Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
I roll into the parking lot and into an empty space, passing the sign that reads PERMIT PARKING ONLY in large red block letters.
Fuckers. It’s a parking lot at a university. People pay a fortune just to be here, and they still have to pay to leave their car on a slab of asphalt.
As I pull my helmet off and tie my hair back at the nape of my neck, a security guard watches me from across the lot like I’ve just wheeled in a live grenade. His sunglasses hide his eyes from this distance, but I can see the stiffness in his stance from here.
A university that probably teaches entire courses on fiscal responsibility, bleeding everyone dry with parking fines… then paying a guy to stand here all day and make sure no one dares to park for free.
Higher education is a fucking joke.
I swing a leg off my bike and walk towards the Physics building without breaking eye contact with the guy. He silently watches me, his hand hovering near the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt like it’s a badge of honour. But he doesn’t move to grab it.
When I get close enough, I give him a nod.
“Good boy.”
He quickly looks away from me with a nervous twitch, then heads in the opposite direction.
I approach the door to the Physics building at the same time as two students, and one of the girls freezes as I pull the door open for them and step aside.
“Ladies.” I nod at them.
The other one drops her gaze, slowly dragging it back up my body as she inhales slowly like she’s trying to steady herself. “Uh… thanks,” she says quietly, her hand brushing her friend’s arm as she guides her inside.
But she looks back before she’s fully through the door, her gaze sharpening with intent as a playful smile tugs at her lips.
Sorry, sweetheart. I’m here for something that’s already taken up every inch of me.
I smile at her as I move past them in the hallway, heading towards the faculty offices to find my doc.
But the main hallway looks quite different today.
It’s lined with oversized posters pinned to portable boards, each guarded by an anxious-looking student.
Clusters of people drift between them with arms folded behind their backs like they’re touring a museum, murmuring to each other as they peer down their noses at the displays.
I stop beside the first one and look down at the skinny, pale kid with large glasses sliding down his nose. He looks like he’s been drafted to show off his poster at gunpoint.
“What’s this?” I ask, motioning vaguely at the hallway.
“A… student conference,” he says, barely loud enough for me to hear him over the murmur of conversation around us.
I slide my gaze to his poster and nod at it. “And what’s your claim to fame?”
His eyes widen, then he turns to the board. “Uh… Field-Induced Dissociation in Weakly Bound Molecular Systems. I’m looking at how composite particles separate under variable potential gradients and tracking the decay rates in—”
“Never mind,” I say, and turn to continue my way down the hall.
As I weave through the crowd, I spot a stream of people heading into one of the classrooms. I follow them in and scan the rows of seats from the back of the room until I see him.
Cade sits in the front row with several other professors I recognize from my last visit to his office. He’s slouched in his seat, looking bored as fuck, twirling a pen between his fingers while some kid fumbles to set up a PowerPoint at the front of the room.
I slip into a seat in the back row where I’ve got a clear line of sight, and watch him.
The guy sitting next to him leans in to say something, his mouth curled in a conspiratorial grin. Cade just glances at him with a flat, unimpressed expression, like whatever joke he told him didn’t even earn the energy of an eye-roll.
This man just becomes more perfect by the fucking second.
“Is this seat taken?” a voice asks from my left.
“Yes.” I don’t look away from Cade as I lift my arm and drape it over the seatback.
“Ok!” A perky-as-fuck voice cuts through the low hum of the room.
I tear my gaze from Cade to see a pretty blonde woman at the front with her hands clasped in front of her and a massive smile spread across her face.
“I hope everyone had a good lunch, and thanks for joining us this afternoon for our graduate student presentations.”
She continues to yap away as she introduces the student waiting to present, and I let my eyes find Cade again.
My man is wearing a cable-knit sweater. And I want nothing more than to bend him over a desk in that and nothing else, and fuck him.
But also… something seems off.
While he’s usually a cranky fucker, and I fucking love that about him, there seems to be a different kind of darkness hanging over him today.
His hair is messier, like he’s run his hands through it one too many times, and his scruff is longer than usual.
He looks exhausted and completely uninterested in anything happening in this room, more than any other time I’ve watched him.
He looks hollow, and almost… sad.
His fingers brush the side of his coffee cup on the table as he slowly twirls his pen in his hand while he listens to the presentation, and I wonder what he has in there today.
The student at the front finally wraps up, and a slide appears on the large screen with Questions? in bold letters.
For fuck’s sake, this isn’t over yet?
Several hands lift into the air across the room, and I roll my eyes with a sigh, which earns me a glare from a girl a couple seats down. I cock an eyebrow at her, and when her gaze drops to my cut, she quickly turns away and starts whispering to her friend.
A guy in the middle row clears his throat when called on to ask his question. “Did you account for vibrational mode coupling when you analyzed the dissociation pathways?”
The student brightens, like she’s been waiting her whole life for that question, and flips back a few slides in her PowerPoint. “Yes, I did consider that when isolating frequency dependencies…”
Oh my fucking god.
