Author's Note: By request and by the power of my plotbunnies not letting me go no matter what, I hereby present to you the exact same romance, from the perspective of Arabelle Martin. Because apparently, I like writing Mr. Lancer's romance. (I don't get it either, folks.)


When she was three years old, her father taught her to read.

It was after his hours at the plantation but before her mother got home from cleaning other people's houses. His hands were calloused and rough even after he washed them, and his eyes were always tired, but they lit up at the sight of his daughter, and he had brought home for her a gift, the first thing she would ever remember getting, a book. It was in terrible shape, pages wavery from water exposure and unable to fold back in correctly it was bloated in her small hands. The story, she would later forget. What she remembered was her father telling it to her, turning the jagged letters into sentences somehow and she wanted to know how.

She wanted to know how so he taught her, drew each letter in the dirt, one by one, and she memorized them. She took days to do it, to put together how these things formed a word, but each had a sound. If she put the sounds together they formed familiar words and this clicked soon enough. It was the trap of the French language that many, many letters were silent and she had to decode things, sit there trying to figure out what that sounded like, what that meant, and each word was fought for.

It gave her something to do. She was often left alone even at that age, not out of negligence but because her parents needed to put a roof over her head. They dreamed of sending her to college one day, of her being able to afford a house with lights in it and that kept them going. Sometimes her mother worked long into the night, picking up last second odd jobs and only coming home in the deepest darkness, laying down beside her husband on a tired mattress for only a few hours before it began again. Arabelle was left alone, and though they locked the door to keep her inside, it was about all they could do. The books were the first distraction, though it hadn't been meant as such.

Since she was too young to go to school, she imagined it. She imagined being a teacher and telling people what the letter meant and telling them stories, and, having run out of books from her father by the time she was four, she made up her own. They were rambling and incoherent as all children's tales were, but she had many, and wrote out the made up names of her characters in the dirt. She told her father when he was home and he would pick her up, hefting her into the air and laughing, teeth white like the tiled floors her mother scrubbed. He told her she was clever and amazing and when she said she wanted to be a teacher he told her she would be.

When she was old enough to go to school her parents somehow pulled together money for paper and pencils, and soon it became apparent to everyone that Arabelle was not like the other children. At recess she did not run around and play with the others, though she was invited to. She sat under the tree in the schoolyard, shaded from the burning sun, and read. Teachers were hesitant to loan out books to her at first, but she took good care of them every time. She suggested being inside to read and soon she'd built up a reputation as the one student they could trust not to ruin anything she was handed.

By age eight, she was in class with boys and girls age ten. She more than kept up; even if she had to write on the back of paper she'd already used for an assignment and collect abandoned pencils off the playground and classroom floors, she excelled. Arabelle was serious and devoted, like her mother, with her father's ability to find joy in things. She held her head high when her classmates teased her, smoothed out the hem of her ragged dresses, because she had skipped two years and they barely managed the one they were in. She was worth something, and she knew it. Many people never learned they had worth, but then again, most people didn't have her parents.

Scholarships and grants and applications and a lot of prayer got her into college, where she found a golden opportunity to go to the States. Univesities under scrutiny for their lack of racial diversity would pay part of the expenses and her scholarships would pay the rest. She knew it was a gamble and that if she failed she would be booted back in an instant, she knew her English needed work, but she shut her eyes and remembered that first bloated book, and formed a sudden vision of getting her family to America. She would ave up money and work while a student and then they would live there together off her teacher's salary.

It's one thing to form that plan.

It's another thing that she actually did it.

The fare for two people to the States wasn't as much as she'd thought, wasn't as impossible as she'd dreamed, and she was still a student when she brought them to her, but they lived together in her apartment, which was infinitely nicer than anything she'd ever had as a child. She worked as a waitress inbetween classes and her father found construction work, still strong enough to keep going. For the first time in her life Arabelle's mother got to actually relax, something that single handedly saved her failing health. Her blue eyes regained their spark, her bony body filled out a bit, and she got to see her daughter's library of cheap second hand books cluttering the whole apartment. She organized them, talked to Arabelle about them, and saw the joy in her face when she did so.

Eventually the construction work her father got was steady enough they moved into their own apartment, cheaper but their own, bigger than their old house was, room just for them. He did maintanance around the building and soon built up a friendship with the landlord, who promised that he would never throw them to the streets. They made their payments and had money left over, something they'd never imagined possible, and the two were living their own happily ever after as their daughter persued her degree in Education with a double major in Literature, something she pulled off by being just as much a loner as she had always been.

Then she was assigned to be a student teacher. It was the last step to finalizing her dream. But while even her professors grew weary of her babbling about books, this teacher didn't, and that was when she stopped viewing him as a teacher and started viewing him as a friend.

He never rolled her eyes at her, never told her she was overbearing, never seemed irritated when she took over hi breakfast or suggested new books for the cirriculum. He never laughed at her over analyzing things. He joined in. There was a wellspring of words inside him his students didn't listen to, so she listened for them, more involved with the lessons than any of them ever dreamed of being. She threw herself into work, wanting nothing more than to have a life like his, teaching and sharing the joy they found in the works of Hemingway and Guy de Maussupant, and even if they didn't get through to everyone, they got through to some. They. She thought of them as a they within a month, which was something her mother picked up on before her, sharing a knowing smile with her father Arabelle missed.

In books romances unfolded rapidly and in moments of passion, they were clear and they were vivid. So Arabelle didn't realize she'd fallen in love with him until suddenly she couldn't imagine doing anything without him. Her invitations to him were like a floodwave, please go with to this, let's do that, have you seen this, we should try to form a book club, any idea that popped into her head being voiced because he would always hear her out. They belonged by each other's side, arguing over the romantic subtext in The Moorchild while other couples went to the movies. God help them when they did see a movie together. They spent two hours afterwards at her place picking it apart trope by cliche by reference, slowly working their way through dinner that was more backdrop than food.

He understood. He understood the overwhelming number of thoughts, the need to express, to read, to live through others, to see the hidden meanings in a story like light catching glass and turning it another color. Even her own parents couldn't understand how desperately passionate she got over things they dismissed as just stories. The only person who ever understood was a bald American man with a goatee who lived a life just as solitary as hers was, and taking his hand didn't induce the cliche butterflies or dramatic blush she'd been told true love would bring. Taking his hand felt right. Her head belonged on his shoulder. Her gaze fell naturally to his forest green eyes. There was no romantic tension, because there was no reason to be tense around the one person who truly knew her.

She pulled him close, or maybe he pulled her close, it didn't matter. That she was half his age didn't matter. That his skin was pale peach against her brown was irrelevant. This was where she should be, and this was what she wanted. And he wanted it too, so no confessions or teary eyes were needed. They just admitted to themselves something the rest of the world had seen coming a mile off. They didn't even need to utter the three damning and solidifying words "I love you". They had said it in subtext every morning they spent together grading papers and every night they spent on the phone debating the use of metaphor in Novala Takemoto's work.

He didn't sweep her off her feet. He simply fit perfectly into her life, a piece of the puzzle she hadn't known was missing, completing it without even knowing he was doing so.

And that was so much better than anything in any book.