat flung into a lake. She was determined to make a better show of it this time, even though it was only a summer course, and she was still only a Ph.D. student, not a proper professor.
Already, at nine a.m., the sun blazed hot, which didn't help wake up her seventy-five students. The first day of summer term always felt drowsy, Paige thought, compared to the first day of other terms. She lifted her face to scan the rising tiers of seats in the large lecture hall, making sure everyone was settled. June sunshine poured in through the open doors in the upper corners of the room, and flies buzzed through the chalk dust in the sunbeams. Paige spread out her roll sheet, called a greeting that quieted the mumbles of conversation, and began reading names aloud.
"Aidan Grey?" she said, a third of the way down the alphabet, and paused. Funny, she thought. Like the actor's name. She looked up in curiosity to see what ordinary undergraduate answered her summons. A couple of female students turned their heads too.
"Here." He lifted a hand.
It took her a second. At first she saw only a guy with dark hair sticking out from under a green baseball cap, a guy who needed a shave and a haircut, like many a college student. But the beauty of the long lashes, the suppleness of the lips, the cheekbones people beat down plastic surgeons' doors for--suddenly those all jumped out at her, and she couldn't say a word. Ironic, since this was, after all, a linguistics class.
He smiled when he saw how she stared, but the smile looked grim. He lowered his legendary lashes and played with the edge of the syllabus, cutting one glance aside at a whispering pair of girls. Paige could almost hear his thoughts: Damn it, they recognized me.
"Thank you." Paige smoothed the roster, heart hammering. Her gaze instinctively swept downward, checking her appearance. As on most summer days, she wore one of her dozen sundresses (white-with-black paisley today) and a pair of saltwater sandals, flat-soled for easy bicycling. When fastening up her red hair in the mirror this morning she had thought she looked classy. Now, comparing herself against every actress who had ever walked a red carpet, she felt hokey and hippie-ish. Like an Oregon grad student.
At the same time, she was thrilled. She wanted to fling the textbook aside, pull up a chair, and grill him on the movie lifestyle, ask him if he had ever met Brad Pitt, something. But of course the only clear words that came to mind were, Oh, my God, we saw your new movie last weekend. And my friend Ky? She said she'd do you.
Paige stifled a laugh in her fist, disguising it as a cough, and moved along. "Heather Hampton?"
After getting through the roll sheet she started the lecture, though she was tempted to put it off and announce, "I see we have a celebrity among us today. Aidan? Could you please come up here where everyone can see you?" She was stopped only by the notion that he would hate her forever if she did. Anyway, she was thirty-three, not a teenage fangirl, and ought to behave accordingly. But every glance in his direction sent her mind spinning with delighted commotion. She never, ever, met celebrities. To get one for an entire term--and a very attractive one, though much too young for her--made her so giddy she could barely spell. Twice while writing on the chalkboard she had to erase a letter with the side of her hand and re-chalk it in properly. Some linguist, her students were probably thinking. Can't even spell "syntax" or "phonetics."
And of course, as she delivered the lecture, she was dying to know why in the gol-darn heck (as her father might say) Aidan Grey was attending summer classes at Ocean Range University in Gordon, Oregon. Gordon was a nice enough little town, tucked into the moist green hills between the Willamette Valley and the Pacific Ocean, an hour's drive from either. But half its twelve thousand residents worked or studied at the university, and if it weren't for that institution, Gordon wouldn't register a blip on anyone's radar. Students serving their four years here tended to call it "Boredom," or, as Paige herself had often said, "Back-Ass-Hills, Oregon."
Aidan Grey was registered as a senior, no less. Paige had noted the "SR" after his name when drawing a shaky checkmark beside it on the roll sheet. Must have acquired credits at other schools, UCLA or USC or something, in between movies. She could make a dubious case for why he would take linguistics--actors could be interested in dialects and foreign accents--but why the hell was he here?
He stayed silent, like most of the students, while she lectured. Sometimes she prompted the class for feedback to keep them awake--easy things like, "What are some parts of speech you learned in English class?" To which someone mumbled "Noun" from one side of the room, and someone else "Adjective" from another side, and "Preposition" from a perky girl sipping iced coffee in the first row. But Aidan Grey only took notes, smiling a couple of times at her best jokes but never raising his hand or saying a word.
Paige resented him by the end of the lecture. It drove her mad, having to perform up here for a professional actor. Her armpits were soaked, her face felt hot and shiny, and she could use a little encouragement, damn it. He at least owed her an explanation as to why he thought he could mosey into her classroom and kick her composure out the window. Who did he think he was, anyhow?
When the lecture ended she wanted to march over there and get some answers. But she didn't have the chance. For one thing, he was fast: he scooped up his notebook and his striped canvas satchel and ducked out of that row with the very first of the exodus. For another thing, other students, who presumably had no idea they were in the presence of fame or else didn't care, ambled down to ask Paige about the class. She answered their questions, casting glances over their shoulders at the vanishing Aidan Grey.
He got snagged at the door by the girls who had been whispering about him. They asked him something, giggled and gasped while he answered, and tagged along as he left the lecture hall. Oh, well. Provided he didn't drop the class, Paige would see him again in two days. Ling 101 was a Monday-Wednesday-Friday deal.
When the last students had left, Paige dashed out into the hot sun and unlocked her bike. Along the tree-shaded campus streets she pedaled back to her duplex, barely noticing the effort it took on the hill at the last stretch. She waited until she'd darted inside before grabbing her cell phone and calling her best friend Kylie.
