Page 18 of Stranger to Love

I couldn’t help but laugh. Good point. Oh no. No no. I didn’t want her to know where I lived. Fuck. I didn’t want her to realise how depressingly, damn poor I was. Not her. That was way too embarrassing.

I hesitated for too long, and she smirked. “Do you know where you live?”

Oh, that smirk. Jeez, I felt completely tongue-tied, and I never struggled to speak.

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I know where I live.”

“Well, that makes one of us,” she said, raising an eyebrow at me.

A stupid flutter rushed across my chest. This was the most we had spoken one-on-one since I started uni. In fact, this was the first time we had ever spoken one-on-one, and I was already dying to make it happen again.

I shrugged. “Heeley Street.”

She nodded and started to pull out of the car park. It wasn't exactly my address, but it was around the corner—a slightly nicer street than mine. We drove in silence for a bit, and I couldn’t help stealing glances at her. She looked incredible, yes, but she didn’t look like she’d been out on the town. So what was she doing out on a Wednesday night?

I couldn’t help but ask, finally breaking the silence, “So, what have you been up to tonight?”

She smirked as she answered, "Minding my own business.”

Well, fuck me, okay. I laughed. "Fair enough.”

“What happened to your face?” she asked dryly.

“I thought we were minding our own business,” I retorted. The tension in her jaw definitely meant she wanted to smile. I was sure of it. Instead, she just hummed in response.

She pulled up exactly where I pointed to on Heeley Street. I tugged on the door handle, but it didn't budge. I pulled it again—still nothing. Oh, I was being abducted.

“If you were enjoying my company so much, you only had to say,” I offered with a crooked smile.

She smirked—that tiny, controlled twitch—and got out of the car, walking around the front to open the passenger door for me.

“Why, thank you,” I said, hopping out and swinging my bag onto my shoulder.

She didn't linger. She simply closed the door behind me and walked back around to the driver’s side. She looked at me once, her expression unreadable. “Goodnight, Alex.”

“Goodnight, Dr. Carter,” I smiled. She didn’t smile back.

I stood there, rooted to the spot, watching her luxury car drive off. I waited a moment until she was completely gone around the corner before I started walking down the street toward my own road.

I managed to get in the house quietly, locking the door behind me. I tiptoed into the kitchen, broke off a generous handful of freezer frost, wrapped it in a dish towel, and pressed the icy compress to my swollen face.

Just brilliant. What a fucking week.

Chapter 5

Dr. Carter

The transition from the relative peace of my house to the sharp, unforgiving neon of the university corridors always required a certain shifting of gears.

That morning, however, the gears were grinding.

“I’ve laid out the seminar response sheets on the desk, Dr. Carter,” Miss Davies said, her voice dropping into that quiet, deferential rhythm she reserved for the faculty rooms. “And the foundational quizzes from last week are completely marked. I’ve sorted them alphabetically by surname.”

“Thank you, Billie,” I said, not looking up from my laptop as I cleared down a three-day backlog of institutional emails. “Any glaring anomalies in the performance metrics?”

“Not particularly. Most of the cohort is grasping the basic utility functions,” Miss Davies replied. She was standing near the window, a stack of freshly printed handouts clutched to her chest. She looked immaculate, as she always did—a dark green dress that was entirely professional yet undeniably striking, though she seemed perpetually unaware of the eyes that followed her through the department. “Though a few of the IBM students seem to be treating the opportunity cost parameters as optional reading.”

“They’ll learn otherwise by the mid-term,” I murmured, finally closing the lid of my laptop with a definitive snap.