Those We Trust

By Charlotte Blackwood

Harmony Boyd is an aspiring writer and college student who falls in love with a tabooed man, and that love is returned. What she doesn't know is someone close to her is watching everything. What will the consequences of her actions be, for her and everyone around her?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charlotte Blackwood
• Release date: Oct 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301137510

Charlotte Blackwood

An author specializing in a variety of adult thriller categories, Charlotte Blackwood seeks to redefine the formula for writing a thriller story. She is the author of fan-pleasing novella Those We Trust and has her next novella in the works. She lives in the state of Washington, not Seattle, with her family.

Book preview

Those We Trust

Charlotte Blackwood

Published by Charlotte Blackwood at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Charlotte Blackwood

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter 1

I had fallen in love with a girl whose bedside table was home to Anna Karenina, the Bible, the Qur’an, an array of multicolored pens (she hated highlighters) and a stack of half-full spiral notebooks. Such was the workspace of a quirky young writer, and such was the altar of my affection when she was away.

The Boyd sisters were all a bit strange. It had a lot to do with their father, Professor Samuel Boyd, who many said had lost his marbles long ago. Alice, the oldest daughter, was a junior with a barely tasteful comedy show on campus. Lexi, the youngest, was a brilliant and promising freshman, but her theories caused even her professors to wonder about her sanity. The most disturbing thing of all was that Lexi, like her father, was almost always right, no matter how outlandish her ideas.

But I was in love with the middle daughter: Harmony. She was eccentric, yes, but less so than Lexi. Likewise, she was nowhere near as brilliant as Lexi, though admittedly quite bright. I ought to know. I was her professor for both Russian and British literature.

I hadn't meant to fall in love with her. After all, I worked with her father in the Literature Department. I taught her and Lexi as I had taught hundreds, thousands of other students. Certainly I'd had a pretty co-ed or two in my class, but I'd never done anything rash or unforgivable like falling in love with them. I'd never even slept with one. I couldn't tell you what was different about her, only that something made her seem completely unlike any of the other girls I'd taught and I went out of my way to spend time with her, out of my way to do whatever she asked.

The strangest part about it was that I could remember her as a little girl, running around in pink little dresses, skinning her knees and being chastised by her mother for not paying better attention. Back when her mother was alive, her father was much more social, much more normal, and many professors seemed to think that Mrs. Boyd's death had been what made him so... odd. I had known the family better than most and knew that he had been a bit odd to begin with, but her death had certainly given him more license to behave how he pleased and not according to the various standards of society. Luckily he was already tenured by that time, unlike me. I had been working towards tenure for years, still not receiving it. Likely they knew I wasn't going anywhere unless they made me, so they extended the honor, rather, to professors who needed incentive to stay, like Daniel Sampson of the Psychology Department, or the illustrious Jane Lowery of Religious Studies.

I might have left a couple of years prior, except Harmony became a student just like her sister, and she was actually in my department. I had to at least stick around for a year, just to see how Samuel Boyd's most normal daughter had grown up. I hadn't seen her since her mother died, as Samuel had become very protective of his girls and didn't really have anyone around the house, although Caleb and I still met up together elsewhere. Once I had her in my class, I knew I wouldn't leave the school until she was gone.

I hadn't fallen in love with her right away, but I was certainly intrigued by her. She knew almost everything about the American Literature we covered with the freshmen, and she ignored the teasing of her classmates with a smile and a seemingly oblivious expression. One day I asked her in to office hours.

I have to say, she said a bit shyly, I thought I was in trouble or something.

No, I said with a smile, I was just a bit concerned. Your classmates... Well, they-

I know they don't really like me, Harmony said sweetly. That's fine. It's not that I don't have friends. I do, they're just not in any of my classes.

What do you mean? I asked, sitting down across from her. It was a silly question, I knew, but I felt the inexplicable need to keep her in the room, to know more about her. I told myself that it was because I was an old family friend and curious, but I knew that wasn't it, even then.

Well, one of my best friends came to college with me, she said. I don't know if you've met Dennis Herring, but he and I have been pretty much inseparable since we were toddlers. Anyway, my roommate and Dennis have made friends with Dennis's roommate and the boys across the hall and we do pretty much everything together. But none of them are interested in literature, so I'll probably never have a class with any of them.

I watched her more closely outside of class after that, watching her grow especially close to Dennis's roommate, Eddie Barr, a promising young Economics major. Early into the second semester, her father told me that they were dating and I felt an unfamiliar jealousy raging inside of me.

It was absurd.