Page 17 of Floored

"Yeah." One-nil against Crystal Palace in a complete and utter slogfest. That was partially why I was sore today, not simply from Lia with the big blue eyes.

Lewis grunted. "Need to do better than that. They're gonna bench your arse for the new French kid. He's bloody fast, isn't he?"

My smile was tight. "I'm aware, Lewis. But thank you for the reminder."

My mobile buzzed, and a text from my manager flashed across the screen, followed by a few I'd missed the evening before.

Conworth: Before you work out, meet me in my office for a chat. You need to do better this weekend.

Everyone in my life wanted me to do better. Do more.

My manager wanted me to be faster.

My brother simply wanted me to try.

A small corner of white caught my attention, a warped image of serviette appearing behind the bottle of amber liquid on the bar cart. I walked over, smiling when I saw feminine handwriting across the surface.

"Brilliant," I whispered, tucking it into my pocket.

My life wasn't without a heavy load of complications, but just knowing I wasn't the only one who felt what I'd felt, I walked downstairs to my arsehole brother and his empty pub with a wide grin on my face.

6

LIA

The next couple of weeks had a rhythm I hadn't established in the first two weeks on this side of the Atlantic.

My body adjusted, and even though I still needed copious amounts of coffee every morning to wake, I no longer felt like a zombie by dinnertime. At home, the chaos of my days involved a larger coverage of space. Running errands and appointments could easily take me across one end of Seattle to the other. At Oxford, I covered a fairly small area. I found places I liked to eat, places I liked to read, places I liked to study, and places I liked to lie on the grass and stare at the sky like my research topic would magically fall from the fluffy white clouds and plop onto my face.

I didn't really make friends with any impossibly fashionable British girls, like I'd imagined I would, which was apparently quite normal when you were studying abroad for a semester. The girl who lived next door to me, Alyishia—at Oxford for a semester focusing on pre-Raphaelite art—was the closest thing I had to a friendly relationship. We'd traded about seven sentences when we passed each other in the hallway.

I ate a lot of bangers and mash and beef pies because I was in Great Britain, and obviously, I would gorge myself on all the meat and carbs I could possibly fit into my skinny jeans. Scones with clotted cream were the other piece I might regret once I finally brought myself to step on a scale, but each time I could continue to close my pants, I thanked my DNA for allowing me to stay slim despite my horrific eating habits while in jolly old England.

I met with Professor Atwood twice a week, and to my utter frustration, she nixed almost every single idea I came up with for my semester project. And among all of that, I hadn't heard a single word from Mr. Excellent One-Night Stand. I annoyed myself with how frequently I checked my phone because I was not that girl. I'd dated casually, and it was fine, no romantic misery attached to anything I'd experienced, but I was not the “omg, is he going to call me soon?” girl.

The most annoying part, though, was what it did to me when I was supposed to be working, supposed to be crafting a research paper on the Brontës to equal one semester’s worth of credit, and my annoying brain would drift back to random memories. The way his hand curled around my thigh when he lifted it higher against his side. The way his body caught the light in random glimpses, a bulge in his bicep when he held himself over me, the epic curve of his ass when I slid my hands down his back.

Ladies and gentlemen, it was not the thing to be thinking about when you're meeting with your advisor. My chest felt hot, and I was quite sure my forehead was popping little tiny beads of sex-memory sweat. That was right when Atwood did the thing with my stack of papers that I hated.

Smack.

"You can do better."

The sound of papers hitting with a rude slap on her desk would haunt me for the rest of my life. In the past three weeks, I'd heard that sound so many freaking times. Every time I sat in front of her, waiting for her to review my notes on which angle my research would take, I braced myself for when she looked up over the rim of her glasses, flipped the black and metal clip back around the edge of the papers, and tossed it toward me.

I took a deep breath. "Maybe I can't."

Her eyebrows rose slowly. "Pardon?"

I closed my eyes and fought a wave of utter exhaustion. For weeks, I'd circled around and around—unable to pinpoint which aspect of the Brontës I'd spend the next two months immersing myself in—the result without any success at forward movement.

"Maybe I can't come up with anything good." I huffed loudly, sinking back into the chair. "Maybe I'm just destined to be someone who really, really loves their work, but I'll never pick a thread interesting enough to unspool from the rest of it. Nothing to set me apart."

Atwood narrowed her eyes in consternation because she never, ever slumped, and I meekly adjusted my posture.

"Better, thank you," she murmured. "Now as to the other ..." Judging by the look in her eyes, I braced myself. "What complete and utter horseshit, and if I'd known you'd roll over this easily, I never would've invited you here for Michaelmas."

Oof. I rubbed at my chest because it felt a little bit like she'd jammed the corner of her laptop behind my rib cage or something for how badly that hurt.

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