long Tuesday night shift at Topaz, I arrived late to the Biophysics lecture. Again.

I slipped into the lecture hall with barely a door squeak. My crocs shuffled lightly on the carpet as I descended past rows and rows of occupied chairs. Sometimes they even squelched, but I was lucky today. My hoodie was tied around my waist because I'd heated up running to class, the sleeves flapping by my thighs.

I held my textbooks pre-emptively cradled in my hands, ready to open them as soon as I found a place to sit. But that was proving a real challenge, with no available seats next to the aisle.

I saw Quentin on the way to the front, in the middle of a row of seats. Inaccessible. He noticed me as I passed him, and gave me a soft smile of acknowledgement. My stomach warmed with happiness. We were still on civil terms, but I couldn't kill the endless curiosity I had towards him.

Why did he hate influencers? Was it an immediate turn-off? Could I change his mind?

Eventually, I slid into a chair at the very front of the room. The lecturer did not hide his displeasure at my late entry. Since I was so close to the front, my head would probably appear on the lecture recording. I kept my head bowed as I immediately started scribbling down notes.

In the pockets where the lecturer taught concepts I was familiar with, I let my mind wander over the last time Quen and I had spoken. After eating lunch in our pyjamas on Saturday, I had retreated to my room to begin my article on Massachusetts' native flora and fauna and the invasive species that threatened them.

Alongside being a club promoter for Topaz, an influencer and model, I was a contributing writer for Natural Affairs, a science journal that released a monthly online magazine. I wrote about biology because of my major, three pieces for each issue, which meant that roughly every week, I needed to write a popular science article. I had been doing the job for two years, and I liked it much more than Topaz. I could work from my bed, I could choose the stories I covered, and each week forced me to learn more and broaden my scientific horizons.

Halfway through writing my latest piece, I had received a Facebook message from Quen.

Krista: You're welcome. You guys were perfect patrons, don't worry. :))

It was crazy how much effort I put into crafting the perfect response.

I wanted him to like me, to see that I was just a normal person trying to make her way in the world. My social platform didn't make me any less of a potential... friend.

I wanted to be sweet but succinct, and Viv would have smacked me if she knew how much mental capacity I dedicated to choosing an emoji.

If I used the winking face, that would be much too obvious—and a little irrelevant to the rest of the message—but if I didn't use any, the words came off clipped and professional.

One parentheses in a smiley face was too passive aggressive. So I settled on two parentheses and sent the message with a racing heart.

And Quentin hadn't even replied after, which made me think he was sorely uninterested in me. Even I wanted to slap myself, if I was honest. What the hell was I doing scrutinising text punctuation?

Guys didn't make my heart race; I had that effect on them.

Why did I care so much? Was it because he didn't fawn over me like everyone else?

One hour later, the Biophys lecture was over. I took the stairs two at a time in order to catch Quentin on his way out but make it look like I had just casually appeared next to him. He was ambling slowly out of the lecture hall, held back by the crowd of students doing the same.

I fell into stride next to him and asked, "What do you have now?"

We emerged into the hallway of Science 1. "I was going to study at the library till eleven. Then I have training with the badminton team."

Ah, so he was an athlete. That explained his wiry muscles and lean physique. "Can I join you in the library?"

He turned his face to me, surprised. I prodded the bridge of my glasses with my index finger to hide my nerves. My eyebrows raised expectantly for his answer.

Then his familiar mysterious smile bloomed on his lips, "Sure."

We walked side by side to the library, up two flights of stairs and through the bookshelves until we found two places to study. Quen pulled out his laptop and opened his code-runner programme, while I pulled out my textbooks and notebook. Viv didn't know how I was still taking handwritten notes for Pre-Med, because the sheer amount of content was overwhelming.

She downloaded the lecture slides and just annotated them, but I was an old-fashioned learner. I found that nothing really stuck unless I wrote it down, so my brain would associate the concept with something physical it had done. Then I typed up my notes neatly, ready to be printed at the end of the semester for finals revision.

