Page 53 of Floored

My fingers itched to ask Molly about dating an athlete. Yes, we'd grown up with Logan, and yes, I knew all the ins and outs of his life, but that was my brother. Now I found myself in an entirely different position. Most nights, I was in Oxford in my cute little flat and my cute little bed, working on my paper in various places around the city. As I'd learned, the city limits housed ten different libraries, and each had a distinct mood. The Old Library at Oxford Union was my favorite, though. Something about the curved ceilings, lined with beams, the floral-shaped windows that allowed the light to stream in, and the pre-Raphaelite murals adorning the walls, I always felt just a little bit more connected to my material. Less distracted by ... well, by my entire existence.

Even the little strawberry seemed more well-behaved when I was in that building.

When I was curled up in the green leather chair that I'd claimed, I somehow managed not to think about the little piece of ever-changing fruit with its milestones and new body parts that slowly took shape.

I managed not to think about Jude and how we'd somehow slipped into a relationship with no label, the byproduct of whatever arbitrary rules we decided were acceptable. Chemistry had the wheel of that particular decision, considering it was hard for us to keep our hands off each other when we were alone. We hadn't slept together again, not since that first night, but everything else we'd done seemed to make that a friggin’ technicality at this point.

But I still wasn't sure how to balance it among everything else.

Or if I should even try. It was completely possible I was borrowing trouble at this point to try to force Jude to put a definition on what we were doing. Or what we weren't.

As I approached Atwood's office, it made me think about Charlotte Brontë, as I often did. Conventionality is not morality, she'd written in Jane Eyre, and it seemed like an especially appropriate quote for my situation with Jude.

Was it conventional? Hell to the no.

Very little about it was done “normally.” But what was normal anyway? My brain started spinning around that question, and I found myself pausing outside Atwood's door long enough that she finally popped her head out.

"Are you coming in? Or are we meeting in the hallway now?"

I blinked. "Sorry. My brain is all …" I waved a hand around my head.

She smiled. "I was a bit foggy in the early parts of both of my pregnancies, so I can relate to the ..." She did some hand waving of her own. "One evening, I found myself quite parched, and when I started pouring water out of our pitcher, I realized—too late, mind you—that I was pouring it onto a dinner plate, rather than into a cup."

I laughed.

"What were you thinking about?" she asked. "Anything you want to talk through?"

Sinking into the chair opposite her desk, I let the thread of that thought snowball for a moment before I answered. "I was thinking about what Charlotte said about conventionality. How the definition of normal or right changes with every generation. Look at me, for example. In their time, I would've been absolutely ruined if I'd found myself in this position. I would've been forced to marry the man who ruined me, no matter the circumstances that led to it. And if I hadn't married him, I—and by extension, my family—would have been ruined in polite society. No choices would've been offered to me."

"True." Atwood sighed, a soft smile on her face. "And what made you think about that?"

I shrugged. "Everything, I guess. Even now, people would say the way we're doing things, the father and I, isn't conventional. They'd equate that to right or wrong. Similarly, how many people thought the Brontë sisters were wrong for writing their books? They had to publish them under male pseudonyms to even have a shot at making money from what they did. Society would judge them, define them, and cast them into a set category because their choices defied convention."

"And you worry that people will define you because of your choices?"

"No." I shifted in the chair. "Or I don't think that's what I'm doing. We don't wear our choices like a scarlet letter. People only know my choices if I choose to share them."

She hummed. In front of her was the same navy-blue teacup that she always drank out of, and she paused to take a sip. "That's quite true."

"We don't need to talk about it." My fingers, knit tightly together in my lap, covered the small bump underneath my black sweater, and I saw her eyes drift there. "Really. I just ... I do that sometimes. Anytime I don't know exactly what I'm doing, or should be doing, I think about them. About the sisters. And how few choices they had, simply because of when they were born, you know?"

As I spoke, I fought a feeling of defensiveness when no one had even called for a discussion on my choices. Professor Atwood removed her glasses and set them on the surface of her desk.

"Lia, I know we need to discuss your first draft—and we shall—but for a moment, would you allow an old lady to give a piece of advice?"

I gave her a look. She wasn't a day over forty-five. Old, my ass. "You're not old, but yes."

She smiled. "It's natural in this field to fixate quite strongly on the past. We're paid to do so, aren't we?"

Slowly, I nodded, not entirely sure where she was going with this.

"I know that you're still sussing out what you'd like to do with your degree once you finish, but no matter what you decide, I'd give you one word of caution." She turned the edge of her teacup to line it up with the edge of her desk, and when the angle was right, she glanced back up at me. "Be careful that you don't anchor your thoughts so firmly on the past that it's hard for you to deal with your future, especially if part of that future is unclear."

"That's not what I'm doing." But my fingers tightened over my belly, my chest felt a little tight at the gentle delivery of her words. "Isn't it a good sign that I think of them often? That I'm constantly trying to correlate our societal dilemmas with what they went through?"

"Of course that's good."

"Then why do I feel like you're chastising me?" Oh, my gawd, were my eyes getting blurry? Was I crying in her office?

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