Golden Trail (The 'Burg #3)(43)

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“Let me get this straight,” Rocky started, sitting cross-legged facing him on Merry’s couch. “Stew Baranski is screwing over your ex-wife; I’m getting divorced from a cheating ass**le; I just took on an apartment that costs about double what I can afford if I have to live on my own salary; Coach Cosgrove, who’s a jerk all the time, by the way, not just tonight, has thrown down, threatening to get me fired; you’re lodging a formal complaint against him on Monday; and you and I are faking a relationship in order to uncover a dirty cop who, nearly seven weeks ago, almost got you killed.”

Layne, lazing back into the corner of Merry’s couch, his feet on the coffee table next to the closed box that contained the remains of a decimated pizza (when Rocky said she was hungry, she did not lie and he made a mental note for the future that a concession stand hotdog would not cover it for Roc), replied, “That’s about it, sweetcheeks.”

She listed to the side and rested her head on the top of the couch, muttering, “We’re f**ked.”

He grinned. “We’ll be fine.”

“You keep saying that.”

Layne kept grinning. “I keep sayin’ that because we’ll be fine.”

Rocky closed her eyes and sighed.

Layne lifted a leg and nudged her knee with his shin before returning his foot to the coffee table.

Rocky opened her eyes.

“Cosgrove got reason to be cocky?” he asked quietly.

She looked over his head then back at him.

“Let’s just say that I don’t adhere entirely to the School Board approved curriculum.”

His grin got bigger as he muttered, “Baby.”

She lifted her head from the couch.

“It’s boring, Layne, and the kids don’t learn shit. If they get Halsey, the ones who want the grades do the work but they don’t get anything out of it. The ones who don’t care, I kid you not, they sleep. They sleep through his class. Literature is art and art is about passion, it’s about drive, it’s about beauty. How can you slide through a semester of that and not be moved by it?”

Layne watched her and he knew this was dangerous territory. He knew it by the light in her eyes, the passion, the drive, the beauty of it and he was moved by it. He was moved that even after eighteen years, when she had that same light in her eyes when she was studying to be a teacher, it hadn’t dimmed in the slightest. And he didn’t need Rocky to move him that way. She was moving him enough.

Even knowing that, he didn’t do a f**king thing about it.

“Do what you do and f**k ‘em,” Layne advised.

“Easy for you to say,” she muttered, reaching out to grab her bottle of beer, she brought it back, took a pull, dropped her hand and then her eyes went back to him. “You didn’t just pay first, last and put down a deposit on a luxury apartment tonight.”

“They won’t fire you,” he assured her.

“No? I’ve worked for that school for ten years, Layne, and I’ve been hauled in front of the School Board four times.”

“Why?”

“Uptight, ignorant parents pissed about shit they don’t understand. Do you know, I had a complaint lodged against me because I make the kids memorize Poe’s Annabelle Lee and some parent thought ‘sepulcher’ was a sex palace?”

Layne burst out laughing.

“No joke!” she shouted over his laughter. “They thought it was about underage sex!”

Layne forced himself to quit laughing and looked back at her. “How could they think that?”

“I was a child, and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea; but we loved with a love that was more than a love – I and my Annabelle Lee,” she quoted, those words struck deep, all humor fled and Layne stared at her as she went on softly. “It’s the most beautiful, bittersweet, sad love poem ever written, Layne. When I first introduce it, I take them to the choir room, which is soundproofed and has no windows. I turn out the lights, light candles and make them put on blindfolds and I recite it to them, shutting out everything and making them hear the words of a man broken when he lost his bride.” She closed her eyes. “But our love was stronger by far than the love of those much older than we, of many far wiser than we, and neither the angels in heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea, can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabelle Lee.” She shook her head and opened her eyes. “Sometimes,” she whispered, “Even the boys cry. I even get through to the boys. I’m teaching beauty, Layne, how can that have rules?”

“Teach how you teach, Rocky,” he said quietly. “You don’t like their rules, break ‘em.”

She stared at him and she did this a long time before something unpleasant passed across her face and she looked to the side, hiding her expression from him.

“Roc,” he called.

“You know,” she told the wall, her voice quiet. “Jarrod always told me to do what they say, play by their rules. He never got what I was trying to do. He never told me to break the rules.” She looked back at him. “Eventually, I quit talking to him about it. It annoyed him that I didn’t listen. He knew so much more than me.”

He knew by her face and the tremor in her voice that this was bigger than her husband cheating on her. This cut deeper than infidelity.