"Just let me grab some things, I'll be out in a minute." Moriarty told her, gesturing towards the exit to the car park around the back of the school.
Regan nodded and started walking. It'd definitely been an interesting second day of school, and she was a little confused as to how this had all developed so quickly. It felt like only yesterday that she was terrified of this man as he followed her to school - because it was only yesterday. And somehow, he'd made her feel like it wasn't as much of a big deal as it actually was - because his ulterior motives were so brilliantly disguised. He'd taunt her fear, and then dismiss it altogether. She didn't appreciate being manipulated in this way, and it shot up about ten million red flags. But somehow she'd ended up here - accepting a lift home. She wondered if this was a situation that her childhood warnings of 'don't get into stranger's cars' applied to.
She stepped out into the cool evening air, not cold - but crisp and refreshing compared to the stuffy interior of the school. It was quite invigorating, and took her mind off everything, if only for a moment.
Mr. Moriarty exited the building behind her with a few folders. "Come along then." he grinned, making a b-line for the most expensive looking car in the car park, the same black Mercedes that frightened her only yesterday. The car opened with trilling little beep, and he dropped his stuff in the boot. "Hand your bag here." Regan gave him her bag and took her seat in the passenger side. The interior was leather, but absolutely messy. It was quite a juxtaposition to the well-groomed man himself, that such an expensive possession could be filled with various papers and old coffee cups. Moriarty got in the drivers seat and smirked at her. "I know it's a mess, don't look at me with those judgey little eyes."
He started the car and began driving out of the empty car park. She looked down at her feet. The floor of the car was riddled with cigarette papers. Absolutely riddled, some new, some old, some clean, some scrunched. She knew he smoked, of course, but it obviously played a bigger part in his life than she anticipated. It made her feel oddly sad. He was, what, near or in his thirties - and it was probably a long-standing habit. There's no way anybody in this day and age couldn't know that it was a horrible habit - and yet he continued to do it. Why?
"I know it's bad." he said quietly, as if he was reading her mind. It was more likely, in fact, that he was reading her ill-disguised expression of dread and disgust. "I hate it, I really do."
Head lights from oncoming traffic illuminate his face briefly as they pass. His expression was forlorn it made him look almost beautiful in the dim light.
"Then why do you do it?" Regan inquired.
He let out a quiet sigh.
She looked out the window, "Sorry... I, shouldn't have presumed." she stammered.
"It's fine, I like people who are curious."
She let out nervous laughter.
"So what are we going to do about all these presumptions surrounding us?"
Her laughter was instantly stifled and she felt her face go red again. "Er, what?"
"As in how are we going to dismiss these rumours about something unethical and illegal. I have ears, Regan, I heard the shouting before I intervened."
"So you knew there was a 'fight'?" she made air quotation marks.
"Correct."
"And you only intervened after someone was hurt?"
"Also correct." he said. She could hear the cheesy grin in his voice.
That didn't make much sense to Regan. "Isn't it your responsibility as a teacher to stop students from hurting each other?"
"You're on the ball tonight, Regan."
"So... Why did you wait so long? We could've avoided this whole situation." Regan had a moment of clarity, "Unless, that was your plan?"
He tapped a finger to his nose.
"That's... So cruel." she gasped.
"I wanted to see what would happen, what is so wrong with that?"
"What's wron-, well, for a start - I could've been hurt." she argued.
He laughed. "I doubt that."
"What is wrong with you?" she spluttered, outraged. He stopped the car and she looked out the window. "And how do you know where I live?!" Alarm bells were going off like fireworks in her mind.
"I willingly chose to teach high school English." he simply said. "Perhaps a more informative question would be what isn't wrong with me?"
He took his hands off the wheel and let his elbow sit on the glove box, where her own elbow was already propped. They touched in a way that shot an alarming tingle all the way from the point of contact, to the back of her neck, and down her spine - making her shiver. "Why are you telling me all this?"
"There's a good question... Call it - curiosity. Because without curiosity we're boring wastes of space... And I detest being bored." he droned.
Regan sat awkwardly there for a moment, wondering if she could even gather the energy to move her elbow and leave - something glued her to her spot and she hated it.
"That's why you're not boring, Regan. You have curiosity, and you're not one of those dreadful ordinary people. Do you ever wonder to yourself sometimes, Regan, what it must be like?" he asked, turning to face her and thankfully removing his elbow. She quickly put her hands in her lap. "To be ordinary?"
"I never considered myself to be extraordinary, Mr. Moriarty."
"Call me Jim."
"Yes, well, I really must be getting home - er, Jim. Thank you for the lift."
He looked vaguely disappointed, but nodded. "Remember to give that book a read, no excuseeeees." he lulled.
