Page 80 of Change My Mind
I rolled my eyes and ran my thumb along the bump of his piercing.
“Okay, fine, lunch might not be a problem. My other fear is that I am convinced I’ve forgotten how to do my job. I’ve had longer off than I usually do, so my rhythm might be off. Plus, I was teaching in French. What if I’m not good at this job when I have to do it in English? I don’t have the advantageof having an accent that endears people to me here. It’s the same as everyone else’s!”
Eli laughed softly, and I swiped my thumb over his head through the damp cotton, causing that laugh to turn into a groan.
He put his hand over mine, not to remove it, just to stop me from teasing him.
“Look, I am very aware that I have never seen you do your job, but I do know that Becky backed you and the powers that be listened to her. She knew you would be able to do this job. You aregoodat teaching Shakespeare. You were teaching me new things all the time, and there is no way you haven’t got better at it in fourteen years with more knowledge and actual teaching experience under your belt. I highly doubt that you’ve forgotten how to do it, and the students will find you engaging no matter what.”
“But what if they don’t! What if I become one of those teachers they all talk about because my lectures are shit and boring?”
“You could never be boring, Ads,” he replied quietly.
It had been a while since I had someone to reassure me in the moment when it felt like everything was going to shit, and I was doubting myself.
Someone to catch you when you feel like you’re falling apart.
I cleared my throat and blinked away the tears threatening to spill over.
“What do you have on today?” he asked as he removed his hand from mine. I started teasing his barbell from side to side while I thought about the colour-coded schedule I had committed to memory for the semester.
“Two lectures and a seminar. Which are all introductory, all about Shakespeare, and all very much in my wheelhouse. But I had a vision while I was watchingHandslast night that I was mid-lecture, and I noticed people starting to snicker, andwhen I looked down, my boob was just hanging out. What if it was a premonition?”
“Which boob?”
I laughed. “Seriously?” Eli nodded. “The funner one.”
“Do you need to worst-case scenario this?”
“What?”
“I find it helps sometimes when I am very stressed. Like the morning of the menu tasting when I was doing yoga and supposed to be focusing on the present, what I was actually doing was trying not to notice how your back muscles move when you’re in downward dog and thinking about the fact that I might give you severe food poisoning with a bit of chicken and have to nurse you back to health. So, let’s worst-case scenario this.”
I tried not to get stuck on the idea of Eli looking after me if I were sick.
Or the fact that when he was doing yoga, he was thinking aboutme.
“Okay, let’s do that. I’m late to my first lecture, and then I can’t get my slides up for my presentation. The students lose all respect for me,” I started.
“Rumour spreads quickly that you are terrible at timekeeping and so old that you don’t know how technology works. In your next lecture, you get continually heckled and don’t finish a single sentence. For an hour,” Eli continued.
“I’m so flustered that I end up being late to the seminar taking place in my own office, and when I get there, somehow all the students are already inside and they are staring at me?—”
“Because your boob fell out while you were rushing to get back to your office,” Eli cut in.
“Yes! Exactly, but I’m so hot from the rushing that I don’t notice, so I go about my business and settle in to teach them. I think they are just laughing at me because of the rumours, but it’s worse than that. There’s a boob out!”
“You tuck it away and try to get on with the seminar, but it doesn’t work. You fumble through the hour and rush them out of the office the moment you can.”
“Just as I’m getting ready to call it a day, the police turn up because I’m being done for indecent exposure. And then I end up in prison, and my family never speaks to me again.”
He was quiet. Then he huffed out a breath. “Fuck, that took a turn. I’d still visit you in prison, though.”
“You’re too kind.” I tried to joke, but it failed becausehe would visit me in prisonand wasn’t that just the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me?
“Don’t you feel better now?”
I thought about it for a moment. There were still some nerves, but honestly, they were to be expected. It was a new job in a new country. I mean, this city was home, but it wasn’t the environment I learned to teach in. If I wasn’t nervous, I would be worried.
