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Blake should have expected the on campus coffeeshop to be super busy on a Wednesday afternoon, yet she still made the decision to order her tea latte five minutes ahead while waiting for the elevator in the next building over. Universities were the perfect place to inspire burgeoning minds, while also capturing influential words from academics at the forefront of their fields. Money, though still a factor always at play, seemed to taint the minds at these institutions far less than the world outside.
Blake tapped her notepad against her leg while she sent the audio recording she’d just finished a few moments prior to her personal email for safe keeping. Its large file size took almost a minute to send. Another thirty seconds later and the elevator’s reverberating ding filled the empty halls of the Howard E. Kripke building on the south side of U of B’s main campus.
With two hours of interviews now at her disposal, Blake almost couldn’t wait to get home so she could start her latest article for the Vale Journal. Almost. The only things standing in her way were the after-effects of waking up before 6 AM so she could catch her first subject before his class began at 7:30.
Thankfully, by the time Blake made the short walk from the Kripke building to the student centre, her tea was waiting for her at the coffee shop bar.
Blake approached the counter and pulled the lid off her tea. Before she could add a packet of sugar, a woman, maybe eighteen or nineteen, moved into Blake’s personal space.
“Sorry,” the student said, reaching over Blake’s arm so she could grab an extra coffee collar from the shelf.
Blake drew back, surprised by frantic nature of the woman. Not a second after she’d left, a boy’s shoulder bag nudged Blake in the back, pulling a disgruntled huff from her throat.
It’d only been five years since she’d graduated from her Alma mater and yet, being around kids these days really tested her patience. Scratch that. Being around rude and unobservant people, really tested her patience.
After stirring her tea and fastening the lid once again, Blake picked up the drink in her free hand and turned to throw out the darkened wooden stir stick. Her lips perked up in a half smile when her trash found its target, but the new demeanor would not last long.
A blur of blonde hair drifted through Blake’s periphery before her body, tired of being bumped into, moved to react. Somehow, despite the blonde’s current trajectory, the two women did not intersect. Instead, as the blonde pivoted to avoid crashing into Blake, all of her belongings, crashed to the floor.
For a moment, Blake felt vindicated. It served this woman right to drop all of her things if she refused to pay attention to where she was going. However, the sentiment quickly vanished from Blake’s mind as she replayed the event over in her head. Much to Blake’s chagrin, the blonde wasn’t the only one not completely aware of her surroundings.
The words, I’m sorry, were ready to leave Blake’s lips, when the blonde, who’d by then, kneeled down to pick up her dropped books and phone, turned and looked back. She was young, but not young enough to be an undergraduate student—not unless she’d started her studies later in life. An onlooker would have never guessed she’d just committed the awkward plunder of losing all of her belongings, because as she looked up at Blake, she supplied a wide and bright smile.
“I didn’t see you there,” she said, now standing at full height, a good few inches taller than Blake.
“I—Me neither,” Blake forced out, trying to stop her eyes from roaming.
It was rather difficult when the woman’s piercing stare never seemed to falter. She had a pair of black rimmed glasses resting atop her nest of golden hair and motioned to them as she followed up on her original statement. Blake didn’t hear it.
“I’m sorry?” Blake inwardly cringed at her sudden lack of ability to pay attention.
She was a journalist by profession and a self-proclaimed excellent listener. Today, however, was not a good example of either.
“Oh, I said, it’d probably help if I’d actually been wearing these properly.”
Blade nodded along, dumbly. No longer able to hold her gaze, Blake’s focus shifted down to the two books in the blonde’s arms: Understanding Film Theory and The Art of Film: An Introduction. Blake was a bit surprised at the content matter but supposed an aspiration to act was not farfetched considering how attractive the woman was.
“So, what are you—” Blake tried to ask, but the woman was backing away with an apologetic smile still gracing her features.
“I’m sorry, but I am really really late now, and my sister is going to kill me.”
She made the throat slitting motion with her free hand before turning around to head for the front doors.
Blake watched her go, before sucking in a deep breath, and heading for the exit as well. As she took her second step however, a jingling of metal against the polished concrete floor below, stopped Blake in her tracks. She looked down and saw a set of car keys attached to a chain with other bobbles and tags sticking off of it. Blake was pretty sure those weren’t there a few minutes ago and really, what better excuse did she need to run after the bubbly, yet elusive, blonde student she’d just met?
