Chapter 5
Xavier’s procrastinating.
He can admit that to himself.
There are a couple of weeks left on his lease and absolutely no reason he needs to move the rest of his stuff from his old crappy studio apartment into storage today.
But Bianca’s got a job interview this morning and while that doesn’t really mean he needed to clear out, he figured it would be easier for her without him underfoot.
Besides, the only other thing he could be doing is working on his defense presentation and the thought of even looking at it right now makes him want to projectile-vomit everywhere.
He’s so damn close to being done. It’s actually a good sign that he can’t stand to look at any of it anymore. He never feels worse about any project than when it’s nearly complete, sort of his brain’s way of telling him that the end is in sight.
Still, he’s not even doing what he’s supposed to be doing instead of working.
It’d be one thing if he was conscientiously loading the boxes he packed into the back of his car and driving them over to the storage unit he rented out for the next year.
Instead, he’s sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, digging through the crate he hadn’t even bothered to look in when it arrived.
The stuff from his mom’s house, the same box he pulled Bianca’s ring from the other day.
Oh, that’s a dangerous thought.
Bianca’s ring.
It’s temporarily hers and he needs to keep reminding himself of that, because it’s too easy for him to just slip inside this fantasy world where he finally had the balls to say something.
He’s been to enough therapists over the years to know what his issues are, why he never lets himself really fall for anyone.
It started with his parents and their shitshow of a relationship and now just it’s the life he’s chosen for himself, doing what he loves, all around the world.
And that’s a life that doesn’t include him hurting anyone like his dad hurt his mom, not to mention wives two through four.
His shrinks have all thought it’s because he’s afraid.
And yeah, he is afraid, but it’s been five years and he’s still as much of a coward as he was the first time he laid eyes on her.
It wasn’t the first class, it was the second. She hadn’t been there the week before, he was sure of it, because he absolutely would have noticed the tiny fireball of a girl who sat right at the front of the room and contributed as much to the lecture as their professor had.
And listen, yeah, he was attracted, immediately.
But he was also a little annoyed.
Was she trying to make up for missing the first class?
Probably.
Who missed the first class of the first course of their PhD program unless it was absolutely life or death?
But apparently she’d gotten permission, which annoyed him even more.
He could come up with a million different things he’d like to do other than sit in a lecture hall for a couple hours of Foundations of Information Science, a course that turned out to be an absolute, rigorous shitshow of a weed-out class, forcing students to choose early on whether or not they really wanted to pursue this degree or if they just thought Information Science sounded like an easy way to add the title of doctor in front of their name.
The hours were long, the professor borderline unreasonable, and Xavier found out later that Bianca had had to negotiate a half a letter drop in her grade in order to miss that first session for her sister’s wedding.
She still got an A-, the highest mark in the course.
(She only told him after he pestered her about it months later.)
Not that he cares about grades – in fact, he’s a pretty firm believer that grades in advanced graduate work are meaningless and sometimes actively counterproductive – but still, it was like a gauntlet being thrown.
The whole program knew what the standard was and Bianca Dimitriou was the one that set it.
After all his field work, two degrees in Archaeology, and another master’s in Information Science, he assumed fully shifting his academic focus would be challenging, but it wasn’t the program that did it, not really, especially not after that second class.
It was her, forcing him to think harder and dive deeper, to keep asking questions until he’d fully run up against the edge of current research and then beyond it.
So the last five years had been the most intellectually stimulating of his academic career, mostly from sharpening himself against her, like a blade to a whetstone.
It’d be one thing if he just thought she was hot, but he’s a better academic because of her and fuck if that isn’t even hotter somehow.
And now he’s moving in with her.
The last couple of months he’d deliberately kept himself apart.
In fact, he’d done such a good job with it, he’s pretty sure she didn’t even consider him a friend anymore, if she ever did.
His feelings were slowly but steadily getting stronger and once he knew he was leaving (and not just leaving, but moving nearly seven thousand miles away), it was time to cut that cord.
