Page 3 of Love, Academically

She frowned slightly before plastering that annoyingly beautiful smile on her face again, as she stood and grabbed the tin from his desk.

“Here,” he said, offering her the battered and dogeared staff handbook back. He did not want it.

“You keep it, I’ve got loads. I’ll book you on those courses.” She turned to leave. “Oh, and Rhys?”

“Hmm?” His eyes were on his screen already because now this ridiculous conversation was over, he could get back to what he was supposed to be doing. What more could she possibly want?

“What’s with the whole ‘Miss Cartwright’ thing? Call me Lila.”

He cut his eyes to her, surprised. Was she trying to be his friend?

“Okay, see you later!” She hugged the cookie tin to her chest and swept out of the room, leaving rainbows and sweetness in her wake.

Rhys scowled at the door she’d left open.

Lila

By about four, Lila had finished her tin of cookies and had made a significant dent in checking the student intranet log-ins that had been inputted incorrectly by the previous coordinator.

But she was flagging as she watched the students stream past her door, heading home or to the pub, clustered together, laughing and joking.

Grabbing her phone from her bag, she pulled up the group chat she had with her two best friends.

Jasmeet text back immediately.

Lila smiled. For all her toughness and no-bullshit attitude, Jasmeet loved her job as a primary school teacher, and her kids loved her.

Yes, it was all snot and tears and scraped knees, but Jasmeet’s fridge was covered in beautifully scribbled, colourful cards and pictures from her students, past and present. More were added every year.

Maddy was always late to the party and couldn’t remember anything, but she was one hundred percent forgiven because she had the most adorable, squidgiest, giggliest seven-month-old baby that Lila had ever seen.

That was a long message for Maddy, so Ellie must be sleeping. Ruby, Maddy’s wife, was probably desperate to get Maddy out of the house. She could be ever so slightly helicopter-y.

Lila sighed. So much for girls night.

Who was she kidding? Jasmeet was the beauty of their little threesome, all sultry, large chocolate eyes, glossy black hair and the longest legs Lila had ever seen.

Telling Jasmeet that she found Rhys the teeny, tiniest bit attractive, and possibly that his arse was like a little round peach, was probably not one of her brightest moments, because Jasmeet had hung on to it like how a snowy owl grabs a vole.

But she had pushed and pushed and Lila had to give her something, some indication that she was over Jason.

And she was over Jason. Completely. It was just hard to put herself out there again.

Her phone buzzed in her hand. She clicked on the email alert and sucked in a breath.

The bright blues of the job website filled the little screen, with ‘We’ve found the perfect job for you…

’ at the top. Yeah right, like they had.

Lexicography jobs were few and far between, especially for someone as lowly qualified as her (‘lowly’, meaning not at all).

She scrolled down, and what would you know.

They had found the most perfect, gold-dust, flawless job in the entire world.

Lexicographer/Editor at Oxford University Press.

Actually writing and editing the dictionary, her dream job.

She scanned through the requirements quickly.

Undergraduate degree in a relevant field; her English Literature degree would do nicely.

Preferably a postgraduate degree in Linguistics, Language or Translation or appropriate professional experience.

That meant that every man and their dog with a postgraduate degree vaguely connected to the field would be applying.

That was that then.

Lila didn’t have a postgraduate degree, and she didn’t have ‘appropriate professional experience’.

Really, clicking on the “yes, show me job alerts for ‘lexicography’” was the most wishful of all wishful thinking.

The agreement had been that when Jason finished his medical training and became a doctor, it would be his turn to support her and she would go back to university to do a Masters in Linguistics, because who didn’t love finding out where words came from? But of course, that never happened.

She very rarely opened up the knitting basket in her mind marked “Feelings Left Over from Jason”, never unwinding the purple ball of anxiety, the yellow one of self-doubt, or the massive bright red ball of fluffy, unworkable wool labelled “missed opportunities and self-pity”, because quite frankly, they did nothing to help her.

All they did was make her feel bad. Lila pushed down those feelings deep and hard into her stomach, because no.

He was not her life anymore. She was happy and carefree and she could do what she liked. She was “Kenough”.

She read through the job listing again. The closest she would ever get was her job in the university, adjacent to, but never touching, the world of words and language.

In Lila’s dream, she would be surrounded by words all day, discovering where they came from, how they developed.

She’d be writing new meanings of words as they changed through modernisation of usage.

It was the archaeology of language, the uncovering of forgotten pieces of history, the deciding of how the world was viewed through the most important form of communication: words.

Queen lexicographer, Susie Dent of Dictionary Corner, was (of course) Lila’s rock star.

Lila clicked through to the MA in Linguistics on the university’s web page.

It would be the absolute perfect course, but there was no way she could afford it, not even part-time or even with the discount the university would give her because she worked there.

She still had that loan to repay from her time with Jason.

Besides, she’d have to explain it all to her boss, Sue, and that would mean letting people know that she had a desire to do something, putting herself out there for someone to laugh at and tell her that she wasn’t worth it, and wouldn’t be able to do it.

Lila clicked back onto her list of student logins for the intranet with a sigh. Dreams were all well and good, but not when they got in the way of putting the food on the table, and keeping the roof over her head, as well as the cookies in her tin.

Besides, she’d never be good enough for a lexicography job.