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.
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 Bront?s 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 Bront?s 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.
When I didn’t answer, she prodded a bit more gently. “Why did you say yes to this, Lia?” My mouth opened to answer, and she held up a hand. “No crap answers. This will only work if you’re willing to let me push you.”
Every sarcastic answer that crowded my throat was a bitch to swallow down, but I managed it. No part of me wanted to dive into the depths with her because whenever someone wanted to excavate why I felt what I felt, I had the overwhelming urge to go skydive out of a rickety-ass plane just to avoid it.
Thoughts, unwelcome and uncomfortable, flitted just beyond reach, and my mentally shaky hands couldn’t grasp onto a single one. If it were Claire sitting across from me, or my other two sisters, Molly or Isabel, if it were Finn, or my brother, Logan, or his wife, Paige, I probably could’ve come up with an answer for them.
This time, there were no narrowed eyes, just patient understanding on her face as she watched me search for an honest answer.
I shook my head, knitting my fingers together in my lap for a moment. It grounded me just enough to grip one thread as it whirled around in my head.
I don’t know what to do with my life, and I’ve been running from that for years.
The thought was a bit too naked to share. Even thinking it left me feeling unsettled because not once had I ever admitted that to anyone.
“Come now,” she said gently. “I see something going on there in your face, Miss Ward.”
My hand rubbed my forehead. Was I sweating?
“There is,” I answered. “I just, I don’t know if it helps with the issue at hand.”
Professor Atwood nodded slowly. “All right.”
“I mean, it may help. I don’t know.” Focus, Lia, just freaking focus, I willed myself. I was better than this. I flew across the Atlantic to a foreign country by myself without a single ounce of anxiety medication which, let’s be honest, was a giant win. I’d done all this unfamiliar stuff alone, and I’d managed amazingly. Yes, sure, I banged a hot Brit who never called or texted like a hot asshole, not that I’d checked my phone eighty thousand times just in case I missed something coming through, but I’d done really, really well. And just because I didn’t know what I was doing with my life, or that I was maybe possibly using continued schooling as an escape from facing that reality didn’t mean I was a screwup or anything.
I still had choices.
That stopped me short, like someone clotheslined me with a crowbar across the chest. I had choices.
The Bront?s didn’t.
“They didn’t have choices,” I whispered, my thoughts racing and tumbling so fast I could hardly keep up.
Atwood tilted her head. “Take me down that thought with you.”
I met her eyes. “They didn’t have a choice. The reality they lived in—the death of their mother, that women were still considered the property of their husbands, the modest income of their family, the fact that teaching was truly the only position they could take in order to make money—it was all out of their hands. I mean, we know that Anne enjoyed teaching more than the others, but Charlotte hated it. Yet that experience, no matter how powerless or humiliated it made her feel, shaped one of the most iconic feminist characters in classic literature.”
“Our dear Jane Eyre,” Atwood murmured, her eyes bright and excited as I rambled.
“Their lack of choices—the cage they were forced to live in—shaped everything we cherish about them.” My heart raced as I said it, and when Atwood’s face spread into a slow smile, a burst of energy spread over my middle.
“And …?” she prompted.
Right. This was the part of master’s classes that felt ridiculously pretentious, when we had to frame everything in “super smart people speak.”
I licked my lips. “It was the awareness—the consciousness—of female independence that was impossible for them to recreate in their own lives. They created an accurate reflection of their reality, the social base they knew, but crafted characters that achieved something they had yet to achieve themselves.”
Professor Atwood leaned back in her chair, still grinning. “I like it. All three sisters? Or will you focus on one in particular?”
“I’m not sure yet. Can I let you know when we meet next?”
“Of course.”
No matter what rhythm my days had found, this was the first moment when I felt like I wasn’t insane for doing this semester in London. I felt good. Tired, but good. And the exhaustion was ironic because I was sleeping like the dead every single night.
As I stood to leave, pulling my bag up over my shoulder, Professor Atwood spoke again.
“A suggestion, if you’re open to it.”
“Always,” I told her.
“Have you made your pilgrimage to Mecca yet?”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.