Untrue Love Read online

  Contents

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  Afterword

  1

  ELLIE WAS NERVOUS, and she hated herself for it. For the thousandth time she reviewed her appearance in the mirror, scanning for anything that wasn’t exactly the way she wanted it. Her brown hair fell in gentle waves, her hazel eyes gazed out beneath heavy lashes, and her white skin bore mute testimony to the countless hours and dollars she had invested in creams and exfoliating rubs.

  “Are you ever coming out of there?” Jackson asked through the bathroom door.

  Ellie scowled in irritation. “What are you implying?” she demanded of her boyfriend.

  “Nothing,” he answered, a little too quickly.

  Ellie swung the door open and glared at him with her hands on her hips. “What did we talk about, Jackson?”

  He gave her his famously crooked smile. “We talked about how this is a big day for you.”

  “A very big day.”

  “The biggest of days.”

  “And what do I need from you today?”

  “My support and encouragement.”

  “And are you under the impression that sarcasm comes across as really supportive and encouraging?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t mean to be sarcastic.”

  “I see. You were working on the assumption that, in fact, I may never come out of the bathroom. That I would grow old and die in there, after which the entire apartment would be boarded up and left as a warning to others.”

  He came forward and took her hands, an apologetic expression on his face. “I’m sorry, Ellie. I didn’t mean to be flippant. I just thought that maybe you should be leaving for campus.”

  Ellie let out an exasperated breath and returned to her reflection in the mirror. “I have plenty of time.”

  “Not really.”

  “It takes fifteen minutes to get to the department. The meeting isn’t for another twenty minutes.”

  “And it will take at least five more minutes to get ready to go, and if you take a moment more you’ll end up rushing to get there on time and will arrive all flustered and out of breath. Which you don’t want to do,” he said, stepping close and wrapping his arms around her from behind, “because you look completely delicious right now and it would be a crime against humanity to mess that up.”

  Ellie smiled and leaned back against him, enjoying the feeling of his muscular body against hers. She met his reflected gaze in the mirror. “This is going to be awesome, right?”

  “Right,” he said, kissing the top of her head. Ellie savored the faint scent of his cologne and wrapped her fingers around his thickly-muscled forearms.

  “There’s no way they’ll say no, right?”

  “Right,” he murmured again.

  “And all of those weird vibes I’ve been picking up lately?”

  “Are in your head,” he finished for her. “You’re feeling nervous, and that’s perfectly normal. I’d be worried if you weren’t a little nervous. But you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to this department, and today they’ll recognize that fact by granting you tenure.”

  “Tenure,” she repeated in a half-whisper.

  “Tenure,” he murmured into her hair, hugging her tight.

  Ellie wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of the morning in Jackson’s arms, but then she caught sight of the clock just above the sink. “I’m going to be late!” she exclaimed, freeing herself of his grasp and hurrying to the closet in search of her shoes.

  With heels on her feet and a coat over her arm, Ellie landed a clumsy kiss on Jackson’s lips and hurried out the door and down the hallway of their apartment building. Now that she was in motion she was beginning to feel better. Jackson was right, she felt sure—the strange looks and cryptic comments she’d heard from members of the tenure committee over the last few weeks were almost certainly figments of her imagination. The faculty had all but promised her tenure when she joined four years ago, and the ratings she got from students in her classes were among the highest in the entire school. While it was true that her book research had run into a few dead-ends, she had more than enough articles published in scholarly journals to satisfy even the most stringent review.

  Tenure was a formality; everyone said so. Now if only Ellie’s nervous stomach would agree.

  Bright sun greeted her outside and she felt thankful for the short walk to campus. The exercise would help clear her head and work off some of the nervous energy that was bouncing around inside her like a hyperactive five-year-old.

  She hated feeling nervous. Nervousness was for other people, the ones who weren’t sure of themselves. Ellie had always seen herself as a winner, a front-runner. She was the sort of person who went to grad school even when everyone dismissed her as nothing more than a social butterfly, because who the hell were they to say what she could and could not do? She was also the sort of person to finish her Ph.D. after only five years, and then get a tenure-track position right out of school. Ellie had grown up as “the popular one,” but that was all that had been left for her growing up with a brainy older sister. Even so, every time someone had dismissed her or looked down on her, she grew a little bit more determined to prove what she could do. She would show everyone—and she had.

  When Ellie arrived on campus the growl of traffic was replaced by the relative quiet of the grassy quads. She could see the department building now, and she stopped long enough to take a deep, calming breath.

  She exhaled forcefully. Ready or not, losers, she thought to herself. Here I come.