And Cade looks just as annoyed as I feel. He reaches for his cup and downs what’s left in one long gulp, like maybe whatever’s in there might stop him from stabbing himself with his own pen.
Finally, question period ends, and another student takes the front. I drag a hand down my face, wondering how many more of these I’m going to have to sit through before I can bury my cock in my professor’s ass.
But then the next PowerPoint appears on the screen, and my interest piques.
Thermodynamic Implications of Ancilla–System Interactions in Stochastic Quantum Measurements
Spencer Holwell, Ph.D. candidate
Supervisor: Dr. Cade Cormier
“Hi, everyone.” Spencer smiles around the room, and I huff a quiet laugh to myself.
He’s the complete opposite of his supervisor, looking like he’s right where he wants to be, and loving every second of this before it even begins.
“Thanks for coming. I’m Spencer Holwell, Ph.D. candidate under Dr. Cormier, and today I’ll be talking about thermodynamic implications of ancilla–system interactions in stochastic quantum measurements.”
He dives right in, talking about things like back-actions, interaction Hamiltonians, and measurement costs as if they’re part of casual small talk. But I’m not watching Spencer. I’m watching Cade as something interesting happens.
It’s subtle, but something in him seems to spark to life as he listens to his student, the change barely there but impossible for me to miss.
He sits up a bit straighter, and he brightens just enough that only someone watching for it would notice.
To anyone else, I’m sure he still looks like a disinterested asshole, but I see the way his focus sharpens, how his head tilts slightly when Spencer says something that makes him think, the faint twitch at the corner of his mouth when a point lands the way he likes, and those small, approving nods he probably doesn’t even realize he’s giving.
It’s the quiet shift of a man locked onto something he cares about, and for a moment, I almost understand why people sit through this kind of thing willingly.
Almost.
Suddenly, I feel eyes on me, and I slide my gaze a couple seats down from Cade, where the perky blonde from earlier is watching me with an uneasy look on her face.
I remember her quite fondly from the first day I came here looking for Cade. She was all attitude and gatekeeping until her coworkers folded. But she had fight in her even though she was clearly scared shitless.
She leans over and taps Cade’s arm, trying to get his attention. But he just shoots her a look and shrugs her off.
God, I love him.
But she persists, murmuring something to him, and he stills. Then his gaze slides over his shoulder and finds mine.
Hey, baby.
He holds my gaze for a moment, then turns back to Spencer like I’m not even here. He’s fucking perfect.
“Questions?” Spencer asks as he finishes his presentation and looks around the room with a smile.
“Yes.” One of Cade’s colleagues, who I recognize as the guy who nearly pissed himself when I told him to point me in Cade’s direction, raises his hand. “Do you think your cost model might be ignoring the decoherence effects in the ancilla over time?”
Spencer’s brow furrows as his gaze darts to Cade, who rubs his forehead with a sigh.
“Well,” Spencer says, shifting his attention back to the professor, “the model incorporates those effects in the effective Hamiltonian, so they aren’t ignored, but treated as part of the system cost.”
“Yes, I understand that, but what about scaling that to non-Markovian regimes?” he asks.
Cade turns his head towards him, levelling him with a look that makes him shrink back in his seat, and makes me smile.
Spencer clears his throat. “As I was saying, the model already accounts for those conditions by extending the cost function to include time-correlated noise. So, no, it’s not neglected.” He glances around the room. “Any other questions?”
No one else puts their hand up.
Excellent.
But as Spencer takes his seat, another student takes the front.
Alright. Enough of this.
As I stand, Cade’s gaze immediately flicks to me. I tilt my head towards the door, then turn and walk out. I lean against the wall just outside the door, facing a fidgety student babysitting his poster across from me.
Until Cade appears.
His dark blue eyes lock on mine as he stands before me, silently waiting for me to explain why I brought him out here. But he already knows why.
“You’re done here,” I say.
His chin lifts, and his eyes narrow slightly. “You think you can just show up and expect me to follow you?”
I push off the wall and close the space between us, lifting a hand to run my fingers over the cable-knit sweater on his chest. “Yes. I do.”
He exhales through his nose and shakes his head. “I can’t just leave.”
“No?” I ask, tilting my head. “Because you looked pretty fucking done in there.” I lean in until I catch the faint smell of rum on his breath, ignoring the feeling of eyes on us from people down the hall. “And it looks like the rum’s not strong enough for that kind of torture.”
His hands land on my chest, and he pushes me back with a glare that dares me to push harder.
But I just smile, because whatever it was that was missing from him today is flickering back to life.
I shrug and lean against the wall again. “If you need to stay, stay. Your choice.”
Cade doesn’t move as he continues to stand before me, like there’s a war playing out inside him.
But I don’t push and try to convince myself I’ll understand if he chooses to stay.
For whatever fucking reason that would be.
Then, slowly, the corner of his lips tilts up, and his harsh edges soften, just enough to let me in.
I smile. “Let’s fucking ride, baby.”