Ten minutes later, I couldn't help asking Quen a question. "What's the code for?"

Everyone on the eighth floor thought I was the most introverted person of them all, and for the most part I agreed. My social battery drained quickly and charged slowly. I preferred movie nights over clubbing. I didn't feel a need to fill silences with unnecessary conversation.

But I somehow always wanted to speak to Quen. It wasn't that our silences were uncomfortable—they were incredibly tranquil, in fact—it was that he was so temptingly reserved that I needed to know more about him. Why did he hate influencers?

My conversations were ropes, and I threw them at him in the hopes he would catch one and let me climb over to his soul.

Quen paused his typing and looked over to me. He gave his brow a gentle massage, and his eyes seemed much more brooding when he glanced at me through hooded lids. "It will analyse the data from the Biophys lab and spit out the answer."

"What?" I was pretty sure I looked bug-eyed. "That's so cool! But won't it take longer to write than just crunching the numbers manually?"

"This time, yes," he shrugged. "But I can reuse most of these functions for all the future labs."

"Holy shit," I awed. I suddenly became thoughtful, the idea of coding sparking a familiar idea I'd been having over the years.

Quentin noticed the look on my face and asked, "What? Did you want me to send you the code? You can use Spyder to run it, if you want."

I smiled at his generous offer. I was a rare specimen on campus in that I wanted to retain my academic integrity. "No, I was actually going to ask you if I think I should learn to code. I've always wanted to, but now I feel like it'd be a really useful skill."

"It is useful," Quentin answered. "But it's entirely up to you."

"Can you recommend a language to learn first?"

He rubbed his chin, deliberating, and my eyes trailed over the veins on his tanned forearms. When he glanced up, I quickly met his gaze with my own, like it had never wandered.

"Python is the easiest to start on. It's very intuitive."

"Okay, I'll consider that. Thanks."

Quentin pushed the lid of his laptop further back and returned to his work with a soft, barely perceptible smile.

I knew I had assignments to work on, but thanks to my weekend study sessions, I could spare an hour or so to follow my digressive burst of inspiration. I found an online Python workshop to work through, which taught the basics of writing functions and creating object types. After five minutes, I had learnt enough to pull together a sweet little function.

It asked the user for their name, and then printed, Hey, Name, I like the colour of your shirt.

"Here, give this a try." I slid my laptop over to Quentin.

He read the prompt for his name, and typed it in quickly. Then he pressed the Shift and Enter key on the keyboard, which caused the function to execute. I didn't know that was a way to run the function. I had been pressing the button on the webpage's dashboard like a chump. Coding lifehack, I noted.

He laughed at the result, his lips stretching wide and his eyes scrunching up narrow. "Blue is a nice colour."

I felt starstruck at the sight, at the warm, husky sound, which I had never heard before.

"Impressive. You're a quick learner," he complimented me. He took hold of my laptop and poised his hands to enter some code of his own. "Do you mind?"

I shook my head, leaning back into my chair so whatever he did would be a surprise. Was I a fool that I found his programming skills attractive? Probably.

One minute later, after rapid typing and a few key clicks, he pushed the laptop in front of me. "Your turn."

Quen's programme prompted me for my name as well, so I entered it and copied his Shift+Enter hack. The programme printed out a Unicode flower, composed of slashes, hyphens and other punctuation marks. It had five petals and a large round centre, inside which said Krista.

Oh, my poor heart.

"Sap," I smirked slyly, letting none of the giddiness I felt show on my face. "This is how you plan to get a job in software, isn't it? Wooing your employers with crafty code."

He responded dead seriously, "No-one can resist my function execution."

I laughed loudly at that, before someone told me to shut up from five rows down. As I slapped my hand over my lips to stifle my chuckles, Quen cracked up, too, but he managed to keep his laughter to an acceptable volume. I was just ecstatic that I got to see him laugh one more time. He was gorgeous.