He needed separation, time to slowly untangle her life from his before it was too late.
It was clear that she hadn’t noticed his absence or if she did, that it didn’t matter much to her. She was laser-focused on finishing up her thesis, defending the shit out of it and then going off into the world to battle misinformation like the fucking plague on society that it is.
He wanted to resent her for it, wanted her to feel the loss of him the same way that he did her, but he couldn’t. The last thing he ever wanted to do is hurt her and he’s glad he didn’t.
But he’s not afraid of her getting hurt right now, because more and more it feels like he’s the one in danger.
They’re close. Too close. And getting closer by the second. Even closer than they were before.
He’s moving in, for fuck’s sake.
And he was so close to getting out of this with his dignity intact, escaping to the other side of the world.
Now though?
He’s barreling toward the heartbreak he’d been trying to avoid. He’s doing it happily, enthusiastically even, despite it all, in ways that he thought impossible. Because being allowed near her, even for just a little while, even if it’s just pretend, is worth it.
Ugh.
He has to stop.
She’s not even around and she’s completely derailed him.
It’s actually worse when she’s not there. Her presence tends to focus him.
But enough is enough.
This is pathetic.
Truly sad.
He grabs a couple of boxes, balancing them precariously on top of each other, and shoves them into the trunk of his old Jeep before coming back for a couple more.
Three trips back and forth – including one with his futon tied extremely haphazardly into the trunk of his Jeep with his hazard lights flashing – has all of his belongings stored and the apartment bare, as if he’d never been there.
He doesn’t have any particular sentimental attachment to the place, despite his five-year residence, just walls to keep out the – admittedly rare – elements and a spot to lay his head, really, but a small wave of nostalgia hits him as he flicks the light and locks the door behind him, dropping the keys into the mailbox for his landlord to pick up later.
It’s not the place, it’s the leaving that tugs at him.
He’s done that over and over again in his life – picked up, gathered his shit and moved on.
And in a couple of months he’ll do it again, even if he’ll be leaving his heart behind.
Then a year from now, he’ll move on again from Greece to wherever his career path takes him.
Hopefully, by then, time and distance will have done their thing.
They’ll have to.
He doesn’t want to think about what’ll happen to him if they don’t.
“You good?” he mutters to Amelia, whose attention is trained solely and intently on the piece of folded cardboard in front of her. The way his should be on his own work.
He’s finally found something that keeps her from demanding a spot on his keyboard typing gibberish across his screen – a miniature version of a laptop that seems to make her feel like she’s working alongside him.
It’s a solution he found scrolling through his phone, where the algorithm, through absolutely no fault of his own, has been feeding him cat videos pretty much nonstop.
Amelia gives a soft purr of contentment and Xavier hums in agreement.
He glances across the living room, past his papers and books and more drafts of his presentation than he actually wants to think about, toward Bianca’s bedroom.
Every few seconds he watches another shirt fly from one side of the open door onto the bed at the other side while she digs through her closet.
She was still here when he got home – apparently in his distracted haste to get out of her way, he’d gotten the time wrong.
Her interview is this afternoon, still a couple of hours away, and she’d given him the lowdown this morning while she was frantically flipping through the notes she’d prepared for it.
It’s a second interview with the University of California Library Systems and apparently, according to Miranda, this is the make-or-break part of the process.
Before she even got a call to interview, she’d had to submit a video of one of her instructional sessions along with an application that seemed to go on for a dozen pages.
The first was a screener to weed out candidates that had the right things on their resumes, but maybe didn’t quite live up to them in person.
This round is with the system’s director and the head librarian in charge of undergraduate curriculum development.
If Bianca gets the job, she’ll be reporting directly to them as they develop a new program to increase both digital and media literacy in undergraduate students across the state university system.
It’s her dream job and nothing can get in the way of that.
Especially not him.
So, he’s staying out of the line of fire. Or at least he’s trying to.