Bridget looked up from the papers she was squinting at, sitting on her favourite lab stool by the window, and broke into a smile that cracked his heart right open.
‘What are you doing here?’ She plopped off the stool and came to give him a quick hug.
‘I can’t believe you’re still wearing that old lab coat.’ They’d spent an afternoon using Sharpies to customise their white coats with cartoons of animals conducting scientific experiments. Standing in the lab with her again, it was as if he’d finally come home.
‘What, you mean at IPD they made you wear a boring plain one? I bet they didn’t even let you wear the antler goggles, did they?’
He laughed. ‘I’d forgotten about those. They were such a health and safety hazard. But, more importantly, please tell me you aren’t refusing to use the office?’
Most of the twenty or so postgrads and postdocs used a communal office, where each of them had a desk and some storage space.
She shrugged, glancing back at the workbench beneath the window. ‘I like working here. Why would I want a crowded office with no natural light or clean air?’
‘Space? No students spilling acid on your stuff? A place to hide from Cole or take a mid-experiment snooze?’
‘Please! As if the prof ever deigns to enter the lowly lab.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘But what are you doing here? And if it’s not for a job interview then I don’t want to hear it.’
‘I’d better not say, then.’
Her face fell. Noticing him watching her, she quickly forced a smile. ‘Well, it’s lovely to see you anyway. Do you have time to stay for a coffee?’
‘Yes.’
‘Great. Let’s go to the café downstairs. They’ve started doing a yoghurty muffin thing that is so good it’s worth facing the med-student crush.’
‘Or, we could go into my office? I’ve got a proper coffee machine in there. And doughnuts.’
Bridget pointed at him, eyes narrowed. ‘Is your office inside the Nottingham University Medical School Neuroscience Department?’
He couldn’t help grinning. ‘It is.’
‘In the old cleaning cupboard that overlooks the morgue entrance, which we always said only the no-hope losers would accept as their office?’
‘The very same.’
‘I am so happy that you ended up a loser and I need at least two doughnuts to celebrate the dream team being back together.’
‘Ah, Cooper. I thought that was you. Is Dr Donovan bringing you up to date?’ Professor Cole had appeared out of nowhere.
‘We were actually about to have a meeting to discuss the project.’
‘Make sure she provides you with a detailed plan. I want to know you’re happy with the timescales. We need a wedding by t equals eight weeks.’ He disappeared as quickly as he’d appeared.
Cooper did some quick calculations as they headed into the cupboard office. ‘That’s the May bank holiday.’
Bridget plonked herself in the creaky, clapped-out spinny chair that the lab assistant had pinched from Behavioural Sciences. ‘Yep.’
She tried to spin around but the chair merely let out a loud screech and jammed stuck after moving a couple of inches. ‘I tried to explain the inconvenient timing but he wasn’t interested.’
‘Good job he’s handed things over to the new senior research assistant, then, isn’t it?’
Bridget clutched her heart with both hands beneath her lab coat. ‘I cannot tell you how relieved I am to no longer be dealing with this by myself. This is one of the best days of my whole life.’
Cooper turned his back and started fiddling with the coffee machine. He knew that wasn’t true – Bridget had one of those lives and one of those personalities that found great days all over the place. But for him, sitting in his new office that managed to be stuffy and freezing cold both at the same time, sipping coffee and listening to Bridget explain her work on the compatibility project so far, her cheek stuffed with custard doughnut; knowing that this was where he was going to be for the foreseeable future – well, it definitely made his top three.
* * *
Everyone else on the course thought they were mad, but Cooper and Bridget knew that the only way to end up on the same final-year research project was to both apply to the one that no other student would want to go near. Any other professor or doctor, and it was too likely that they would end up on separate projects. So that was how, despite Professor Cole being a boorish, sexist, highly annoying grouch, Cooper and Bridget ended up spending several hours each week carrying out research under the vigilant supervision of Professor Cole’s research technician, Justin.
