Read By Jove for Free Online

off his shoulder and onto the starting block above them. “Share the lane?”
    “Well, I should—oh!” Theo stared up at his side. A long, jagged scar twisted across the lower right side of his torso, along the edge of his ribcage.
    Grant jerked as if he had been burned and slid into the water. “It’s nothing.”
    She impulsively reached down and touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare. Was it an accident?”
    “Sort of,” he said shortly, and ducked under the surface.
    Theo felt like slipping back into the pool and not coming up. How could she have been so tactless and unthinking? But the scar writhing across his smooth skin like an agonized snake looked painful even now, though the wound that created it was obviously old and well healed. She had almost felt a pain in her own vitals, just looking at it.
    And now he would not meet her eyes, which was even worse. Why couldn’t she just tell him straight-out that the scar, horrible as it was, didn’t matter?
    “I need to go shower if I’m going to make it to Dr. Waterman’s first class,” she said. “What time do you want to meet for coffee? Around four?”
    Grant looked at her, his face carefully blank. “Are you sure you still want to?”
    She touched his shoulder again, a lingering touch this time, and felt shocked at her boldness. “Yes, I want to. Very much.”
    He gazed at her a moment longer then smiled wryly. “I’m sorry. I’m a little hypersensitive about my scar. Most people look disgusted and turn away, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if it revolts them. But you—”
    “Apart from being sorry that you must have suffered dreadfully at some time—”
    “You might say so,” he muttered.
    “—apart from that, it doesn’t matter.” She added softly, not caring for once if she blushed, “There’s certainly nothing wrong with the rest of you.”
    His eyes widened. “If that was a sexist comment, then I thank you. Four it is.”
    …
    Theo found herself slipping back into the routine of being a student with surprising ease. Her classes were absorbing, and some were downright fun. In Dr. Waterman’s Rhetoric and Composition class she found herself translating famous passages of literature and poetry into Latin, to try to reproduce their tone and emotion.
    Theo wrestled joyously with her translations of passages from Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and taking her courage in her hands, persuaded Grant Proctor to try his hand at it as well. She told herself it was in order to expand her educational boundaries as they compared notes. But mostly it was to guarantee that they would meet for coffee or a post-swim breakfast or lunch several days of the week.
    Grant quickly became as immersed as she in Dr. Waterman’s exercises and seemed to enjoy their amicably fierce debates over the subtleties of verbs and grammatical structures as much as she did. The fencing with words, the thrust and parry of his conversation, was exhilarating. The fact that her partner in these verbal bouts had dimples to die for was even more so.
    “Translating Jane Austen into Latin was an interesting experience,” she said as they met for lunch during the second week of classes. Dr. Waterman had given them parts of Persuasion to translate. She’d been absorbed by the task of fitting early nineteenth-century prose with Latin vocabulary and grammatical structures that gave it a slight touch of formality without becoming too stuffy. But it had been enormous fun as well. Persuasion was her favorite Austen book; not even Colin Firth—er, Pride and Prejudice —could budge it from first place.
    “I hadn’t read it before,” Grant said, frowning at his notes.
    “Hadn’t read Persuasion ?!” Theo pretended to faint in her chair. “I am shocked—positively shocked !—to hear that.”
    He looked up at her in consternation, then relaxed and smiled. “Actually, I haven’t read much modern fiction in