Chapter 12

I start off the day pretty edgy. Up to now I’ve felt perfectly secure with Hugo around, but after yesterday I’m extremely aware that he’s a man, and a very strong one, and I’m a woman and not anything close to strong.

In time, though, I begin to relax a little. His manner is as deferential as always, no, more so. Before we’d occasionally touch, brush against each other the way two people will normally do in close quarters, just casual and no big deal. Now, though, he’s scrupulous about avoiding any contact at all, moving all the way to one side if we happen to pass each other in a tight space.

There’s something else, too, that wasn’t there before, or if it was I didn’t notice. It’s in the way he looks at me, even a little in his voice when he talks to me. Also a little, well, in his pants; Dad’s slacks fit him pretty loose, but I think I see some tenting I haven’t noticed before.

He’s acting ... well, smitten, for want of a better word. He’s riveted when I speak, his eyes follow me when I move around, he can’t seem to get enough of me.

I’ve seen it before, a couple of times. Not often, I’m not one of those glamour queens who make men drool just by walking past them, but it’s happened. I remember one guy in college, if I was anywhere in sight he had eyes only for me, and I think he had a permanent stiffy. Wild horses could have stampeded right over him and he wouldn’t have cared. Shit, he wouldn’t have even noticed.

But usually that kind of thing makes guys, well, stupid. They get so obsessed about what the little head is feeling that the big one quits working altogether. The guy in college, it went on for most of a semester and then he all of a sudden just vanished. I wasn’t unhappy not to see him any more, but I did ask around after a couple of weeks and it turned out that the school had bounced him after he failed every single class he was taking.

Not Hugo, though. He seems to be able to compartmentalize, his learning curve is just as steep as ever. And his retention is truly phenomenal, mostly I only need to say it once, whatever “it” is, and it sticks. Progress is still a little stutter-step, there’s no structure at all in the way I’m teaching him—hell, I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m no teacher by either trade or inclination—and we bounce around way too much, But he’s getting the basics of English, even syntax and verb tenses and all, and we’re increasingly able to have real conversations even while he keeps drinking me in with every glance.

The other times, it made me self-conscious and uncomfortable to have a guy look at me like that. But I don’t feel uncomfortable with Hugo at all, I just feel beautiful and sexy and desirable. In odd moments I find myself wondering how it might have been if—

Jesus, Linda, are you going nuts? Wondering what it would be like to boff a guy who less than twenty-four hours ago was getting ready to rape you?

Who I thought was getting ready to rape me. Big difference.

Two or three years ago I moved in with one guy for a couple of months, well, sort of. It started out gangbusters and then went straight downhill when he began acting like a real control freak. One morning he woke up in a really foul mood. Turned out he’d had some kind of weird dream about me where I was playing around with some other guy right in front of him. And he stayed pissed at me most of the day for what I’d done in, for Christ’s sake, his damn dream. I was awfully glad to go back to my own place, which I’d thoughtfully never given up.

How can I be upset at Hugo for what I thought? For what I fucking started, in fact.

Well, girl, why did you? What possessed you to lean down and kiss the guy, which is what set the whole mess in motion?

Uh...

Your honor, please instruct the witness to answer the question.

Nuts.

One of the first things they teach you in law school is not to give witnesses open-ended questions. If you don’t know what the wit’s going to say, don’t offer him an opportunity to say it. It’s probably a pretty good idea to take the same tack if you’re going to ask yourself questions, not ask any that you don’t want to hear the answer to.

I get firm with myself and shove all that aside to zero in on the job at hand, teaching Hugo English. It helps that, with his self-imposed hands-off rule, I mostly don’t get close enough to smell him. Occasionally just a bit wafts over to me and I take a little deeper breath, but not often.