  2

  PROFESSOR ROBERT BUCHANAN always seemed a little startled to Ellie, as if she had walked in on him while he was doing something he didn’t want anyone to know about. The English Department Chairman’s gray beard was always well-trimmed, she allowed, though it did make him look a little like a Civil War general, but the gray comb-over that crowned his head was doing him no favors at all. Whenever Ellie spoke with him, she had to remind herself not to stare in horror at the ghastly thing. She never was able to understand why some men were so afraid of growing bald; Buchanan would never be a sexy man, no matter the length of his hair, but he would take a big step in the right direction if he woke up one morning and shaved the whole mess off.

  At the moment he was sm
iling mildly at Ellie, and the two of them had been idly chatting about nothing in particular. Ellie was beginning to grow wildly impatient. She was never a fan of chit-chat at the best of times, and today it seemed downright sadistic.

  “Well,” Buchanan said, as if satisfied on some obscure point that had been bothering him. “Before we start, I want you to know how much I’ve enjoyed having you with us the past few years. You brought a new energy to this department, Ellie, and for that I will be always grateful.”

  Ellie nodded, but her stomach grew tight once again. This was not the opening remarks that she had expected.

  “As you know, the tenure committee has been meeting for some weeks now, and we had some very difficult decisions to make. It’s not just a matter of reaching a decision in your case. We’re responsible for setting the department up to succeed in the long term, and for that we need to consider a number of variables. In some cases, the individual merit of a particular candidate is of less importance than the long-term needs of the department.”

  Ellie swallowed hard and tried to smile, but her face refused to cooperate. Deep inside her chest a flame ignited and began to grow into a crackling fire. “You denied me tenure. You actually denied me.”

  Buchanan winced at her choice of words. “It wasn’t me, Ellie. I pleaded your case as strongly as I was able, but it wasn’t up to me. You’ve done everything we asked of you, and I’m sorry that this wasn’t sufficient. The decision of the committee was to deny you tenure.”

  Ellie stared at him dumbfounded. Inside her lay a seething cauldron of shock and rage. “Could I ask why?” she managed to say.

  Buchanan sighed. “It’s not your teaching or your publications,” he began.

  “Because both of those are excellent!” she spat.

  “They are excellent,” he allowed, “but that’s not everything that the committee considers. There’s also the question of how well you work with others on the faculty, and on that level there were a number of concerns.”

  Ellie’s eyes widened and her nostrils flared. “So you’re saying it was a popularity contest.”

  “I’m saying that an English department is a very political place, and a lot of the business we do comes down to questions of support and allegiance. I like you, Ellie, and I’m not the only one, but there are others on the faculty who don’t think quite so highly of you.”

  “It was Kate, wasn’t it?” she asked. For a long time Ellie had considered Kate Trask to be one of her quasi-friends in the department, but lately a hostility had grown up between them and Ellie had never found out why.

  “Kate and others. It was much harder than it should have been, Ellie. You didn’t have many friends on the committee.”

  Ellie snorted in disgust and rolled her eyes, at which Buchanan raised his hands in the air in exasperation.

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You don’t care what anyone thinks about you, and sometimes that’s a wonderful and powerful thing, but there are other times when you should give some thought to how you can get the support of the people you work with. Otherwise, things like this might happen.”

  Ellie stared at him in silence while she fought to get her thoughts in order. The vengeful rage that had possessed her only a moment before was slowly being replaced by a terrible, bleak emptiness. “So what now?” she finally asked.

  Buchanan sighed and looked away. When he looked back it was as the department chairman; they were no longer speaking as friends. “You have until the end of the term. You can keep your office until then, but you need to clear out everything by June 15. After that, building staff will box up anything they find and send it to the Salvation Army. We don’t have any adjunct positions open for Summer or Fall Quarter, but if you’d like to apply for a position for the winter you can do so through my secretary.”

  Ellie received the news impassively. He had just told her that she had less than two weeks to make herself scarce. If that was the way it was going to be, she felt she could play the game every bit as well. “Very well,” she said, and got to her feet. She was at the point of leaving when she turned back to where he was watching her quietly. “Thank you, Robert,” she said quietly. “I do appreciate what you’ve done for me.”

  Buchanan nodded once. “Thank you, Ellie. And do me a favor, please.”

  “What?”

  “Go out there and succeed so brilliantly that you make everyone who voted against you look like a moron.”

  Ellie managed a smile, and then she hurried away.

  3

  “IDIOTS!” ELLIE FUMED, pacing furiously from one end of the kitchen to the other and back again. “Second-rate, small-minded sons and daughters of bitches! They were threatened by me! They’re all so terrified that I’ll expose them as an untalented pack of amateurs that they couldn’t wait to get rid of me.”

  Jackson leaned against the counter, staring at the floor with a bottle of beer nearly forgotten in his hand. “It’s all politics, Ellie. I tried to warn you.”

