Page 8 of Dream a Little Dream

Dodging the dog walkers and early risers along the river, Kenny raced his way to the University of Ryston. The campus where he worked and spent most of his time was an amalgamation of the old and new. Some buildings making up the Riverside grounds maintained an old-style English appeal of refurbished old public schools and listed buildings, but scattered among them were the modern glass-fronted additions spreading over the hundred and thirty acres making up the gated community. Accessible to the public by a walkway through a riverside woodland, it was quaint. Rural. The parents on open days often remarked how safe it felt within the confines.

Kenny didn’t tell them nowhere was safe.

Weaving onto campus, he made his way to the Psychology block. His office was in one of the antiquated buildings, an old manor house where the floorboards creaked and the walls heldsecrets of aristocratic scandals. It was probably a joke of some kind—let’s put the lot who research criminal behaviour in the creepy building with skeletons in the closets. But with the lift out of action most days, it at least gave him an extra three levels of a leg workout up the stairs where he popped out at the administration office. It was scarce of the usual staff who all offered support services to the academics or ran government-funded projects today, though. Obviously, not everyone was as eager as him to get started and shake off the remnants of a summer of debauchery.

Except for Gail.

Sat behind her computer at the desk by the window overlooking where the sun peeked down on the river, she peered over her specs, hovering her spoon full of cornflakes at her mouth. “Dr Lyons,” she greeted with her usual smile. “Welcome back.”

“You too, Gail.” He wiped his brow with the sleeve of his mesh t-shirt.

“Ha bloody ha.” Gail tutted. “You know us support staff work through the summer. Unlike you ‘part-time’ academics.”

Gail was the faculty senior secretary. Assistant on all things admin for the academics within the School of Social Sciences. She had a bunch of staff under her and had been part of the university since its inception from a lowly polytechnic. In her sixties, she was clinging on until retirement.

“I can assure you it wasn’t all lazing on a beach.” And Kenny wasn’t part time. He was a full-time associate professor.

But Gail was right. He had most of the summer off and had been fortunate enough to land a place at the annual EAPL, European Association of Psychology and Law, conference in Portugal that year, plus the training conference run by the Met in London, so he’d got out and about a fair bit more than she probably had. Albeit for work. But it also meant that when herifled through his pigeonholes, his name etched underneath, it had already filled up with varying papers and envelopes and other such things admin and postal put in there marked for his attention.

Slipping them under his arm, he headed to his single office along the corridor, buzzing himself inside with a keycard. It was still in the mass of disarray he’d left it back in July, but with the addition of a dry-cleaned suit hung on the back of the door.

“You’re a diamond, Gail!” He called out after slapping the mail on his desk cluttered with books, papers, research documents, and all the other shit he threw there to sort out later.

Heshouldhave sorted it out before jetting off to Portugal in July. Chaos and clutter threw him off balance, made it impossible to function. A messy office meant a messy mind. Or, if he were honest with himself, which he never liked to be, his mind was already such a mess that he needed his surroundings to feign the calm.

“You need to get yourself a wife,” Gail called back through the corridor.

Dry cleaning errands weren’t in Gail’s job description, but she’d been here since the area had been home to one of the largest car manufacturers in the UK, before the university took over the town and everyone within now either worked or studied here, aka longer than Kenny, and she’d known him as the eager student, therefore taken it upon herself to become his surrogate mother. No matter if he was now forty.

After unhooking the suit and grabbing his laptop bag stuffed with everything needed for his first lecture, he headed back into the faculty office.

“Rather old-fashioned, there, Gail. Dry cleaning isn’t a wife’s job.”

“True, but if you had a wife, you might dry clean your own suits to impress her.”

He snorted. Often asked why he was still a bachelor, the answer that his work kept him busy didn’t suffice anymore. So he skirted around the periphery of the truth. Why on earth would someone want a man who could psychoanalyse their every behaviour for a husband? While it wasn’t exactly like that—he wasn’t a mind reader, despite his best efforts to hone his talent—he’d had enough relationships end because of his ability to analyse his partners’ deepest thoughts and desperate desires. While that might be great on the surface, to pin down what someone might want in bed, after a while it became a weapon of control.

One he used too freely.

“Tell me you at least had a holiday romance?” Gail breathed out in exasperation. “And didn’t spend all your summer consulting?”

“I’ve given up the consultancy work.” Leaning on the doorframe, the lie rolled off his tongue easier. He had told himself to give it up, but he was still waiting for the right case… “Writing another book instead.”

“Good. Means you got time to find yourself a nice girlfriend.” She waggled a spoon poignantly. “Maybe this lady Dom’s setting you up with will work out?”

“He told you about that?” Kenny rubbed his brow, now regretting agreeing to the blind date set up by Dominic, an hourly paid political science lecturer.

“Least she’s not faculty this time, eh?” Gail peered over her glasses like a school ma’am.

Kenny said nothing. It wasn’t his fault that the affair he’d had last year with a faculty researcher ended badly; her having to leave her job as a result, leaving the occ-psyche unit in a bit of a pickle. He’d been honest with her going in. Committed relationships weren’t in his skill set. Everyone who’d fallen intobed with him all ran more than a mile away after in order to forget.

Some as far asScotland.

“I’ll shower at the gym.” He checked his watch. “Remind me which room I’m in.”

Gail clicked on her mouse, eyes on her computer screen. “Intro to Criminal Psychology, year one, LT five at nine a.m.”

Kenny winced. “Better get a wriggle on.”

---