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worry,” he said kindly. “A lot of people get muddled in their first week. How are you finding Cambridge?”
    “Oh my goodness, it’s perfect,” Sasha gushed. “Just magical, thank you. St. Michael’s is like a dream come true.” She thought,
He seems very kind. I shouldn’t have judged him so harshly the other day.
    “It’s certainly a very special place,” said Theo.
I wonder if her nipples go darker when she blushes?
“Especially for we physicists. These are exciting times, Sasha. World-changing times. And Cambridge is right at the heart of it.”
    Sasha felt a rush of excitement and pride so strong she had to grip the chair even tighter. She loved the way he said “we.” Professor Theodore Dexter, a Cambridge physics professor, her tutor, was addressing
her
, Sasha Miller from Frant, as an equal. She felt like a coconspirator in some wonderful, top-secret plot. Looking at him close up for the first time, she had to admit that Professor Dexter really was terribly good looking. Better looking than he’d seemed across the parking lot at the Cavendish labs. He reminded her of an American actor…she was so bad with names, she’d never remember which one…one of the doctors from
ER
perhaps? He was certainly very young. She’d been right about that the other day.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Isaac Newton discovered the generalized binomial theorem at twenty-two. Mozart wrote his first concerto at six. You can’t put an age limit on genius.
    “Listen, Sasha, I’m afraid I’m a bit busy just at the moment. I wasn’t expecting you, you see.”
    “Oh. Of course.” Embarrassed, Sasha got up to go. “I’ll get the notes from one of the others and I’ll, er…I’ll come back next week. Sorry.”
    “Please, stop apologizing,” said Theo smoothly. “If you like I could meet you somewhere for a drink this evening? We can talkthrough the course, what’s expected of you, the lecture schedules…that sort of thing.”
    It was such an unexpected suggestion that for a moment Sasha didn’t say anything. She was supposed to be calling Will this evening for a proper chat. She’d even blown off Georgia, who’d been on at her to come to some quiz night at Caius, because she wanted to focus on Will. It had only been a week, but already Sasha felt like the distance between them was growing. All the magazines said that long-distance relationships took work.
    But she couldn’t exactly turn down her professor. Not after he’d been so understanding about her coming at the wrong time and all that.
    “All right. Thanks. Where should I…?”
    “I’ll leave a note in your pigeonhole.”
    Sasha left, and Theo turned back to his book. All of a sudden his spirits had lifted exponentially.
    Perhaps inspiration was about to strike after all?

CHAPTER FOUR

    M ICHAELMAS TERM SEEMED to race by. Sasha hadn’t ever known time to pass so quickly. Once the excitement of freshers week was over, St. Michael’s got back to work. The bar was still packed every night, but by eight thirty in the morning a steady stream of green-faced undergraduates could be seen on their bicycles heading for labs or libraries. Even Georgia, whose dedication to partying was the stuff of legend, dutifully trekked off to the architecture faculty building every morning with a back-breaking stack of files under her arm.
    When she didn’t have a supervision with Professor Dexter, Sasha spent her days shuttling between the Cavendish lab and the university library (the
UL
). After a brief panic in the first two weeks, when she’d worried she might be out of her depth intellectually (Professor Clancy’s “introductory” lecture on nanophotonics was so impenetrable he might as well have been speaking Urdu), she soon relaxed and began to delight in her studies. Not only was the teaching phenomenal—physics lessons at St. Agnes’s felt like another lifetime already—but the facilities and technology at her disposal were the stuff of