Chapter 5
Xavier’s procrastinating.
He can admit that to himself.
There are a couple of weeks left on his lease and absolutely no reason he needs to move the rest of his stuff from his old crappy studio apartment into storage today.
But Bianca’s got a job interview this morning and while that doesn’t really mean he needed to clear out, he figured it would be easier for her without him underfoot. Besides, the only other thing he could be doing is working on his defense presentation and the thought of even looking at it right now makes him want to projectile-vomit everywhere.
He’s so damn close to being done. It’s actually a good sign that he can’t stand to look at any of it anymore. He never feels worse about any project than when it’s nearly complete, sort of his brain’s way of telling him that the end is in sight.
Still, he’s not even doing what he’s supposed to be doing instead of working.
It’d be one thing if he was conscientiously loading the boxes he packed into the back of his car and driving them over to the storage unit he rented out for the next year. Instead, he’s sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, digging through the crate he hadn’t even bothered to look in when it arrived. The stufffrom his mom’s house, the same box he pulled Bianca’s ring from the other day.
Oh, that’s a dangerous thought.
Bianca’s ring.
It’stemporarilyhers and he needs to keep reminding himself of that, because it’s too easy for him to just slip inside this fantasy world where he finally had the balls to say something.
He’s been to enough therapists over the years to know what his issues are, why he never lets himself really fall for anyone. It started with his parents and their shitshow of a relationship and now just it’s the life he’s chosen for himself, doing what he loves, all around the world. And that’s a life that doesn’t include him hurting anyone like his dad hurt his mom, not to mention wives two through four.
His shrinks have all thought it’s because he’s afraid.
And yeah, he is afraid, but it’s been five years and he’s still as much of a coward as he was the first time he laid eyes on her.
It wasn’t the first class, it was the second. She hadn’t been there the week before, he was sure of it, because he absolutely would have noticed the tiny fireball of a girl who sat right at the front of the room and contributed as much to the lecture as their professor had.
And listen, yeah, he was attracted, immediately.
But he was also a little annoyed.
Was she trying to make up for missing the first class?
Probably.
Who missed the first class of the first course of their PhD program unless it was absolutely life or death?
But apparently she’d gotten permission, which annoyed him even more. He could come up with a million different things he’d like to do other than sit in a lecture hall for a couple hours of Foundations of Information Science, a course that turned out to be an absolute, rigorous shitshow of a weed-out class, forcingstudents to choose early on whether or not they really wanted to pursue this degree or if they just thought Information Science sounded like an easy way to add the title of doctor in front of their name. The hours were long, the professor borderline unreasonable, and Xavier found out later that Bianca had had to negotiate a half a letter drop in her grade in order to miss that first session for her sister’s wedding.
She still got an A-, the highest mark in the course.
(She only told him after he pestered her about it months later.)
Not that he cares about grades – in fact, he’s a pretty firm believer that grades in advanced graduate work are meaningless and sometimes actively counterproductive – but still, it was like a gauntlet being thrown.
The whole program knew what the standard was and Bianca Dimitriou was the one that set it.
After all his field work, two degrees in Archaeology, and another master’s in Information Science, he assumed fully shifting his academic focus would be challenging, but it wasn’t the program that did it, not really, especially not after that second class. It was her, forcing him to think harder and dive deeper, to keep asking questions until he’d fully run up against the edge of current research and then beyond it. So the last five years had been the most intellectually stimulating of his academic career, mostly from sharpening himself against her, like a blade to a whetstone.
It’d be one thing if he just thought she was hot, but he’s a better academic because of her and fuck if that isn’t even hotter somehow.
And now he’s moving in with her.
The last couple of months he’d deliberately kept himself apart. In fact, he’d done such a good job with it, he’s pretty sure she didn’t even consider him a friend anymore, if she ever did.His feelings were slowly but steadily getting stronger and once he knew he was leaving (and not just leaving, but moving nearly seven thousand miles away), it was time to cut that cord.
He needed separation, time to slowly untangle her life from his before it was too late.
