“Just keep renting, I guess. Julie’s killing it obviously and I’m sure she wouldn’t want to renew the lease, so maybe I’d find a new roommate or something and it’d be fine.”
“So, the job is in LA?”
“It’s based here, yeah, but it’s mostly remote. Since technically I work for the entire system, I need to be able to communicate with any university library on any given day.”
“And you’ll be designing their information literacy curriculum?”
“Part of the team that’s doing it, yeah. But my job is specifically developing a program for incoming freshmen that’ll hopefully build on the skills they learned in high school.”
“From what I can tell from teaching undergrads, they basically learned how to take nudes and unintentionally distribute them as far and wide as possible in high school.”
“Yep. So I’ve got my work cut out for me.”
“Where do you even start?”
“At the beginning. Where information comes from, why it’s presented the way it is and what makes good information versus suspect. Figuring out if you’re only consuming news that reaffirms your opinion or exposing yourself to multiple points of view, full context, and expert analysis.”
“You’re gonna be good at it.”
“I know.”
He loves how confident she is. It makes him want to pull the car over and pull her over the gear shift and kiss the living breath out of her on the side of the road.
“Are they gonna let you teach?”
“That’s part of it, at least at the start of every academic year. The freshmen will be in with us during their first week or two on campus. Their university librarians will take it from there, but we’ll be getting feedback from them all year and then reevaluate at the end of the first semester. Eventually, I want to have a required course for all first-semester freshman on it, you know, a basics of research that really digs into it and guides them for the rest of their undergrad and beyond.”
“And all that, while you write during breaks, get that dissertation ready to publish.”
“Well, yeah, obviously.”
“And you could write anywhere, right? Theoretically.”
“Sure.”
“You could fly out to Greece then, if you wanted? Maybe do a little writing there.”
“Xavier?” she asks, her voice soft and . . . shit, is that . . . pity in there too?
He chances a glance away from the road over to her, but she’s not looking at him, she’s looking straight ahead, her eyes wide and unblinking. Oh, so maybe not pity, maybe . . . panic?
Shit.
He refocuses on the road. “I mean when you have some downtime, you know? Maybe take a vacation? Take a trek back to the old country.” He tries to soften it with a joke. She wouldn’t be visitinghimper se.
“I . . . don’t think I’m going to have a vacation for a while. You know, between getting settled and how busy it’ll be, I just . . .”
“I know, boss. I was kidding. It’s just gonna be weird to be halfway around the world from you.”
“Yeah,” she agrees. He looks over again and she’s twisting her ring around her finger and he can’t help it, he reaches across and takes her hand in his, squeezing gently and then feeling the tension in his shoulders relax when she twines their fingers together and rests their joined hands on the sun-warmed skin of her thigh.
The silence spreads and settles between them, not exactly uncomfortable, but a little bit heavy, full of words unspoken, and whatever she’s thinking – and he’s not sure he actually wants to know – stays in her head, even while her thumb makes soothing strokes against his.
He wishes he was strong enough to pull away.
He’s not.
“Whoa,” he says, pulling up where his phone has told him the destination is on the right.
