Offlimits, Professor! - Chapter 6

LEO'S POV I checked my watch for the third time. Fifteen minutes late. Zoe Washington was fifteen minutes late to our session. This was exactly the kind of unprofessional behavior I should report to Sullivan. A student who couldn't be bothered to show up on time clearly wasn't serious about her studies. I could march down to his office right now and tell him that Zoe was wasting my time and the department's resources. But I found myself just sitting there, staring at the empty piano bench and wondering if something had happened to her.

The practice room door finally opened, and Zoe rushed in looking flustered and out of breath. "Why should I have to arrive before my student?" I interrupted, standing up from my chair. She stopped talking and looked at me with those wide dark eyes. "You shouldn't. I messed up, and I'm really sorry. I promise it won't happen again. Ever." I'd been prepared to lecture her about professionalism and respect. I'd had the whole speech planned out in my head. But the genuine remorse in her voice caught me off guard. "Take a seat," I said instead, gesturing to the piano bench.

"We have a lot of work to do." "Thank you," she said quietly, settling onto the bench. "I really appreciate you not giving up on me." Something about the way she said it made my chest tight. Like she was used to people giving up on her. "We're going to focus on classical theory today," I said, pulling out my stack of teaching materials. "Real theory. Not the simplified versions they teach in introductory courses." For the next hour, I put her through exercises that would have made some graduate students cry.

Harmonic progressions, voice leading, counterpoint rules that most jazz students never bothered to learn. "This is the foundation," I explained as she worked through a particularly complex Bach invention. "Everything else-jazz, blues, contemporary-it all comes back to these principles." "But what about improvisation?" she asked, her fingers stumbling over a difficult passage. "What about feel?" "Feel comes from understanding. You can't break the rules effectively until you know what the rules are." She nodded and tried the passage again. Better, but still not quite right.

"Let me show you," I said, moving to sit beside her on the bench. I started to demonstrate the proper fingering for the passage, my hands moving over the keys. "See how the voices move independently here? Each line has its own-" I reached for a higher note at the same time she did, and our hands collided over the keys. The contact was brief, just a brush of skin against skin, but it sent electricity shooting up my arm. We both froze, her hand still touching mine, and for a moment the only sound in the room was our breathing.