Excerpt of Just Once by Lori Handeland

He was only twenty-three, but he'd been to Vietnam and back; so had many of them. The GI Bill was in full force on campuses across America. Former soldiers going to college on Uncle Sam's dime. It was the least they deserved.

Charley could have taken advantage of the bill himself. No money for college meant he'd been drafted, and while he had spent time as a grunt with a gun, he'd also had a camera. He could have come home after his first tour; instead he'd stayed and kept on shooting. The pictures he'd taken while marching through the jungle, in the midst of firefights, faces, bodies covered in blood, the tears and the laughter, then his insider's view of the final days in Saigon had landed him here.

For the summer semester he would teach Advanced Photography, and in the fall he would begin his new job with the Associated Press. This was the life he'd dreamed of while growing up on a farm not very far away.

"Are you Charley Blackwell?"

In the middle of searching for his notes, which must be at the bottom of his camera bag, below every camera body, lens and filter he owned, Charley glanced up and into the prettiest green eyes he'd ever known.

"I am." He smiled. "And you are?"

The girl blushed, her cheeks turning apricot instead of crimson, a shade lighter than the auburn streaks in her dark brown hair. Her summer weight short skirt and tie-dyed T-shirt were replicated all over the room, but she wore them a lot better than anyone else.

"I'm Francesca Sicari."

"Fancy," he said.

She lifted her eyebrows and her mouth quirked. "People usually call me Frankie."

He rarely did.

Charley managed not to touch her while she was his student, but it wasn't easy. That skin—dusky with a hint of peach—begged touching. Those eyes, like a wise Egyptian cat's—he found himself staring into them when he should have been teaching. Her hair, which hung to her waist as so many women's did then, was thick and straight and whenever it swayed a different shade revealed itself. He wanted to photograph that hair at dusk, at dawn and every hour in between.

She was his best student, as well as his most talented student. Frankie saw things in a way no one else did. When Charley looked at her photographs he found a world he wouldn't have without her, a world that was different from the one he saw through his lens. That's what photography was all about.

She sat in the front row of his class for six weeks and drove him mad. Whenever she was near he smelled lemons. Charley had always liked lemons, usually in his vodka and lemonade.

He later learned the streaks in her hair were from lying in the sun after combing lemon juice through the strands. Something all the girls were doing. Strangely she was the only one who smelled like lemons even after she'd washed the juice away.

They would go out with the other students—take pictures, have a beer afterward, talk about photography, the war, the election, the death penalty, the meaning of Bohemian Rhapsody—anything, everything—then go their separate ways.

Charley dreamed of her every night.

It wasn't appropriate. He was her teacher. But he wasn't a teacher. This was a short-term gig. He started counting the days until the summer semester was over.

After that final class, the students filed out, shaking Charley's hand, thanking him, wishing him well. Frankie sat in her chair until everyone was gone.

Charley had been waiting for a time when there would be only them; now that it was here he wasn't sure what to say. They were two years apart in age, but he felt so much older. Probably too old.

He still woke sometimes, screaming in the night. A lot of the guys who'd come back from Vietnam did. Charley had witnessed plenty of horrors. Recording them seemed to have imprinted the images on his brain as well as on film. The thought of Francesca seeing him screaming, crying, thrashing . . . he wasn't sure he could stand it.

"I hope you enjoyed the class."

Her lips curved. She didn't speak.

Charley opened and closed his hands, a nervous gesture he usually soothed by picking up a camera, so he did. He trained the lens on her.

She placed her palm over the glass. "Maybe later."

"Later?" he repeated stupidly.

She took his hand and led him home.

Later—after—he took pictures of her and she took pictures of him. They were the first set of many.