Bridgeport Academy #2 by AshleyValentine

Author:AshleyValentine
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: JUV014000
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2016-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

16

Dear Mr. Dalton, I’m afraid I will no longer be able to assist you with your office tasks. I will, of course, continue my work on the Disciplinary Committee as class prefect, as I am serious about my commitment to that position. Thank you for understanding. Naomi looked at the note, written in her slanting cursive on one of her lime green monogrammed correspondence cards. Was it too personal to use one of them? Maybe she should just email him. But no, it felt like a more suitable ending to their ill-fated affair to write the note on her expensive stationery, with the NLP engraved in the corner. Maybe, she thought wistfully, it would make him wonder what her middle name was. Also, it made her feel like a heroine from a Jane Austen novel, a wounded female so elegant that she managed to write such a polite letter to the man who had scorned her.

Not that she was angry. She just felt deflated and confused. If Eric hadn’t wanted anything to happen between them, he’d had plenty of opportunities to stop things. But he’d encouraged her, hadn’t he? Naomi hated that she felt so defensive about it, wondering if she had only imagined there was ever anything between them.

No, that wasn’t right, Naomi answered herself as she crossed campus to Stansfield Hall, unlocked but generally silent on weekends. She thought back to the first time she’d met Eric Dalton, thinking at first that he was a student. She was unable to shake the feeling that from the very beginning, while he’d been kind of sheepish about his attraction to her, he still never tried to hide it. And it wasn’t just a casual flirtation—he invited her out to dinner, took her in his plane to his home in Newport, and had drinks waiting for her on his sailboat. He’d given her wine, lit candles for her, sent cars to pick her up and take her back to campus, invited her to spend the night with him, taken her clothes off…These were not actions of a man afraid of being inappropriate.

She climbed the three flights of marble stairs to his office, her heels echoing loudly, and then paused when she heard a shuffling noise inside and music playing softly. Silently she placed her note directly in front of the door and tiptoed back down the long hallway.

An hour later the sun was getting lower in the afternoon sky and Naomi was still aimlessly wandering around campus. It was a glorious summer afternoon, and she was too depressed to go indoors and spend her Saturday in the library alone, without even a cute boy to text.

Naomi wiped her nose pathetically on the back of her hand. She hadn’t spoken to Corey for a week now, not since Black Saturday, when he caught her coming off Dalton’s sailboat at the docks. Suddenly she felt a tug of longing in her stomach, remembering how nice it had been to just hang out with Corey and smoke cigarettes and rag on their families together.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.