Practice Makes Perfect Read Free

veiled homoeroticism. Or was she the one who wanted to argue about the B on her paper? Whatever it was, she was on time, which was a nice change, and he pushed thoughts of caffeine and documents and Helen aside to listen to his punctual student.

Chapter 3
    H er student assistants were covering the desk, her web bibliography for Grace’s English 240 class was done enough for now, her exhibit on the Pembroke Hellbenders—the first integrated college basketball team in Kentucky, and also currently the worst—was just waiting for the start of basketball season to go up.
    So Helen had a moment to breathe.
    Breathe .
    The problem was, she couldn’t breathe. Oh, sure, the normal minimal required amount of oxygen to maintain biological functions was happening, no problem. It was the relaxing, turn-off-your-brain, slowdown-your-heart kind that was MIA.
    If only her problems were strictly professional.
    No, she’d always had a pretty easy time managing her professional stress. She had good relationships with the humanities and social science professors, and had mostly gotten them to treat her like a colleague instead of a research assistant. Some of them even considered her valuable, and not just because she had a key to the archives and could let them in off-hours. She did committees and professional organizations and student advising—it was all just a matter of being organized. She got stuff done, dammit.
    And it was satisfying, but it wasn’t always challenging. She realized, after sneaking to a signing at a bookstore in Lexington for one of her favorite guilty-pleasure writers, that she had creative muscles that weren’t being stretched by librarianship. She needed to do something that would use her smarts but was totally un-academic.
    So she wrote a novel.
    It was that easy! All she had to do was work in secret during early morning hours and eschew all extracurricular social commitments, and voilà: romance novel. So easy.
    And now it was done and she had actually sent it out in public, but she still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to confess her romance-writing secret to anyone she cared about.
    She had enough trouble being taken seriously at Pembroke—she wasn’t a real professor, just a librarian. Add romance novelist on top of that? Forget it. She could kiss tenure good-bye. No amount of academic publishing (and she had cowritten two books on research in the humanities) would undo the damage one smutty book would wreak on her CV—even if she didn’t put it on her CV.
    And what would her parents say? She loved them, and they supported her—they’d bought dozens of copies of her two books on research in the humanities, and they were dentists—but there was no way. Getting The Talk from her mom when she was seventeen (wishful thinking, Mom, and a year too late) had been bad enough. Knowing they were reading a book of her sexual imaginings? Her father would never make eye contact with her again.
    And she could just hear her mother now. You can write these love stories but you can’t give me a grandchild?
    Worst of all, what if it never got published? Then people would always be asking her about it and she’d have to explain that not only did she write trashy books, but she wrote trashy books that weren’t even very good.
    No. It was better for everyone that it was a secret. Not winning the contest was a blessing, then. Her secret was safe. Whew .
    Of course, she’d taken Psych 101 back in the day. She could see that maybe her unwillingness to be open about her book was affecting her writing. But, no. That letter from the editor said she liked it. Not enough to buy it, but she liked it.
    She just had to write better sex.
    Helen needed resources. She was good at finding resources. And she had a moment to breathe. And, conveniently, she had brought her personal laptop from home so there was no need to involve Pembroke property in her research, or the IT