We both went back to our work with wide smiles on our faces. Before I closed the code runner, I copied Quentin's code into a blank document and saved it. I was serious about learning code, had been for a long time, and now that it gave me something in common with Quen, I was sure I would continue teaching myself.

There would come a day when I understood exactly the code he had written and how to replicate it myself, but until that day—and even after it—I wanted the reminder of the flower he had given me.

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Quentin was such an anomaly.

He was quiet but witty, reserved but confident. He didn't react to me the way many men did. After Noah had blown my cover and shown him my Instagram, I had half expected him to make an account and follow me. But that didn't happen.

He was as silent on social media as ever. I tried to start a conversation on Facebook with him after that study session in the library, and he had not taken the bait. It went down in less than ten minutes.

Krista: Good luck for badminton practise.

Krista: I didn't even know Halston had a badminton team. Do you guys play competitively?

Krista: Go Foxes then! :))

And he hadn't replied.

Hadn't even seen it till sometime between six and seven in the evening, which were the two intervals when I had checked. He just left a heart reaction on my latest message, without continuing the conversation or starting a new one. Surely if he liked me, he would invite me to a game or something.

I was starting to wonder if he was even attracted to me. Most guys were, if the sideways glances and double takes were any indication. But it was no secret that I really let myself go around campus in that I didn't use makeup, perfume or eye-catching clothing. Actually, from an alternative perspective it was a secret because I looked so different that no-one recognised me.

Maybe I was going about it the wrong way. I considered how my friends would have approached it.

Viv's method of getting guys to ask her out meant making out with them at the clubs the first night they met, and then tempting them with revealing Snapchat or Instagram Close Friends stories, and then being a stone-cold bitch to them in person.

She managed to keep a rotating carousel of boys who wanted to date her, but would take whatever they could get, to use as fuck buddies—and only ever once. "One and done," was one of Viv's many snappy life mantras.

Riley's method—

Hell, I didn't even know. I bet she didn't even know, either. She had only dated one person in her life, Phoenix, and they had fallen in love accidentally, the way high school sweethearts did. They'd been together for five years before splitting up before the semester started.

Apparently she was under the impression that they would keep their relationship semi-long distance while she travelled the world and gained experience to write future novels with. He thought that after she graduated, she could find a job in Carsonville like he did and finally settle down. There was really no way to compromise, so they ended things. The more she partied and drank, the more I knew she was hurting. And that was a lot.

My method of getting boys was non-existent. Because, I didn't really get boys. I didn't bait or tempt or chase them. All my life, they had just magically shown up at my doorstep and begged for a chance. I had so many unanswered messages, so many mobile phone numbers drunkenly slipped to me, that I hardly knew what to do with them.

Starting relationships was a matter of just picking a guy from the bunch. And yet, that had never appealed to me before. Maybe it was the way that most men only appreciated my looks, not my opinions or interests. They were interested in sex, and nothing else.

Or that they laid it on thick at Topaz but not around campus. I wanted an affection strong enough to withstand the light of day.

But surely, despite my inexperience with chasing men, and dating in general, I wasn't doing something wrong with Quen. The way I acted around him was so obvious. The thing standing in my way had to be his opinion of influencers.

It dug at me, nestled like a small prickle in my heart. Not enough to occupy my waking thoughts and distract me in classes, but—

Why, goddamnit? The one man I met who was smart, modest, and respectful. The one man who was driven towards his future. The one man I actually liked.

And he disliked people who do what I do.

I knew as soon as I considered it—the wave of excited determination that swept over my spine more telling than any empirical evidence—that I had to change Quen's mind. Maybe he couldn't get over his prejudice. Maybe he would and still wouldn't see me like I saw him.

But, fuck, I was going to try.

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What do we all study here? If you aren't in uni, what would you like to study in the future? Or if further education is not for you, what subject fascinates you?

I study Physics - so if you ever read a thick chunk of science fangirling, just know that is me speaking through Krista. Also, if you ever read a STEM-induced meltdown, that is also me. Physics is a cruel mistress.

Aimee x