Deliver Me

Chapter 2

The alarm went off five minutes later, it seemed, and I slammed my hand on the buzzer, groaning into my pillow at the thought of another day in paradise. Ten minutes later I was out of bed, bladder empty and coffee in hand, ready to grade twenty assignments. I had two hours to get it done before I needed to get ready to teach my first class of the day at nine o’ clock. Daniel Carter, you can do this.

I worked as a graduate assistant for the Math Department at Georgia State, which helped pay the tuition for my Master’s degree. Unfortunately, the partial scholarship and the assistantship didn’t pay all the bills, hence the delivery job.

Grumbling as I wrote a D minus grade on one of the papers, I thought of the one bright spot in all this drudgery. Julius Tanner, another graduate assistant in the department, and a friend, was my eye-candy to the stars. Brilliant and confident, he was going for his Ph.D. in Statistics. He had dark brown skin, hair shaved close to his scalp, and eyes that reminded me of melted honey. Julius had a beautiful smile. Tall, too, at six-foot-three. So manly.

He reminded me of Tyson Beckford. The students, male and female, fawned all over him, and the professors treated him like the second coming of Pythagoras. He probably found it all amusing, most of time, but he seemed to take it all in stride. Being able to see him during the day gave me a reason to keep going because honestly, sometimes I was just too tired to care.

I finally finished grading at seven thirty, which gave me enough time to make some eggs, shower, and jump into Bessie. It didn’t take five minutes before sweat was beading on my forehead as I drove along the busy streets. I always had to carry a change of clothes with me in the summer months since I would sweat through everything by the time I got to the campus. I just didn’t have the money to fix the air right now.

Once I parked the car in the faculty lot, I grabbed the papers, my messenger bag, and clothes and ran into the building. I walked briskly to the bathroom, where I changed from my T-shirt and jeans shorts into a white button-down shirt, and brown slacks. I left the shirt hanging open as I splashed water on my face. In the mirror above the sink, my light brown eyes looked tired, and my skin was blotchy, not an attractive look on someone who was already rail thin, average looking, and five-foot-eight. At least my chest and arms had a little definition. That was something.

I kept my boring brown hair buzzed short, so nothing to fix there. I took some of the paper towels from the dispenser and wiped the sweat away from my chest. I buttoned my shirt, tucked it into my pants, and grabbed everything to leave the room. As I opened the door, I almost bumped into Julius.

“Sorry, man,” he said.

“No problem,” I replied, and felt a little weak in the knees when he smiled as he walked by me.

I must have looked at him funny, though because he stopped to ask, “Hey, you okay, man?” Crap.

Hopefully, I wasn’t drooling like an i***t when I replied, “Yeah, I’m fine. See you later.” I left the room like my ass was on fire.

Julius taught the third-year math students, and his classes were always right after mine. He would arrive at the lecture hall as I was leaving, give me that boner-inducing grin, and hold the door open for me. Such a gentleman! He was out of my league, though, in so many ways, and he obviously wasn’t hurting for money. Plus, there’s the fact that I didn’t even know if he was into guys. The l***q community thrived at the university, but any faculty members of the same persuasion—including myself—tended to keep things pretty discreet.

Some of the other graduate assistants had tried to get to first base with Julian, but none of them had succeeded so far, male or female. So, no one, especially me, damn it, knew which way he swung, literally or figuratively. Oh well. I walked to my first class of the day, lackluster grades in hand while I wished for the moon.

My last class ended at two o’clock in the afternoon, which gave me a couple of hours to do some work on my thesis before I needed to get home and change for my delivery shift at five o’clock. Oh joy.