And then he kisses me again. A long, lingering kiss this time. There is an urgency in his kiss, and a second later, he works the top button free on my blouse.
“Nate,” I gasp.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he breathes in my ear. “Okay?”
I’m not going to say no.
Half an hour later, the two of us are lying breathless in our bed. Nate was so determined to ravage me that I kicked off my Manolos instead of removing them carefully and placing them lovingly back in the closet. The rest of our clothes are strewn about the room. When I look over at Nate, he has a sheen of sweat over his body, and he looks back at me and grins.
“Whew,” he says. “That was…”
I nod in agreement. I don’t know what changed today, but maybe there is a path back to saving our marriage. Not that I don’t care deeply about Jay, but he and I do not have a future together. Nate is the future, for better or for worse.
“Good thing we’re ordering in,” I say. “I am way too tired to cook.”
Nate laughs. “I know.”
“We should, you know…” My eyes lock with his. “We should do that more often.”
“Absolutely.”
I snuggle up next to my husband, and he puts his arm around me. I rest my head against the muscles in his shoulder, feeling contented with him for the first time in a long time. We do have sex once a month, but it’s never like that anymore. It’s usually very regimented, like we’re brushing our teeth.
This is like back in the old days, when we were first together.
“By the way,” Nate murmurs into my hair. “I got this weird note today. It said that you needed to see Addie Severson urgently. Everything okay?”
Addie Severson is the last person I want to talk about when we are relishing in our postcoital bliss, but it feels rude not to answer him. Besides, I want him to know what that girl did. He needs to know what she’s capable of.
“Not really,” I tell him. “She cheated on her midterm.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Cheated how?”
“She was looking at another student’s paper. I saw her do it, and then I checked the two papers right after, and the answers were almost identical. That other kid is a stellar student, and there’s no way she would have gotten so many right answers on her own.”
“Wow. So what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to the principal.” I’ll have to wait till tomorrow morning, but this is the protocol if a student is caught cheating. “I’ll let Higgins know what happened, and she can deal with it.”
“The principal.” Nate shakes his head. “Wow. That’s rough. You really have to take it all the way to the principal?”
“I have to. Those are the rules.”
“Well,” he says thoughtfully as he squeezes my body close to his, “it’s not like she did anything nefarious. It’s not like she had some cheating scheme that she came up with in advance where she stole a set of answers. She was sitting there during the exam, and she didn’t know how to do the math problems, which I can definitely relate to. She panicked.”
“She cheated, Nate.”
“But you don’t even have any proof, do you?” He frowns. “You say you saw her copying another paper, but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she really studied for it. Did she admit it?”
Technically, Addie did not admit to cheating. But I could see her looking at Kyle’s paper. After all my years of teaching, it was painfully obvious. Plus, that girl is not capable of getting that kind of grade on her own. And I saw the look on her face when I confronted her. “Not exactly.”
“She’s struggling.” He squeezes me closer to his warm body. “We’ve all been there, Eve. Didn’t you struggle with your English class in high school, and you needed a tutor?”
I don’t know what to say to that. It’s technically true. “So she could have gotten a tutor. She didn’t have to cheat.”
“Not every student can afford a tutor. I think we can both agree that Addie has been through a lot in the last year.”
Under any other circumstances, this conversation would have enraged me. Cheating is wrong, and the fact that my husband would defend a student who copied off another kid is ridiculous. Especially since he seems to have made Addie his little pet project, despite the fact that I warned him about her. But curled up in his arms, I can’t work up much anger or even indignation. Nate cares deeply about his students, and I can’t fault him for that. It was one of his qualities that made me fall in love with him.