Gravity

Part 2 - The 14th Day

There should be a law against having to be at school on a Sunday.

I sat, dutifully, at my desk, nursing a cup of Jasmine tea and going over one of 70 essays about the Origins of Tolkien's Middle Earth. Four of my students' essays hung suspended in mid air in front of me as I read and graded them, a soft cyan-tinted sheen occasionally rippling over them as I scanned over them.

Magic: useful for just about everything.

I mused over the content of the essays. The majority of them were very well written and correct, in terms of what the general public knew of the reasons behind the writing of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and even the Silmarillion.

If the world knew what I knew, the true origins, the more arcane details, well...

With the world in its current state, it's a very good thing that the general public is ignorant to the actual facts.

I'll just leave that there for you to think about, Melon.

I had just turned my head toward the clock on the wall, when I heard a knock on the door of my office...er classroom. My head snapped towards the door. I had been aware that there were other teachers here, but I didn't think any one of them would step out of their rooms for coffee, let alone to talk to one another. Though, if I'm honest, it was more than a little surprising that anyone was here at all today, outside of myself.

Seriously, it's fine for me to not have much of a life outside of my work and my defending this reality from the things that go bump, but other people should not be here. Not on a Sunday.

Especially not on this Sunday.

I scrambled to grab the levitating essays and placed them all on my desk before sitting back down and attempting to look like I had been doing things, well, normally. "Yeah?" I answered, snatching my wire-framed glasses from the desk and hurriedly putting them on my face.

Cost of keeping a secret identity. You try it sometime and see if you like it. It had begun to drive me nuts, to be honest.

The door creaked open and a woman walked in, her blond, shoulder-length hair framed her round-ish face and her storm gray eyes darted about until she found mine. She continued through the door in her tan cardigan and gray pencil skirt and smiled. Goddamn Melanie Lawson and that smile of hers. "Hi. I didn't think there was anyone else here today, but I saw your light on and thought I'd say hello." She spoke and my ears suddenly went warm and my mouth developed the sudden urge to say hello to her as quickly as possible, while my heart did its best impression of an action hero leaping out of a window.

Instead, I did my best to play it cool. "Hey there, Mel." I replied, shuffling my students' papers about on my desk. "I didn't know you were here, either."

Lies.

In matter of fact, I had seen her classroom light on when I went to the lounge for teabags earlier. I desperately wanted to say hello, but I had also been actively avoiding her. After watching your crush kiss someone else, you'd be keen to steer clear while you worked out your feelings too.

Or maybe that's just me.

We've already established my ongoing weirdness.

Okay, fine! What I really wanted was to either leap out of a window, myself, or to rush over to her and take her in my arms. I didn't think that either of those things would have been a good idea and I didn't want to be disappointed again the way I had been at the company party. It hadn't yet been a full month ago and the memory of it was still fresh in my head.