Another Love Read Free Page A

strange interaction. Maybe he was just trying to amuse himself. Nerd-baiting had been popular when she was at school, but she’d hoped that university would be different. She heard the scrape of a chair on the next table and felt him turn towards the sound; an accomplice maybe? Ah, yes, that would be it, a dare. Well done, Mr Good-Looking. Job done.
    The next day, however, he sat next to her again. This time he took his biro and drew a smiley face on her folder. She felt confused, welcoming the interaction but so unsure of his intentions that she feared making a fool of herself. She reciprocated in the only way she knew how, by drawing a ladybird on his folder. He encased it in a bubble and added an arrow pointing in her direction, above which he wrote, You.
    Her scrawled reply was swift. A ladybird? Really?
    To which he replied, It’s the eyes…
    She had the last word. And the spots!
    On the third day, he greeted her with a whispered, ‘Hey, Bug Girl!’
    She smiled, very much liking the idea of being his Bug Girl, happy to have this connection. Even if it was only because he admired her bookishness, it was still a thrill.
    They quickly established a ritual whereby whoever arrived first would place their rucksack on the seat next to them and ward off anyone else with a steely stare. Their contact was confined to the library. This was unsurprising as Romilly rarely ventured to the Student Union bar and was not a frequenter of the bars and clubs favoured by David and his cronies. And David had never even heard of the volunteer programme at Bristol Zoo, where she spent many hours in the butterfly forest explaining lifecycles and other fascinating facts to the general public.
    Three weeks after their first encounter, they met in the stairwell. Heading in opposite directions and both with large folders held tightly against their chests, they hovered, she above and he below. It felt coincidental but also opportune; it was what she had been longing for, a chance meeting. Both were rooted to the spot, unmoved by the tuts and yells and the trundling feet forced to navigate around them. It was as if they were each in a force field of their own, singled out from the crowd and marked as being of special interest.
    For the first time, he spoke to her in a voice louder than a whisper. ‘Hey, Bug Girl.’ And all of a sudden she felt a spike of envy. It was an unfamiliar sensation, a bit like hunger and fear and anger all swirled into one. She could taste the sour note of jealousy that blossomed on her tongue as she stuttered her response. For she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that boys like David Wells didn’t fall in love with bookish, ginger-haired, spectacle-wearing girls like her. They went for leggy, long-haired gigglers like Carrie and Holly, girls who knew sexy stuff and weren’t afraid to be manhandled, unfazed at the prospect of their T-shirt riding up or inadvertently flashing their pants.
    Romilly had never been that sort of girl. Being clever was her thing, her nose always firmly inside a book as she crept from the library to lectures and back again. The boys that courted her were the ones who also studied science and who also wore specs and who knew every word to the entire series of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and weren’t afraid to spend an entire coach journey to Dartmoor and back again proving this. David was in another league entirely and it was a league in which she wasn’t even a minor player.
    ‘It’s Romilly.’ She nodded.
    ‘David Wells.’ He smiled.
    They continued to sit close to each other in the library, getting to know each other little by little via whispered exchanges, some gentle teasing and the scrawling of information and ideas in gel pen across each other’s notes and files. They would then stroll back to halls together, down the steep pavements of Park Street or up towards Whiteladies Road, meandering and chatting, whatever the weather.
    ‘How can you spend all day, every day, studying