Week 4 / Friday

Julian and Larissa’s normal practice outside covid was that Julian would get home a little before Larissa. When Larissa got home, unless it was too windy, they’d get Asha’s black bathers on and go for a swim out in front of their place, and then Larissa would sit in Julian’s lap on one of their sun lounges, and they’d smooch and tell each other about their day. And covid was easing, so they were starting to get back to their normal practice.

Larissa had sat in Julian’s lap bouncing with excitement as she told him about the changes they’d made to her course. Which led straight to bed, of course, given what she was actually bouncing on when she bounced in his lap. Well, and the fact that her tits were out, and Julian loved his favourite handles. Well, he had to put his hands somewhere, he claimed. Only then would she get to her phone calls of the day. But this Friday night, Julian was the excited one. The signs were subtle but enough for Larissa who knew her man inside out by now. So she said he had to go first.

He gave her a big smile, and said, “Well, you know it was uni day today, right?” Sure, Larissa was aware of that. Julian generally went up to their university once a week for the morning and caught up with a bunch of people who collaborated with the project – rumours, research, and advice. “Well, today, I got a message asking if Layna and Chez could come to one of the meetings as well, so they did. When we got into the room, there’s a bunch of profs there, and the dean of science as well.”

“Wow,” Larissa said. It was usually just a bunch of doctoral candidates he met with.

“Yep. So Chez, Layna and I, looking each other, what the hell is this? Well, then the dean said that our project is doing really good. Our hit count and social media presence, and the attention we’re getting from the politicians – great. But what they really love is how solid our content is. So Layna says that we all know that it’s because of our wonderful collaborations with the uni teams, and how much we value that. Cause she was worried, like me, that it was suddenly going to be a problem. Well, and the guys I work with said something about that last time. Well, Hannah, actually, you know her.”

“Yes, Hannah – how’s she doing? She’s lovely people!”

Larissa had been having a bad day not long after her and Julian and started living together, and she’d decided that she couldn’t wait until she got home from working at the restaurant for some comfort time, so she’d gone and sat in the back of one of Julian’s tutorials, waiting for it to finish. Hannah was the doctoral student running the tutorial, and when it finished she’d heard Julian ask what was up with Larissa, and when the answer was that she’d totally screwed up some chemistry related assignment for her course, Hannah had invited her back to see her the next day for what turned into a ninety minute tutorial on the chemistry of aqueous ions. Life saving, and purely out of the goodness of her heart. “We should catch up with her!”

Julian smiled. “Yes, she’s lovely isn’t she? She’s doing really well, actually. We were talking today, and she told me that she’s actually got a boyfriend, a really wonderful patient guy, and she’s so beyond thrilled. And her mum and dad love him, and she’s hoping he’ll be moving in with them soon.”

“Oh, that’s so great! I’m soooo happy for her.” The thing was, Hannah was a lovely girl, and a serious science nerd, but she also had lupus pretty bad, and she was pretty much wheelchair bound.

“Guess what?! She watched the video of our wedding, and she loved loved loved the whole dancing in your underwear thing. She asked me whether it would be possible that she could do that with us.”

Well, wow. “Yes, I mean, of course, but how would we do that?” But if was at all possible, Larissa would do whatever it took.

“Well, she does dance with her guy – he supports her to be upright, and she cuddles up to him and loves it. And she did the underwear thing with just him, but she’d just love for them to do it with a few others around her, to feel part of the group.”

“Next Friday then? We invite them here?” Stuff the party they’d been invited to, this was the thing they should do.

Julian nodded. “The stairs will be a challenge, but she also loves to swim, so yes, here. I’ll talk to her. And I think she’ll be OK about covid.”

Larissa bounced on Julian. “Great! We should invite Steph and Xander too. And maybe Layna and Joe. Anyway, back to your story!”

“Right, so the dean said that the amount of work we were getting them to do was actually becoming a bit of an issue, and getting people to sign NDAs, but they love what we’re doing, so they’ve been talking about it. Well, they made us a proposal. They want to sponsor the project, bless their most famous science comms graduates, get the uni name on our videos, leverage us into getting themselves a reputation for cutting edge science communications. But they’ve got no money to offer us, not after having no international students for the last couple of years. So what they want to do is that our project will also be an official uni project, so that they can have a cost centre to record the hours against, which will make it easier for all the people helping us. And they’ll enrol us to do a masters degree in science communications, for free, first students in a new course they’re going to develop. All we have to do is submit a formal paper describing each video as we make it, why we did it, how it fits into our master plan, and what research we did in the background, and who did what. And they’ll give us whatever media back up we need, and we can go on the record using the university name as our affiliation, though we can’t speak on its behalf.”

Julian was clearly – and rightly – thrilled with that. Larissa gave him an enthusiastic kiss and said, “Sounds great! But will it be too much work? I bet Chez was worried about that.”