She turned back to look at him, defiance in her eyes. “I’m usually in bed by three.”
“Three o’clock in the morning!”
Her head started dropping again, “ish.”
“ ‘ish’! What does that mean?”
She was almost back to addressing the floor. “Well, almost always by four.”
“Almost always! Four! Shit!” He scrubbed his face. “I feel like my father.”
She tilted her head, “You’re not that much older than me.”
“Can it, little girl,” he growled. “I’m six years older, but that’s not what I meant. I’m going to have to watch over you, aren’t I?” he demanded. “I’m going to have to make sure you go to bed at a reasonable hour and get up in a timely manner and have breakfast before you go to work. Shit! I thought it was going to be bad enough pulling those grades out of you, I never thought I was going to have to worry about your daily performance!”
Her spine stiffened and she glared at him. “My daily performance will be fine. I’m a great lecturer. All my students love coming to my classes.”
“You can’t be late and you can’t cancel classes. It’s another of Boxford’s rules, and frankly, I agree with him on that one. These kids are paying a small fortune in tuition to come here, or their parents are, and we owe it to them to give them full value for their dollar. You just told me that it is going to take a miracle to be on time for your first class. How do you expect to go to bed at four, get up, be dressed for business, eat breakfast and be intelligent in the classroom four hours later? And, and! Keep going for four straight hours! I expect a high level of performance from you, no sleepwalking through classes.” He threw himself back against the sofa, “Shit!”
She leaned back against the sofa too. “I’m sorry!” she wailed. “It’s not my fault! I never asked for this job. I don’t want this job! I’m a victim too.”
“Yeah, well Miss Victim, I like my job and I don’t want to lose it, so I am going to have to watch you like a hawk. How much time does it take you to get dressed in the morning? Not jeans, full business attire.”
“Do I have to wear my hair up?”
He looked startled. “Why do I care how you do your hair? How long?”
“Well, as long as you don’t care about my hair, I’d say forty-five minutes should do it. That’s make-up and everything.”
“Okay.” He blew out a breath, “Your hair is going to be presentable, right? I mean I do care that it looks decent, just not what style it is.”
She was tapping her front tooth as she thought. “You know, putting it up might be faster. I don’t have to blow it dry, I can just let it dry on its own.”
“No! You have to dry your hair. God sakes, woman! Do you know how cold it gets here? You’ll catch pneumonia and I’ll get fired for sure.”
“But I don’t have to go outside, just walk downstairs.”
“It doesn’t matter, dry hair,” he said firmly. “Okay, forty-five minutes to get dressed and take those extra fifteen minutes to get downstairs and prepare, so we’re at an hour already. Let’s say half an hour for breakfast, hmm.” He turned to her, “How many times am I going to have to wake you up before you actually get out of bed?”
“Huh?”
“Come on,” he said impatiently. “You know how these things go. I’ll knock on your door and tell you to get up. You’ll say okay and roll over and go back to sleep. By the time I realize that you aren’t getting ready for work, it’ll be too late to make up for lost time and then we’re screwed. So let’s just acknowledge that it’s going to happen and plan for it. What’s it going to take to get you out of bed every morning?”
“I don’t know!”
“All right,” he said evenly, “I’m going to plan on half an hour to wake you up. We can adjust as experience tells me what to expect. So you need to be up by six. How much sleep do you need each night?”
“What! Is this the Inquisition?”
“All right. We’ll assume the standard eight hours to begin with, although if I’m treated to this much attitude on a regular basis, we might need to up it.”
She turned to him in horror. “Oh, no! No you don’t. I am not going to bed at ten o’clock!”
“Looks like you are.”
“That’s ridiculous!” She shook her head. “This is so wrong, so very wrong.”
“It’s the hand we’ve been dealt and we will just have to manage. With practice I’m guessing that you can shorten the forty-five minutes dressing time and once you get adjusted to your new bedtime we can probably reduce the time necessary to get you up in the morning, maybe even speed up breakfast a bit. We might be able to shave a good half hour off your morning routine if you cooperate.”
She reached out and clutched his arm. “Rich, this is crazy! I can’t do this!”
“I’ll tell you what is crazy. Losing my job, the job I love, the job I planned to grow old in, because some chit can’t get out of bed in the morning because she can’t go to bed at night at a reasonable hour! Speaking of which,” he glanced at his watch, “you need to be in bed in two hours and I suspect that you haven’t gone downstairs to look through the information I left you, have you?”
“No, I haven’t. But cut me some slack, Rich, I’ve been setting up my rooms. I haven’t had a chance!”
“You need to get better at planning your time and ordering your priorities. You have five years to get settled in your rooms, but you have to teach four classes you are unfamiliar with first thing tomorrow morning.”
She sighed, “You’re right. I could have planned better. But I do have one thing to say in my defense.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know this building. Yes, you showed me where my office is, demonstrated the elevator and gave me my keys, but I don’t know anything else. Important things like are there any little steps or places where the floor is uneven that I might trip over in the dark, because I don’t even know where the light switches are.”
He nodded. “Okay, you get off this time, you have a valid reason for not going down to your office on your own. But I wasn’t gone getting the pizza the whole two hours that you were working on your rooms. I would have gone down with you and showed you where the light switches were if you had asked me.”
She compressed her lips, sucking the lower one into her mouth and nibbling it before releasing it out again with a pop. “Okay, I admit it, I suck at prioritizing, not always so great at planning, either.”
“I’m going to have to watch you on that, too, aren’t I?”
“I did make three lists while I was getting settled in my rooms, though. That’s exceptionally good for me.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Three lists, huh? Three whole lists.” She turned her shoulder towards him and crossed her arms. “Okay, don’t freeze me out. I’m sorry. What three lists did you make?”
“The renovations I want to be done. The things I need my family to ship up to me. And the things I need to buy. Where is the nearest mall?”
“Hmm.” He scrunched up his face in thought. “I’d say, it’s probably Clinton, that’s about ninety minutes southeast of here.”
“What! How about a department store? I don’t need a whole mall, just a good department store.”
He