Twelve
Jameson’s final lecture of the day went fine. Unfortunately, he was barely aware of it. But the students looked marginally interested in his treatment of 20th Century British Poets and how he connected the poets’ real-life struggles to the poems themselves.
“After all,” Jameson said, ending the lecture, “not all of these men and women were celebrities during their time, but some of them are very popular now. Their words are lasting, they are universal. These are the kinds of truths we need to know, in our hearts, to understand the world around us.”
As he was packing up his things, Jameson checked his phone. A text from Rex, of course.
The tone of the text was—and there was no other word for it—smug. Saucy? Sauced. The wolf shifter was drunk.
Should see her blog, man. The cat’s got claws. Sexy claws. I know you want her.
What? Jameson frowned at the screen. Sexy cat claws? Obviously he was talking about Nina, but what blog? He typed out, What are you talking about?
Rex’s response took too long, and Jameson frowned again in annoyance. Suddenly, a link popped up.
Jameson finished shoving things in his messenger bag and sat down on the desk at the front of the empty lecture hall. He clicked through to the website. . Because everyone deserves an HEA.
Curious, he clicked a random post link lower down the page and started reading. Then he realized—this was his Nina. Her tone was all over these words, the way she spoke. The things she said. Alphahole. Pants feelings. She was—this was her blog.
Romance, though? He wondered about it. His mom had always been reading it, and had been quick to snatch a book out of his hands if he found one at the breakfast table and started to read. He’d never been able to get far into any of them.
In his education, everything not-literary was frowned upon. Trash, he’d heard someone call it before. “It’s the same plot over and over,” a professor had said, her lip curling in distaste. “Man and woman meet, fight, and then get together.”
But Jameson felt he shouldn’t judge it without reading it first.
Nina seemed to read quite a lot of it, given all the reviews she wrote.
He went to the middle of the page and selected a more recent post. Her reviews were short and to the point. She usually shared some kind of insight into her life.
The cat’s got claws.
If she was sharing about her life, was she—shit. He quickly clicked on , and there it was.
That alphahole I mentioned last week, J? The two-hundred-plus pounds of muscle who showed up ranting and raving and acting like I was the worst piece of cat scat to land on his territory? He just almost kissed me. I think.
He clenched his phone tight in his hand and mouthed the word “alphahole” again. It was one thing when she teased him about it to his face, and another entirely to be called the name behind his back.
He stood up. Marched to his office and sat, stewing, for the last thirty minutes of his office hours. He tried to keep it together while one student, Kurt, explained how his grandma had died and he’d had to miss class.
“Just how many grandmas do you have?” Jameson asked him.
Kurt blinked.
“Because this is the fifth time you’ve tried to use that excuse with me over the past two years.”
Kurt started cracking his knuckles. “I, uh—”
“Look,” Jameson said. “If you want to do something else with your life, now’s the time to start. You don’t want to be an English major? Fine. Don’t be an English major. Be something else. Be anything else. Be anything where you can give one hundred percent to it. No more weak excuses and doing things by halves, all right?”
“I want to be an English major,” Kurt said. “I do. I just—”
Jameson raised his eyebrows.
“I just need to get my shit together.”
“Good, then,” Jameson said. “Get your shit together. And when you come to my lecture halls, I want you not only there in body, but in spirit. This is the stuff about universal truths I was talking about in my lecture today. We are living our lives, and we need to live them entirely.”
Kurt stood up and shook Jameson’s hand. “Thank you, Professor.”
Jameson nodded. “You’re welcome. Now go.”
Kurt took off, sending another look over his shoulder. Jameson caught his reflection in the glass of a framed photo on the wall. He looked every bit the predator he felt like, his face pulled down in a menacing frown, his eyes blazing. It wasn’t Kurt’s fault, though—it was Nina’s fault, and the fault of her infernal blog.
He stood up from where he’d leaned against his desk. Office hours were over, and he had to get back to the Ring of Fire. There was no way he was going to let Nina keep writing about him like this.
Calling him an alphahole in a public blog. For fuck’s sake.