Steelhands - Jaida Jones [126]
“I …” I managed, quite sure I felt Laure’s eyes boring holes into me. She was no longer in the room, but knowing her as well as I did, I was certain she was lurking just outside the door and watching me like a hawk. “That is, I heard what you said just now. About if anyone needed to talk.”
“Oh, really?” Hal asked, brightening. Once, that expression might have had my knees buckling, but today I was all business. “Don’t tell anyone, but you’re actually the first person who’s ever actually taken me up on that offer. There’s another class coming in about fifteen minutes from now that I’d wanted to sit in on, but I’m sure we could use the professor’s office in the meantime. Would that be all right?”
“That would be more than adequate,” I said, clutching my books stiffly to my chest as though shielding myself from a dragon. “Thank you.”
“It’s no trouble at all. Really,” Hal added, leading me out the door with a smile.
I was nearly certain I saw the top of a fiery red head disappearing behind the doorframe just as we passed through. Dear Laure never had been all that gifted with matters of subtlety, and I wondered if she intended to follow us all the way to the office, too.
Because of my own pragmatism—it made little sense to fall in love with someone whose affections lay elsewhere—my heart no longer jumped each time he spoke, and I could appreciate the slight bits of humor in my current situation. It was slightly jarring to come to such a realization when faced so immediately with the former object of my affections, but there it was: simply another thing Gaeth had gone and ruined for me. Hal had the same complete lack of guile that Laure did, which caused him to sound almost excited by the prospect of someone else’s problems. Since I was doing this for Gaeth’s sake as well as to satisfy my own curiosity, I did my best not to say anything at all until I’d been spirited away to the upstairs offices, at which point Hal’s attentions could be fully focused.
Ducante’s rooms were blessedly clean, if slightly cluttered by scrolls of dusty parchment, and there was a large plant in the corner that badly wanted watering. I restrained myself from wiping down one of the bookshelves as I passed, even though I was certain Hal wouldn’t have noticed and everyone would have breathed a little better because of it.
He didn’t sit behind the desk but rather leaned back against it. I expected he was probably anxious to show me that we were peers, and that I could feel comfortable sharing all my deepest anxieties with him not as though he were a professor but a fellow student. It was a sweet gesture, yet due to the bizarre nature of my request, it was suddenly very tempting to clam up entirely or to invent something out of thin air.
Somehow—reminding myself of Gaeth in order to maintain my focus—I forced myself to sit down, lowering myself slowly into the leather chair so that it wouldn’t creak embarrassingly.
“So, are you worried about the exams?” Hal asked, bracing his arms back against the desk. “I know there’ve been a lot of students in about that lately. And it doesn’t help that some professors have been drawing up practice exams with all sorts of trick questions on them. They think it’ll help if the first-years overprepare, which I suppose is one strategy … But I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself here. You’re … Toverre, aren’t you?”
“How did you know that?” I asked, instantly suspicious, the color rising high in my cheeks and no doubt making me look as though I had the pox. Had he known I was following him all along?
“I’m sorry,” Hal said, tucking a piece of hair behind his ear. He gestured toward the neat stack of notes and textbooks in my lap. “I didn’t mean to unsettle you. It’s just that you have very distinctive handwriting. I have to read your essays out loud to Professor Ducante; he claims it’s going to drive him blind.”
I couldn’t hide my papers now without feeling self-conscious, but I rather desperately wished to. Also, I was going to have to be more careful when I answered Laure’s homework