Regan quickly got out of the car, grabbed her bag from the boot, and opened the gate to her front yard. She turned. He had his window down, sunglasses on (despite the time of day, which she found slightly disconcerting), and nodded to her before driving off at high speed down her street. She shook her head to herself.
"Who was that man?" her father barked at her as soon as she walked in the front door. "Why are you getting into strange men's car? He looked like a criminal, Regan - did you get a lift from a criminal? Do you know what could've happened to you?" he ranted. Regan was surprised he could even get enough breath in his damaged lungs to spout these accusations at her. Surely enough, it was followed by an almighty cough.
Regan's mother patted her father's back. "Your father's right, Regan. For once." she shot him a cold glare. "We were worried about you - what, with the fight at school? And now you're getting into dark cars with tinted windows!"
"Have you fallen in with a bad crowd?" her father rasped once he had regathered himself.
Her mother gasped. "It's your smoking that does it, Brian. I always tell you, 'don't smoke around Regan, Brian. She'll pick it up.' Now look what's happened?" she leaned forward and smelled Regan. "Oh good Lord, she even smells like smoke."
"If you two are quite done..."
"No we're-" her father started, but all he could manage was an exasperated, "Young lady!" as she pushed passed them to go up the stairs.
She paused at the base, "By the way, that shifty character was my English teacher. And yes, he does smoke - which explains why I reek. Now if you'll excuse me, I'd like to have a shower and try to forget about today - okay?"
And that's what she did. The steam was surprisingly clarifying. It made her forget about the car ride, the fight, the gazes and glances, the book - oh Lord. The book. The poetry... She couldn't help but laugh softly to herself as she shampooed her hair. The whole situation was really ridiculous, wasn't it? No student should ever have to worry about her feelings for her teacher - and vice versa. Not that there were any explicit feelings, per se, but there was something. Something tangible, like a word just on the tip of her tongue - but it's a word that hasn't been made yet, there but not there. Almost like those words in other languages that aren't translatable into English because we don't have the proper words to capture the emotion these foreign words do. It was a feeling she was desperate to clutch, to grasp and hold between shaking hands. But she couldn't.
She turned off the shower and pulled her slip onto her body. She padded with damp feet across the hall into her room and shut the door. She pulled the red book out of her bag, and flicked through the pages idly as she lay on the bed with legs languidly waving in the air - glancing at the prose and poetry, trying her best to absorb something but found herself wanting to collapse and sleep to relieve herself of her busy thoughts. She was almost ready to put the book down and turn off the light when a poem caught her eye, Stansas For Music, the same poem Moriarty... Jim, had read her.
"There be none of Beauty's daughters
With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me:
When, as if its sound were causing
The charmed Ocean's pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming,
And the lulled winds seem dreaming:
And the midnight Moon is weaving
Her bright chain o'er the deep;
Whose infant's asleep:
So the spirit bows before thee,
To listen and adore thee;
With a full but soft emotion,
Like the swell of Summer's ocean."
Uncannily, she could hear his voice as she read the words. His languid lilt barely flicking over the sounds as he read the words, as though he often read beautiful poetry and this was no different - as though reading romantic poetry to a student was a casual and not at all inappropriate thing. It was the risks he took that... intrigued Regan. He was risking his job, career - and possibly risking jail time, just to pursue this strange fascination that he had with Regan. His morbid curiosity, which he would stop at nothing to satisfy. A curiosity which he believe that she shared.
Something in the margins on the page caught her eye:
"I didn't expect this either, Regan."
At some point between her handing the book in and getting handed it back, Jim had scrawled it in grey-lead in the margin. Or at least, she hoped he didn't preempt it all. But she wasn't entirely sure what he meant, and was still astounded that he even knew she'd find her way to the poem he'd recited for her. She walked over to her bag, pulled out a pencil, and scrawled under it:
"Don't vandalise school property."
Romantic, Regan. She scoffed to herself. But romance was hardly her intention - she was just feeling out this trying situation at this point, wading through murky waters in the hope she didn't get pulled under. It was stupid risk, but somehow, in some way - she didn't believe she had a choice. The situation was magnetic. Perhaps Jim was right - maybe she did have a fatal curiosity. She was just thankful she wasn't a cat at this point.
She read the poem over and over, and over again. She tried to read other poems, but she was drawn back to this one. The pure emotion, the perfectly captured infatuation that Lord Byron felt as he wrote the words. She found it beautiful, how love was timeless - that a hand long gone could pen something with a feeling that still rung so true with everyone alive that chose to feel it. How inevitable it was, to fall in love.
She heard his voice in her head, till she fell asleep with the book still open by her side.