  She stopped her pacing and stared at him. “What? When? When did you warn me about anything?”

  He gestured with his beer bottle. “Lots of times. I practically begged you to get together with Kate for lunch sometime. You knew that she didn’t like you, and you didn’t even try to change her mind.”

  Ellie pointed her finger at him accusingly. “Don’t you blame this on me! Don’t you do it! I did everything they told me to do, and I did it better than any of them. And now they say I’m not good enough?!”

  “It’s not fair,” Jackson agreed, his blue-gray eyes pensive. “It’s never been fair. Not for you, and not for me. They graduate five doctoral students for every job that’s posted. There aren’t nearly enough positions to go around, and so we’re living and working in a dog-eat-dog world. It’s every man for himself.”

  Ellie wasn’t really listening anymore, she was too busy plotting bloody revenge on the people who had wronged her. Her face lit up at a sudden inspiration. “I’ll write a book! It will blow the lid off this whole racket! It will be like The Devil Wears Prada, minus the fashion and the beauty and the money.”

  Jackson smirked at her. “I suppose Anne Hathaway will play the lead in the movie version?”

  Ellie shook her head. “She’s too fat.”

  “Excuse me?” Jackson asked incredulously.

  “Fat,” Ellie pronounced. Then she added suspiciously: “You don’t think I look like her, do you?”

  “No, no,” Jackson assured her, aware that he had somehow stumbled onto dangerous ground. “I was joking. Seriously, though, Ellie, you need a plan. A better plan than writing a New York Times best-seller about politics and back-stabbing inside an English literature department.”

  She crossed her arms across her chest. “So I guess you don’t remember.”

  “Remember what?”

  “That we talked about this. If either one of us was denied tenure…”

  “We would both leave together,” he finished. “I didn’t forget. But we never actually talked about the specifics of the plan. Like, for instance, whether it’s a good idea for us both to be looking for work at the same time.”

  She shrugged. “Do we have an alternative?”

  “Well,” he said, putting down his beer bottle and stepping toward her so that he could take her hands in his. “Maybe I could keep my job here while you get settled somewhere else, and then I could join you.”

  Ellie gave him an outraged look. “You promised! We promised each other!”

  He nodded, holding her eyes with his. “I did. And I will leave with you at the end of the term, if that’s what you want. But we don’t have a lot of money saved up, and it won’t be easy finding a college or university that has two openings rather than just one. Maybe one of us can get a job on short notice, but the other will need to look for a while, and the longer you go without teaching or publishing the harder it is to get another opportunity somewhere else. But if you get another position, we can get started right aw
ay setting things up so that I can join you there. It might only take a year!”

  “A year,” Ellie repeated, suddenly feeling hopeless and alone.

  Seeing the look in her eyes, Jackson gathered her into a tight hug. “Oh baby, I’ll really miss you. But you know it’s the best way for us both to hold onto the dream. We get tenure, and then we spend the rest of our lives teaching, writing, and growing old together. That’s our dream, right?”

  “That’s our dream,” she agreed, her face pressed against his chest. Inwardly she was stunned at how quickly things can change. This morning she had a good job and a sexy man who loved her and would some day be her husband. Now she was facing unemployment and they were making plans to live apart.

  “So now we both have some work to do,” he murmured. “One of us needs to find a school where we can both teach long-term. No sabbatical leaves. No adjunct positions. We’re better than that. Wherever you end up, start building a bridge so I can join you there. And while you’re gone I’ll be looking for a new school that would have something for both of us.”

  Ellie smiled and nodded while her mind searched for a reason to hope. She had always thought that she was in control of her own fate. Now she couldn’t be sure, and the prospect scared her more than she dared to admit.

  4

  ELLIE’S FAVORITE PLACE within an apartment that would soon no longer be hers was a sunny little alcove that looked out on the street. A leafy green tree—she had never bothered to find out what kind—grew directly in front of their window, and on sunny mornings she liked to bring her coffee and sit with her bare feet up against the window sill, the mug against her chin where she could savor the aroma and look out through dappled shades of green and yellow, thinking about her day.

  This time, Ellie was thinking about more than her day. This time she was thinking about the rest of her life.

  Bit by bit her mind was coming to terms with what had happened. She had been so confident, so sure of herself, and now she knew that had been her first mistake. Somehow she had forgotten that the world would never stop judging her and finding fault, no matter how much she accomplished. She had been on the fast track, but now that was gone forever. She knew as well as anyone that academia was an industry in which perception counts for everything: you’re brilliant if everybody thinks you are, and you’re influential and successful only so long as your fellow scholars choose to grant you that status. Ellie knew that there was a black mark on her record now, and it would never go away.