One To Watch(82)

“My happy ending,” Bea murmured.

“Exactly.”

“But Wyatt, I don’t want you to lie about who you are. Besides, don’t you think it would hurt your mom even more to see you get engaged and then have it not work out?”

Wyatt shook his head. “If we got engaged, and my mom got to see it—I think that’d make her happy, at least for a little while. And if it was a kindness I could do for you? That would make me happy too.”

Bea thought back to her first night on the show, her gut instinct that Wyatt could be her perfect Prince Charming. Now, all these weeks later, here he was, offering her everything she’d come into this experience to find: a kind, honest, gorgeous man to hold her hand and walk together through the treacherous waters of trolls and critics and make the world see her as beautiful. As beloved.

When the generator finally came back online, Bea had no trouble at all kissing Wyatt passionately as the sunset turned the whole field incandescent. It might not be true love, but here, in this approximation of reality, maybe it was close enough.





EXCERPTS FROM RATEMYPROFESSOR.COM: ASHER CHANG-REITMAN


RobF19: DO NOT BE LATE WITH PAPERS FOR ACR. He doesn’t care about your dog, or your cold, or whatever crisis got in the way last-minute. He gives you lots of lead-time for the assignments, so if you don’t get started early enough, he doesn’t give a fuuuuuuuuuuck. No excuses for this dude. Believe me, I have tried.

AliS18: Hottest prof in the history department for sure. Won’t flirt though, which is lame.

MarcusT17: Have you seen him on TV? Maybe he just won’t flirt with YOU.

YahelC19: Or with any students???? Bc that’s disgusting????????

AliS18: Nothing he does could ever be disgusting

MarcusT17: Ugh but you are

AliS18: Shut up Marcus you’re just jealous.





Bea was incredibly nervous to meet Asher’s children, but first, it was time to meet his students: She was sitting in on a meeting of his upper-level seminar on the history of Asian immigration to the United States from 1850 to 1900. The class was in a snug room with a walnut conference table and big picture windows overlooking the trees outside; Bea’s heart jumped as she walked in and saw Asher in his jeans and button-down, looking even more handsome than she remembered.

“What, no tweed blazer?” she joked. “You’re ruining my hot-professor fantasy.”

He grinned as he came toward her, wrapping her in a huge hug—she was thrilled and relieved that he seemed much more at ease than he had in Morocco.

“Guess you’ll have to settle for an average-looking-professor reality,” he quipped.

Bea took her seat at the conference table as a handful of junior and senior history majors filtered in, all of whom seemed largely unfazed by the interloping cameras in their midst.

“Okay.” Asher clapped his hands to begin class. “I’m sure you’ve all missed me dearly over the last month, but I trust Professor LaBruyere has been an able substitute?”

The kids mumbled a halfhearted assent, and Asher laughed.

“Damning by faint praise—and on television, no less. You guys are brutal.”

The kids settled in, and Asher began his lecture on the little-known involvement of Asian American soldiers in the Civil War, detailing firsthand accounts he’d read from diaries and military transcripts to piece together the movements of a particular unit in the Union Army that had been led by a Chinese corporal.

“Did any Asian soldiers fight for the Confederacy?” one kid asked.

“What do you think?” Asher turned the question back on the class. “How would that have worked?”

“It wouldn’t have,” said one girl with flowing blond hair and a navy-blue fleece. “The Confederacy had a law against nonwhite soldiers.”

“Yeah, until 1865, when they were about to lose,” countered another girl—she was Black and wore horn-rimmed glasses. “But Asian people weren’t legally categorized as a race back then. So that made it trickier.”

“That’s exactly right,” Asher confirmed. “Have any of you heard of Chang and Eng Bunker?”

The students looked back blankly, but Bea smiled; finally, she knew an answer.

Asher didn’t miss her look—he never missed anything.

“Bea?” he asked, a smile twitching on his lips.

“They were conjoined twins from Thailand who came to America to tour in freak shows,” she responded, remembering watercolor and charcoal portraits of the pair she’d studied in one of her own college classes a decade prior. “They’re the reason we use the phrase ‘Siamese twins.’”

Asher beamed with pride. “Precisely. After they finished touring, Chang and Eng settled in North Carolina, where they married local sisters, fathered twenty-one children, and? What else do you think they did, being rich men in North Carolina in the 1850s?”

The blond girl shook her head. “They bought slaves.”

“Yes.” Asher nodded. “In the Civil War, two of Chang and Eng’s sons, Christopher and Stephen, fought to protect their fathers’ rights to retain slave ownership. They were two of five Asian soldiers we know of who fought for the Confederacy.”

Bea was awed. Ever since she’d met him, she’d thought of Asher’s manner as tense and halting, but maybe that was just his discomfort in being so far out of his element. Seeing him here, so relaxed and charismatic, she felt an even stronger pull toward him—and that much more nervous for how the rest of their day would play out.