“You hate it when anyone calls you that,” his colleague pointed out. “Even the students. Really, Quinn. You’ve earned that—”
A knock on Quinn’s office door stalled Graham’s tirade, and he stuttered, a tight-lipped Fokker Dr.I stalling out before he could crest into a full lecture on protocol and honorifics. A very familiar young woman popped her head in before Quinn could answer the knock, and she beamed when she spotted him behind his desk. Blonde and endowed with curves broad enough to bend light, her face was a study in cat-eye makeup and glittery powder.
“Hi! Can I borrow you for a minute?” She bounced in, her body packed tightly into a pair of yoga pants and an eye-bleeding neon-pink tank barely strong enough to hold her chest in. “I wanted to talk to you about my paper.”
She looked familiar, and Quinn frowned, knowing he’d seen her somewhere. Something about her wiggle and flashing white teeth triggered a spark in his memory. “Oh, ‘Industrial Revolution and its Artistic Influences.’” His brain crackled, chasing down the threads connecting her to his class and then her assignment. “You didn’t turn your paper in. It’s… a week late, I think.”
“Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” She moved aside to let Graham pass by, pressing herself up against Quinn’s desk.
“I’ll see you later, Dr. Morgan.” Graham’s mouth was a thread of flesh in his gaunt face. “You’re coming to the readings tonight, right?”
“Oh, yeah. Um, I’m bringing a friend of mine. Rafe. He said it sounded like fun.” The word fun was stretching the truth, but Rafe’d been enthusiastic. Quinn shrugged at Graham’s raised eyebrows. “Okay, so he said interesting, but he wanted to go.”
“You’ve got a boyfriend?”
LeAnne—her name popped into Quinn’s brain, slamming into the space behind his forehead. Her wiggling against his desk stopped.
“Wow, you so don’t even—I mean, I didn’t—”
“I’ll see you there, then, Quinn. Try not to work too late.” Graham’s eyes washed cold over LeAnne as he left. “And I’ll leave the door open unless you want it closed.”
“No, open’s fine. Thanks.” Quinn waved LeAnne over to the chair Graham’d been sitting in. “Okay, tell me, what do you think there’s left to talk about?”
BY MIDAFTERNOON Quinn’d gone through a lot of coffee and most of his patience. After LeAnne, there’d been a river of students with elaborate claims of alien abduction, paper-hungry dogs, and in one case, a vomiting baby and a ruined laptop. The last one he gave a pass on, especially when she’d brought the baby in a tie-dyed sling and it proceeded to provide a repeat performance of its assignment-ruining act over Quinn’s desk and, more importantly, in his coffee cup.
Shoving aside deadlines meant more papers shored up onto one end of his schedule, and Quinn cursed his calendar, inputting the last realignment for the day. Muttering as he cross-checked the regurgitation victim’s name against his student list, Quinn caught a glimpse of his clock and nearly panicked.
“Shit, the bridge is going to be a mess getting across.”
His office was relatively small, a tiny oasis of chaotic calm in the middle of a busy hall of other professors. Somehow he’d gotten a corner square—possibly an ex-broom closet—but he hadn’t cared. It was an office, his own space, and more importantly, came with two wide sash windows overlooking the greensward beyond. His desk was an old one he’d dragged from his parents’ house and refurbished after a tsk from his father about the band stickers his youngest sister stuck to its sides.
He’d lost some wall space placing it against the wall next to the door, but the tree-line view was more important than storage at the time, and he had no regrets since. There was enough storage on the bookcases lining what wall space was left, with enough space for an old leather wing chair and an iron chandelier lamp, two other refugees from the Morgan furniture stash.
It was homey, a warm space with buttery cream-painted walls, a beaten but still serviceable Persian rug his mum bartered off a man at a garage sale when he’d been ten, and a mounted wooden sign from the Whistling Penguin pub he’d helped Kane steal during a visit to Dublin in their teens.
The office was as much of his home as the house he’d torn apart and rebuilt, and Quinn needed to be in a space of his own—especially since he was still living in Miki’s warehouse without a vacate date in sight.