Page 8 of In the Light of the Moon

He’d acted so rudely when I saw him earlier today—I certainly didn’t owe him anything. But then, I thought about the way he’d curled up between the dumpster and the dirty, sticky wall as if he was hiding. It didn’t seem fair to relay that to my friend now.

After we ordered and grabbed our iced coffees, we sat in the corner on a squishy sofa. It was situated between large fiddle leaf figs, and I relaxed into the calm environment.

“Okay, so who is this guy?” Josie asked, straw in her mouth.

My eyes focused on my drink and the swirling ice while I tried to figure out what to say. I rotated my cup to further mix the cream and coffee. “He came to Vinny’s, and then I saw him while I was running to one of my classes today. It was weird.”

She took an audible suck through her straw before adding in an expectant tone, “And…?”

I shrugged, “Dunno.”

Josie scoffed and rolled her hazel eyes, “What did he look like, how tall was he, what did he say, what did his dick taste like,something, Sylvie.”

“Goddess, Josie!” I took a deep breath, eyes to the ceiling in exasperation. Why did I open my mouth at all? “He was… pale.”

“Pale,” she deadpanned.

“Yes,pale. Like albinism pale.”

That caught her interest, and again, that feeling of betrayal crept up my throat. Was that an all right thing to say? “And hot?”

My lips turned down, and I tilted my head from side to side. With the stress of the situation when I first encountered him, assessing his looks had been far from my mind. So, I thought back to it now, how his face, though battered and tightened in pain and panic, held strong lines and full, pale pink lips.

Earlier today, I saw those details in clarity under the bright fluorescent hallway lights. The shock of it kept me from really remarking on anything besides how differently he looked when he wasn’t… you know, beaten up.

“I don’t know about…hot,” because I didn’t really describe people using that word, “but he’s handsome. I guess.”

“She guesses,” Josie rolled her eyes again while pulling her phone from the front pouch of her overall shorts. “Name?”

My brows wrinkled, “I didn’t get his name.”

She curled her olive-toned hand in another expectant gesture, “Okay, fine. You said he was on campus? In one of your lit classes or something?”

“Uh, no. I ran into him in the hall, and he said that he wasn’t a student when I asked.”

Josie nodded and stuck the tip of her tongue out of the side of her mouth in concentration, thumbs flying on the screen of her phone. I sipped my coffee and sniffed one of the soaps I picked up for Granna while I waited for Josie to do her work. She’d surely come up empty soon enough. I didn’t even have a na?—

“Got him!” She exclaimed so loudly that several people turned towards us. She raised an apologetic hand and said in a much lower pitch, “Sorry.” Josie handed her phone over to me, and I struggled to concentrate for a moment. How had she found him that fast? Though I didn’t post much on social media apps, I was familiar with them enough to be thoroughly impressed with her quick sleuthing skills.

What I didn’t expect to see opened up on her screen was the faculty page at my college.

“What the fuck,” I murmured and stared at the headshot of the mystery man. Under the professional lighting, his skin didn’t look as ghostly as it had before. His hair looked just like it had earlier today, and the tweed blazer and white shirt brought out the bright green of his eyes. There he was, lips pulled up in a slight, stoic smile, amongst the other faculty members of the Department of English and Literature at Antler Pointe College. Under his name, his title read,Associate Professor.

“Oh, please,pleasefuck a professor, Sylv.” My eyes flitted frantically between her and the screen, unable to fully compute what was going on. He did say that he wasn’t a student, but I hadn’t expected him to be a fuckingprofessor. In the same department I was getting my degree in. “Cool name.”

My eyes shot back down to the screen—I hadn’t even really focused on his name.

Orion Gealach.

The mystery man’s name was Orion. I read over his last name a few times, trying to decipher how to say it, but I guessed that how it read was not how I was supposed to say it. Why did I have the almost overwhelming urge to look up the pronunciation? What language was that from?

I opened up a new tab on Josie’s phone and was typing in the strange surname into the internet browser when Josie whispered under her breath, “Holy shit.” But I wasn’t paying attention. I squinted down at the results that popped up.

Gealach, it turned out, was Gaelic and pronounced likegyal-akh. Though I had no experience with that language, I felt a brief surge of satisfaction for guessing that it had a unique pronunciation.

“Orion Gealach,” I tested saying it out loud, letting my mouth work around the words. I said it again while I clicked back to the faculty page and followed the link posted with his name. His little individual page listed his areas of study, African-American and Irish literature, and I selected his CV while I started to mumble his name again. Something hard hit my shin, and I flinched, “Ow!”

I glared at Josie. She’dkickedme. “What was…” my voice trailed off and died.

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