“Hey,” Blake called out.
The woman didn’t turn initially, probably having drowned out the raucous chatter of the student centre lobby. Already prepared to ignore the weird looks she would surely receive, Blake broke off into a jog to catch up. When she reached the entrance, the blonde had just stepped into the road at the crosswalk.
“Hey,” Blake tried again, now that they were in the relatively quieter outdoor space.
This time, the other woman did turn around. There was a curious glint her eyes as she waited for Blake to approach. The spark fell when her eyes dropped to see the ring of keys in Blake’s hand.
“I think you dropped these earlier,” she said, holding the keys out.
For the first time, the back of the key remote came into view. It took Blake a second for the logo on it to register with her brain, but when it did, a look of puzzlement settled over her. How was this film student, dressed in black joggers and a faded grey T-shirt, driving around a car worth over a hundred thousand dollars?
“Oh! Yes. Thanks,” the woman replied, taking the keys gingerly from Blake’s outstretched hand.
She blew out a sigh as she pocketed them, then looked back up when Blake hadn’t made a move to walk away.
“Was there something else?” she asked playfully, not at all mimicking the hardened lines across Blake’s face.
Blake blinked. Who was this woman, so bright and cheerful, with all the world’s things simply handed to her? Did the car belong to her parents’ or had they actually gifted the vehicle over—tax, title, and license? Despite priding herself on not reading people at face value, there were very few spins Blake could apply to this woman’s situation. Blake really did want to see the best in her, but all she saw were her classmates growing up, surrounded by wealth, success, and happiness. Nothing trying to hold them back.
“Nice car you got there.” Blake felt the words pass her lips as if another soul had been controlling them.
“I’m sorry?”
It was the blonde’s turn to not hear her properly, or maybe just second guess what Blake had said.
“Nice car,” Blake tried again, mouth barely forming the proper shapes for the words as if her hardened features had turned her tongue to stone.
“Oh,” the blonde blushed, shifting her books and phone to her other hand so she could fish the keys out of her pocket. “It’s not mine,” she said, even quieter.
She fingered through the bobbles on the chain until she got to a plastic key card with a snowflake etched into the surface.
“It belongs to my sister’s girlfriend.”
“Your sister’s girlfriend?” The words were heavy, hitting Blake over the head with each clearly enunciated syllable.
“Yes. They left the car at my place last time we went out drinking.”
A pause gave Blake enough time to partially recover before her stomach could successfully eat away at the rest of her body. She was suddenly very glad she hadn’t taken a sip of her drink yet or eaten anything since breakfast, really.
“ But hey, maybe I can convince Weiss to let me take you for a drive… Or just look inside.”
“Weiss?” Blake asked, her hearing sounding fuzzy again.
Why was this stranger she’d just assumed the worst of, offering to drive her around in a one hundred-thousand-dollar car?
“My sister’s girlfriend. She sort of owns this giant energy conglomerate.”
“Schnee Dust.” Blake made the connection now. The snowflake access card. The twenty-something woman she’d read about in one of her colleague’s articles that had inherited the business when her father mysteriously vanished while on vacation in the tropics. “Your sister is dating the heir to the Schnee Dust company?”
“Majority shareholder now, actually,” the woman corrected her.
“And she would let you drive her car?” Blake asked.
The woman shrugged. “She likes me—I think.” She said the last part in a hushed tone, almost introspectively. “She definitely likes my sister, so maybe.”
Blake nodded.
“Would you be interested if by some miracle, she said yes?”
The insides of Blake’s stomach were swirling again, though for an entirely different reason. Did she want to say yes to this stranger?
“I would.”
Apparently, she did.
“Oh.” The answer seemed to surprise both her and Blake. “Well, I am on way to give these back to my sister before her class that starts in… has already started five minutes ago.” The woman blew a sharp breath of air through her nose as she looked away from her phone’s darkened home screen. “Welp. I guess I will be waiting until that’s over.”
