Page 15 of Don't Fall

“You don’t have the right hair for Mike.”

This time he laughs. Loudly. Delightedly. A pleased laugh. Which, would be odd if this conversation wasn’t already so dumb.

“I don’t have the right hair for Mike? Wow. Well, then. Do I have the right hair for Max? Doug? Or maybe Jason?”

“You’re just throwing names out there now.” Annoyed, I abandon ship and jump face first into the sandwich in front of me, resigning myself to calling him Michael for all eternity.

He’s still staring at the side of my head. I can feel it, but I refuse to acknowledge it.

“Well, if I don’t have the right hair for any of those names, I guess I better stick with Lane then.”

Lane.

Slowly, I turn back to face him. “You totally have Lane hair.”

He grins broadly, all of his shiny white teeth peeking out. “Apparently. Who knew!?”

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FORMERLY HOT NEW SANDWICHMaking Roommate...now simply known as: Lane.

So much for making changes and taking time out from being me. It should have been so easy. Middle name out, real name in. Voila. New me. While I’ve never used my first name around friends or family, no one professionally has ever questioned it. Not once. Not even given the ridiculous combo of Michael and McMichael. But then along comes Tessa. Tessa the crazy girl with the umbrella. The flustered chick in nothing but a towel. The coffee addict with all the grace and strength of a circus performer.

My new roommate.

My student.

“So, weird coincidence this morning, huh?” I point out, sliding my plate out of the way and reaching for my water instead.

“I don’t know. Can anything between us still be categorized as weird? Haven’t we graduated past that yet? Onto something else, like...what’s weirder than weird?” Her left brow arches thoughtfully as she continues to contemplate the answer to her own question. “Kooky? Freaky? Ominous?”

“Ominous? Are we headed for danger? Is one of us still planning to kill the other with an umbrella when they’re naked and unarmed?”

She’s so caught off guard, she nearly spits avocado across the room. Fighting her way through laughing and choking she somehow manages to put words together. “Maybe ominous was a bad choice.”

“Maybe.” I smirk. She’s funny. And, I’m back at the beginning of my original train of thought. “Anyway, if you’re not too busy planning my murder, there is one small hiccup in our current plan to room together.”

She nods. She’s figured it out as well. “The whole student – teacher thing.”

“Exactly.” I spin my seat around to face her full on rather than twist. “How comfortable are you with secrets?”

She frowns. “What kind of secrets?”

I’d thought that part was obvious. Apparently, we’re still doing the spelling things out bit. “The kind where neither of us tells anyone that we’re living together.”

Her confusion only grows from here. “Not telling isn’t exactly going to hide anything. I’m sure someone, somewhere in admin will notice eventually that we share the same address. Provided there isn’t some sort of search engine already in place to pick up on such things.”

She’s a wee bit on the paranoid side, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For me. In this case in particular. “Our addresses aren’t the same.”

“Come again?”

“I got the job before I got the condo. And, I never updated my info.”

Her eyes narrow slightly. “You don’t feel like this may become an issue at some point down the road? You know they only forward your mail for like six months. What are you going to do after that? Just hope they don’t mail you anything important? Like your W2’s for example?”

“I bet you get told to relax a lot.”

Her jaw stiffens. Her mouth all but disappears and I now know what she would look like should she ever decide to grow a unibrow. “You’re right. I don’t know why I even care. Not my job on the line. Not my mail getting lost. Not. My. Problem. AT ALL.”

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