Page 33 of Christmas in Paris
He nodded at the girl, then walked into the office. The principal’s door was open, and Ray walked toward it, shoulders back proudly, and chin held high.
“Mr. Myers, this shouldn’t take long,” the woman said by way of greeting, but Ray shook his head and held up a hand.
“No, it won’t. Nancy Bradford is a homophobe who deliberately set out to do whatever she could to discredit Simon.” Ray didn’t quite dare to look at Simon, now that he was there with him. He had to get this out while he still could. “No, I absolutely did not kiss Mandy. And if I had, you can bet your ass that Simon would have had me on a plane back to the States. Nothing is more important to him than the well-being of his students.”
“Be that as it may, you still engaged in an illicit relationship …” Nancy tried to interrupt him, but Ray was completely uninterested in letting her speak. She had already had enough to say, most of it lies.
“Yeah. Me, a consenting adult, and Simon, another consenting adult, had an adult relationship. I’m kind of curious how that fact means that you think you can just say whatever you want, though,” Ray said, glaring daggers at her. “I’m pretty sure that lying is still lying, Nancy, regardless of whether you appreciate people’s sexualities or not.”
“It sounds like there was a misunderstanding,” the principal said, obviously trying to mediate and defuse the situation. “If all that happened is that the two of you had a fling, that’s not cause for dismissal.”
Of course, it wasn’t, and Nancy had known it, which was why she’d spun such an elaborate web of half-truths and outright lies.
“I must have misunderstood what my daughter told me,” Nancy said from behind gritted teeth. “But I still think that breaking the rules requires some sort of punishment.”
“I don’t think so, and it’s my decision.” There was a pause, and then the principal fixed Ray with a look that made him feel like he was in trouble in high school again. “Especially since it was just a fling. As long as you both promise not to see each other anymore, I don’t think there’s any need for anything other than a verbal warning.”
Ray could hardly believe that this was going so well. He had honestly expected the principal to cave to whatever Nancy wanted. Simon had made it very clear that that was what normally happened. So to see her being so reasonable, that was surprising.
When he finally dared to glance over at Simon, though, expecting to see him smiling with relief, he got another shock. Simon didn’t look happy at all. He didn’t look exactly upset, either. There was this look on his face that Ray had never seen there before, and he had seen Simon in a lot of different moods.
Despite the fact that Ray had told the girls to stay out of the office area, he heard a rustle at the door and saw his daughter and her friend standing there. Curiosity must have gotten the best of them, not that he could blame them. He was a little bit curious himself, and so was everyone in the room.
Except for Nancy, she didn’t seem to care at all. If she hadn’t been such a terrible human being to them, Ray might almost have felt sorry for her. But any sympathy he might have mustered up went right down the drain when she spoke next.
“I’ll just have to put Mandy in a better school for the next term, then,” she said, and there was an aura of triumph about her as she spoke the words. Ray would be willing to bet that she settled most disagreements that way.
“You’re not putting me anywhere, Mom. I’m eighteen now, and it’s my decision where I go to school,” Mandy called, visibly shaking from standing up to her mother but doing it anyway.
“And if you’re threatening to take away the school funding, then we’ll just have to live with that. I’m not going to fire my teachers just because you don’t like them, Mrs. Bradford,” the principal said. Her tone said, in no uncertain terms, that Nancy Bradford had finally overstepped.
“Mandy, come,” Nancy huffed, glaring around at everyone with clear disgust written all over her face. “We have better places to be than here.”
“No, Mom,” Mandy replied, and with her shoulders straight and her head held high, she hardly looked like the same girl. “I don’t want to go with you. I’m not leaving this school.”
“You can come stay with us if you want,” Ashley suggested, and Ray gave her a bit of a look since she hadn’t even looked at him to see if that was okay. Not that he was going to complain. If Mandy didn’t want to go home with Nancy, he could hardly blame her.
“Well, that seems to settle that,” the principal stated, rising to her feet. But that was when Simon stepped forward, clearing his throat, stopping everyone in their tracks. Very good teachers had a way of getting the attention of the room on them, and Simon had that particular skill more than even most teachers did.
“You’re going to have to fire me,” Simon said, his voice surprisingly calm, considering how everyone was staring at him. “Because if the condition of me keeping my job is that I have to stay away from Ray, that’s a deal-breaker for me.”
Ray was as surprised as anyone else, staring at him, sure that he was having some sort of dream, or that this was an incredibly vivid fantasy. The Simon he knew didn’t say things like that, no matter how much Ray had wanted him to.
But it wasn’t a dream. It was really happening. As hard as it was to believe, Simon was saying these things, and Ray stared, hardly daring to breathe, so anxious was he that he might miss something.
Chapter Twenty Four
Simon
This should have been a dream come true. Nothing short of a miracle. Nancy had done her worst and had been found out. She wasn’t going to get away with the shit she’d pulled, and Simon could keep his job with no real punishment. He should have been dancing. It was a far better outcome than he could have hoped for when he’d gotten the call to come in today.
But something had happened since that time, something that had changed him forever. Something that he couldn’t have expected. He saw Ray, and everything became clear. It was as though he had been living his life through the lens of a camera that was fogged up, but now the fog had been wiped away, and everything around him sprang into sharp focus.
How could he have thought that he could live without this man? Oh, he could survive. He could breathe and feed himself and do all the basic life stuff. But it wasn’t living, and the moment he laid eyes on Ray, he knew it deep down inside of himself.
The question was, what was he going to do about it? And that was what he struggled with as everything went down. His mind whirled around. He had to talk to Ray, maybe pull him aside privately after this meeting, but he wasn’t sure quite how to accomplish that without making an idiot of himself.
And then he decided. He had a habit of getting lost in his head, of not doing the things, especially the emotional things, that he thought about. It was easier to think about them, to toss them around until he could be completely sure about what was going to happen. And since complete certainty didn’t exist, it meant that he got a free pass out of doing what was hard for him and admitting that he cared about another human being.
