Free Notorious by Cecily von Ziegesar

smelled like Polo aftershave, and Tinsley found herself longing to touch his smooth, freshly shaven cheek.
    “Tinsley Carmichael. Very nice to see you again.” His voice was deep and very professional, but this was quite clearly the highlight of his day. Where did he go from here? Trying to teach bored freshmen to care about Thucydides and Herodotus and all those other impossibly ancient historians? An intimate meeting with his gorgeous advisee was clearly the perfect way to start off his day.
    “Hey, Mr. Dalton.” She stepped inside his cluttered office, loving everything about it and him.
    He groaned in mock anguish. “Eric, please.” He indicated the leather chair in front of his desk, and Tinsley took a seat, smoothing her skirt and crossing her legs in one unified, elegant gesture. Eric pretended not to notice the slit in her skirt and sat down behind his desk. He shuffled through a stack of folders before pulling one out and opening it. “I’ve always felt like students should be able to call teachers by their first names. It makes them seem more human. And it makes me feel less ancient.”
    Tinsley had no trouble thinking of Eric as anything but human—a very healthy, red-blooded man human. Maybe she would have taken a greater interest in ancient history if Eric had been her teacher.
    He smiled across the desk at her. “So, how have things been going for you since your return to Waverly?”
    Vague question, she thought. What
things
? Classes? Boys? Annoying roommates? “Fine. It’s nice to be back.” As exciting as it was to travel the world with her parents, there was something reassuring about being back on Waverly turf, back where she knew how to spin teachers and toss off A papers on Nathaniel Hawthorne in under an hour and where the food wasn’t so exotic it bordered on inedible.
    He leaned toward her. “You know, as your adviser, I’m supposed to keep an eye on you, make sure things like the Ecstasy incident don’t happen again.” Eric looked stern for a moment, and Tinsley could tell he was getting a kick out of pretending to intimidate her.
    She nodded humbly, trying to look repentant. “It won’t.”
    “Good,” Eric said, looking satisfied. “It’s part of my job to make sure you stay on the right track.”
    “
The
right track?” Tinsley asked. “It seems like there should be more than one.”
    “For you, I’m sure there are,” Eric said with a smile, revealing a toothpaste-white grin that reminded Tinsley of when she was eleven and used to practice kissing on an eight-by-ten photo of Ashton Kutcher. “What about colleges? Any thoughts?”
    “Well, I’m looking into Columbia right now,” Tinsley lied, hating to even think about college. When pressed, she said Columbia, but really, Columbia and Princeton and Amherst and Williams all seemed like bigger versions of Waverly—filled with jaded spoiled kids exactly like her.
    “Columbia’s a good school. And what about after college?” Eric smoothed his tie against his chest and glanced down at the open folder on his desk. “I see your grades are solid in all subjects—A-minuses or B-pluses. But … I guess I don’t really get a good sense of where your interests lie.” He looked up from his folder and met Tinsley’s gaze for a little longer than appropriate. A chill ran down her spine—it felt like he was trying to peer inside her. “Besides varsity tennis since you were a freshman …” Eric raised his eyes from her folder to give Tinsley an appreciative eyebrow raise, as if to say he’d love to see her on the court sometime. “Your only extracurricular is Cinephiles, the film society.”
    “I actually
founded
the Cinephiles,” Tinsley replied, a bit defensively.
    “Well,
that’s
impressive.”
    “It’s not a big deal.” Tinsley was modest now. “But there’s this state-of-the-art screening room in the basement of Hopkins Hall that only gets used when a teacher decides to show her class a film.” Tinsley