Moving In With The Enemy

Chapter 51 ~ "I Want Us To Work"

"Annie, you should go home." I hear and I look up from my article to see Adrian standing over me.

"I will, I'm just finishing my paragraph first." I smile.

The Early Modern department is one of the only places with a microform reader at Northwestern and I've been working on this one for a while.

Our team's pretty small, it consists of Doctor Elliot and his Master's student Alyssa heading the project. Then there's five of us who help out, all of us were selected from top schools. There was myself, then Bianca who's here from Harvard, Miles who's from Stanford and then Adrian and Pike who are both from Northwestern.

A good balance of people for the most-part. Doctor Elliot said he wanted a good variety of people from different backgrounds to help with this project. Even though we were all involved with Early Modern studies, History or Anthropology, we all had diverse backgrounds and lives.

Though I will say, it seems like everyone else's background and life have far more dollar signs attached on than mine.

Most of them are renting something for a month, I'm in the dorms which was an option set up for us by the university if we wanted. Seems like everyone else had the resources not to.

We all get assigned to random tasks here and there to help Doctor Elliot with some dig site he's established in southern Texas. They bring us artifacts and it's up to us to carbon date them, research the time period and figure out some way to tie them to the region.

It's definitely cool, just extremely boring. But I know this will look good on my Master's applications.

It's late, I'm just trying to get a jump on my reading for tomorrow. Then I can chill a bit more, it is a Friday tomorrow after all.

I'd probably get this done faster if Adrian wasn't standing over me. He's been.....friendly. Maybe a little overly so, but whenever I bring Walker up he seems to shut down. He knows I've got a guy back home waiting for me.

"Alright." I sigh, turning off the machine and slipping my microform out of the machine. I walk to my desk and unlock the drawer underneath, putting it back safely. "Quitting time." I tease, locking it back up again and putting my keys in my pocket.

"What are your plans for the night?" He asks, turning out the lights with me and I shrug.

"Lay in bed and fall asleep, maybe after a shower." I tell him and he nods, holding the door for me to leave the research space first. Then he follows and I sigh, Adrian was always around, always eager to show me the campus or the city or.....something. I've gotten pretty good at shaking him loose.

"So big plans?"

"Massive." I laugh and he chuckles a bit too.

"It's late you want me to walk you?"

"No thanks, it's pretty populated out there." I shrug, pushing through the doors of the building and stepping outside. "I'm only going to Alison Hall."

"I always forget you live on campus." He laughs, like that was precious and I roll my eyes. "I'll still walk you to your door though, no worries."

"I'm alright, Adrian." I sigh, shaking my head. "I've got to go back and call Walker, we'll talk tomorrow." Just like that I give him the slip and I head off towards my building. 

All I have to say about residence is, thank god I never lived in it at Brown. I've looked at some pictures and I'm convinced Brown's is nicer. I hate shower shoes and meal hall and hearing kids screaming down the hall while I'm trying to focus.

At least it's only a month.

I walk to the doors and scan my pass on the card reader, I hear the buzzer a second later and I pull the door open.