She got Ky's voice mail, which didn't surprise her, as Ky spent most of her time these days in the library, working on her anthropology doctorate. For someone so careless around food and sharp objects, Ky was surprisingly meticulous about bibliographies.
"Ky? It's Paige," she said. "Oh, my God. Ask me about Aidan Grey." She hung up, flopped onto the sofa, and grinned at the ceiling.
****
The next day, in the mild morning air, Paige bicycled to the campus day care, where she conducted research and did some impromptu babysitting once a week. For her allotted hour she played with one- to five-year-olds on the floor amid a landslide of brightly colored toys, recording everything they said on a small digital device. Her Ph.D. thesis examined how kids learned and used language, and, not having any children of her own, Paige had to borrow other people's in order to collect data.
This weekly hour with the tots tended to produce troubling, intriguing, or sweet reflections in Paige. Some weeks they reminded her she was getting into her thirties and had better settle down and get pregnant if she ever intended to. Other weeks she decided it was best to be the cool aunt type her whole life and not bother with direct descendants. Still other weeks she considered adoption, or spent a while ruminating on her own childhood.
This week, however, she found herself thinking, Wonder if any of you are going to become famous child actors like Aidan Grey? I'll say I knew you way back when.
After finishing up with the kids, it was time for her office hours. As it was the first week of class, she didn't expect any students to show up, and indeed it was quiet in the grad student office of the linguistics department. Paige was the first to arrive, unlocking the door and turning on the lights. She spread her notebooks on the desk and peered through the window, looking down three stories upon the courtyard through leafy maple branches. As usual, the office smelled of dry-erase markers and stale coffee, but at least it was cool, thanks to the blessed air conditioning.
Morris, another doctoral candidate, strolled in, yawning, and chatted with her for a few minutes about the English as a Second Language class he was teaching. He then sat at his desk and put headphones on, immersing himself in learning Mandarin.
Paige ignored the "chow, jai, ma" sounds coming from his side of the room and tried to read a photocopied article for her thesis. It was difficult to concentrate on theories of language acquisition in infants, however, when half her brain was babbling like a fourteen-year-old, I have a movie star in my class and ohmyGod he's so cute!
Kylie had called back last night to ask about Aidan Grey. They had a grand time cackling lasciviously over the great windfall Fate had dealt her. Ky begged to be allowed to crash Paige's class, sit right behind Aidan, and slip him dirty notes. Paige managed to discourage her, but agreed to let Ky arrive at the end of the lecture to watch young Mr. Grey leave the building. That was as far into unprofessional behavior as Paige was willing to go for now.
Meanwhile, as Paige sat at her desk in the grad student office, the other half of her brain listened for footsteps in the hallway that would signal the arrival of a student or professor.
For on that latter count--the subject of professors--her brain was hardly any more mature than on the subject of Aidan Grey. Ky teased her about her attachment to Stefan Serovinak, and Paige allowed it and laughed it off, but the crush went deeper than she liked to admit.
He had a Ph.D., of course, but as he was only forty-two and looked younger, he wasn't one of the professors you called "Doctor." Practically everyone, undergrads included, called Professor Serovinak "Stefan." Paige had chosen him as her thesis adviser a year ago for several reasons, which at the time actually didn't include his hotness. One reason was that his expertise matched what she wanted to study. Another was that he was a perfectionist and she appreciated perfectionism. Also, though his praise was hard to earn, he had praised her work in the classes she took from him, and she liked him for that.
Then she started noticing, or rather acknowledging, his other attractive features.
Like many linguistics professors, Stefan Serovinak had a wild mix of ethnic ancestry. He had forebears from Africa, Southern Europe, and Asia; had grown up in Australia and spent a few years each in Japan, Brazil and Alaska; and spoke three languages fluently. English was his true native language and he spoke it with a worldly, slightly British softness which was all the more alluring combined with the cutting words he used.
Sarcasm had never sounded so sweet as from this man's mouth. This past February, after he had said a certain textbook author "writes prose as if he's being whipped for every word under three syllables," Paige's heart went all tender for Stefan.
The wit would have been enough, but he also had caramel-colored skin, black hair whose curls sometimes escaped his attempts at taming them and gave him a romantic Heathcliff look, and scads of elegance compared to most people in town. He wore vests with his shirts, and some of the shirts were silk. Once, outside a diner where he was taking Paige to talk about her project, they had pressed close together as Stefan held the door for a crowd of students coming out. A fold of his silken sleeve rippled in the wind and caressed Paige's bare arm, leaving her drenched in desire.
Surely it wasn't right to look at your major professor's unfastened top shirt button and want to glue your lips to the patch of skin revealed there. It also wasn't a respectable or scholarly thought to imagine squeezing his butt through the fine-spun fabric of his trousers.
No, those ideas didn't have much to do with language acquisition at all.
And, in fact, those ideas were deplorable, because Stefan was married. Three years now, to a lovely blonde woman. Jolene's hair color didn't really matter, Paige supposed, but it was such a bright golden blonde she couldn't help thinking of it when picturing her.
But Paige practically never saw Jolene in real life, so it was sometimes easy to forget she existed and contemplate Stefan's charms as if he were unattached. She hadn't seen him since spring term ended two weeks ago. He and Jolene had gone on vacation. But he was due back any day now, and despite the situation being all wrong, her ear wouldn't stop listening for that footstep a few doors down, that key in that particular lock.
Paige shifted her legs, aware she was tingling and not concentrating on the article. She gripped her yellow highlighter and tried to think up some comments on the article to impress Stefan when he came in.
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