Page 19 of Stranger to Love

I stood, smoothing the front of my tailored trousers, and checked my watch. 11:41 a.m. The seminar was due to begin in four minutes.

As we walked down the corridor toward the seminar room, Miss Davies kept pace a half-step behind me, a habit I had tried and failed to break her of since we started working together. She was an excellent teaching assistant—thorough, intelligent, and fiercely organised—but her deference occasionally bordered on the frustrating.

We took our positions at the front of the room as the students began to filter in. It was a mundane routine, one I had executed hundreds of times across my career, yet that day my eyes kept drifting toward the door with an irritating, uncharacteristic persistence.

And then she walked in.

Alex looked as though she had dragged herself out of a gutter, though she was attempting to mask it behind that usual, infuriating stride of hers—the one that suggested she owned the building and was merely leasing it back to the university. Her shoulders were hunched under her jacket, her hair a bit wilder than usual, and her face—

My breath caught in my throat, a sharp, cold spike of adrenaline hitting my chest before I could rationalise it.

The left side of her jaw was heavily bruised, a deep, angry purple blooming against her pale skin.

Beside me, I heard Miss Davies let out a small, sharp intake of breath. “Oh dear,” Billie whispered, her hand moving instinctively to her own throat. “What on earth...”

I didn't answer. I couldn't. I stood entirely stoic, my features locked into a mask of absolute detachment, even as my mind raced through the dark hours of Friday night. Who touched her that night?

Across the room, the blonde girl, Holly, caught sight of it too. She let out a gasp audible from the front row, wrapping her arms around Alex in a panicked embrace. I watched Alex flinch slightly—just a micro-movement of her shoulder—before she pulled away, smoothing down her hair and offering Holly a quick, reassuring squeeze.

I couldn't stop looking at her. It was absurd. It was unprofessional. I was a senior lecturer, a woman who prided herself on absolute emotional austerity, and yet I was standing at the podium stealing glances at a first-year undergraduate like a schoolgirl. There was an electric, terrifying pull in my chest—a sudden, fierce instinct to cross the room, demand a name, and burn down whatever corner of this city had dared to leave a mark on her.

It’s just a student, I told myself, my knuckles whitening against the edge of the podium. You feel a duty of care. Nothing more. But the lie felt thin, even to me.

I tapped the smart-board sharply, the sound cutting through the residual chatter of the room like a gunshot.

“Good morning, everyone,” I stated, my voice coming out crisp, cold, and entirely focused. “This is the final week we will spend on foundational concepts. Next week, we dive into the core material of the course. Therefore, today, I want to ensure absolute clarity on the basics.”

I loaded the bullet points onto the display. “Use your textbooks as reference as needed, or ask myself or Miss Davies for further explanation if you require it.”

The room dissolved into the low, rumbling hum of group discussion. I remained at the front for a few minutes, pretending to review my notes while my eyes inevitably tracked her.

She was taking charge of her table. Despite the exhaustion radiating off her in palpable waves, despite the visible ache in her face, Alex was leaning over her textbook, guiding the other three through the dense paragraphs on the scarcity paradigm. I watched her lips move as she explained a concept, her hands gesturing with a natural, unforced authority. She used an analogy—something about shifts at the club she worked at—and I saw the exact moment the lightbulb went on in Holly’s head.

There was a brilliant, sharp intelligence behind Alex’s cheeky grins and defensive bravado. It infuriated me how much I wanted to cultivate it. How much I wanted to control it.

I forced myself to move, walking over to the opposite side of the room to assist a table of struggling students. I leaned in, detailing the difference between marginal and average costs, but my peripheral vision remained locked on table four.

Miss Davies had walked over to them. I watched from across the room as Billie leaned over the desk, her green dress catching the low light of the seminar room. She was speaking to Alex, her expression soft—too soft, frankly—and her eyes lingered on the purple bruise with an overt, vulnerable sympathy. Alex looked up, flashing Billie that signature, devastatingly confident smirk, and I felt a sudden, ridiculous flare of irritation flare up in my throat.

Discipline, I reminded myself sharply. Maintain discipline.

But when Miss Davies moved away, and the boys at the table began a loud, circular argument about diminishing returns, I found my feet moving before my brain could intercept them.

I stopped directly beside Alex’s chair. The table went dead silent the moment my shadow fell over them.

I didn't look at Mo. I didn't look at Abdul or Holly. I stared down at Alex, looking directly at the left side of her face. Up close, the swelling was worse. It made my blood run entirely cold.

“Alex,” I said, my voice dropping into a register that was dangerously low, stripped of every ounce of my lecture-theatre performance. It was intimate, unhappy, and entirely unyielding.

She dropped her pen, the small movement sending a tiny click through the silence. She looked up at me, attempting to pull that brittle, confident smirk onto her face. “Yes, Dr. Carter?”

I didn't give her the satisfaction of a reaction. I kept my gaze bored into the bruise, my voice leaving no room for negotiation.

“Stay after class.”

I turned on my heel and walked away before she could utter a single word of defiance.

The remaining forty minutes of the seminar passed in a tense, agonising blur. When the clock finally hit the hour, the students began packing their things, the rustle of nylon and zippers filling the room. Holly gave Alex a deeply sympathetic, worried look on her way out, whispering something I couldn't catch.