Blake nodded again as her hand tapped at the side of her coffee cup. It looked like the woman was going to say something else, when the sound of a car approaching caught Blake’s attention. She grabbed the other woman’s arm that was holding her books and pulled her out of the road. Her skin was warm from standing out in the sun for the last few minutes and left a thin layer of moisture on Blake’s fingertips. After letting go of the woman’s arm, Blake stared at her hand for a moment, before lowering it back to her side.
“Thanks,” the woman replied, blushing slightly—although it was hard for Blake to tell in the blinding sunlight.
In retrospect, the woman barely had one foot on the pavement. Still, she seemed quite thankful for Blake’s quick thinking. Following the incident, conversation stalled for another prolonged period of silence, before Blake said, “So your sister is a student here?”
“Yes. She’s in the graduate engineering program. That smarty-pants.” She chuckled with a proud fondness, before her eyes settled back on Blake.
“What about you? Are you a student as well?” She nodded towards the notebooks Blake was juggling in her hand that also held the tea.
“Oh, no. No. No,” Blake assured her.
There was nothing wrong with being a student. Blake was just very glad that part of her life was behind her and she could now focus on important pursuits like human rights and getting to know tall blonde women on college campuses.
“What about you?” Blake asked. “Are you a student here?”
“I’m a professor, actually,” the woman replied.
“A professor?”
She’d definitely heard correctly this time, yet all Blake could do was picture the woman on some cheesy pulp fiction cover with her glasses low on her nose and the title The professor, written below. Blake willed away the growing red flush on her face and tried to focus.
“Yes. I teach Film Studies.” She lifted the books in her hands a smidge as evidence of her statement.
“Right. Of course,” Blake replied.
“I look a little young to be a professor, huh?”
“Uh…” Blake looked over the woman’s shoulder at a group of young men passing by across the street. They had their heads down, hands gripping the straps of their backpacks. Blake wished she had something proper to hold onto. Against all logic, she could not get that word, professor, out of her head. Unfortunately, the image of the woman now holding one tip of her glasses in her mouth just wouldn’t leave Blake’s mind.
“You don’t have to humour me,” the woman continued. “I know I’m kind of young to be a professor.”
“Hey!” Blake blurted.
The woman jolted—eyes wide at Blake’s outburst.
“I should probably get going. I need start on this new piece, now that I’ve gotten some interviews out of the way. It was nice meeting you prof—”
Blake didn’t think she could complete the sentence. The other woman, however, misread Blake’s hesitation and completed it for her.
“Professor Xiao-Long,” she said. “But since you’re not one of my students, you can just call me Yang.”
She winked, before trying and failing to make eye contact with Blake once again.
“It was nice to meet you, Yang,” Blake finally replied.
Yang nodded with a smile, though after a few seconds time it appeared to falter. It was like she could see right through Blake’s thinly veiled façade of doubt and embarrassment.
“Well…” Blake stepped back to leave, when Yang took a step forward.
“Do I need to wow you with an expensive super car before I get your name?” Yang asked.
Her fingers danced against the spine of the thicker textbook, before coming to a rest. Blake couldn’t help but follow their movement—intended distraction or not.
“You don’t need to, but it would help,” Blake offered, finding Yang’s cheeky grin infectious.
She wondered what it would be like to wind her own fingers between Yang’s.
“So?” Yang asked.
She took a step closer to Blake, entering her personal bubble. Though it made Blake noticeably uncomfortable, it was far from the irritated frustration she’d felt earlier in the coffeeshop. As Blake flicked her tongue up against her teeth to reply with her name, Yang’s hand, reaching out towards her, made it go slack.
Her long fingers were paler than Blake’s, with nails that were rounded and white at the tips. Blake imagined taking one in her mouth and—
“Blake, huh?”
Blake’s head shot up in surprise. Yang had adjusted the coffee collar on her cup to read out the name on the label.
“I’ve never met a Blake before. How does it feel being the first?”
Blake failed to produce a response, instead shaking her head with slightly parted lips like a guppy searching a fish tank for food.
Yang laughed good-naturedly at Blake’s response, before lightly shoving her shoulder and finally stepping back.
“I’m sorry, that was a terrible joke. “
“Yeah, terrible,” Blake mumbled.
Yang shook her head, then shrugged.
“I never said I taught comedy. Anyway…” Yang shoved her free hand in her pocket where the car keys were and shrugged. “I’ll let you get going. It was nice meeting you, Blake.”