What If We Did | ✔️ COMPLETED

Prologue

A/N - This is a first, completely unedited draft. There WILL be spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

Honestly, I don't want to spend the next three years doing a degree in linguistics. Not because I don't enjoy learning—I do. It's how I landed the scholarship in the first place.

I'm aware I applied, interviewed, and studied as hard as I could to get into Oxford. I know it's an incredible opportunity. I'm lucky to have even been offered it. But what I really wanted was to go travelling with my best friend, Lauren.

In many ways, Lauren is extremely lucky. She hates her parents and will do anything to spite them—like sack off uni and buy a one-way ticket to Bali. Which is exactly what I was supposed to be doing. It's why I've been waitressing every day for the last two years.

Unlike Lauren, however, I adore my mum.

Mum migrated to England from Ireland when she was nine months pregnant with me. She had no friends, no family, no money. We stayed in the back of a B&B near Yorkshire—our home was basically a shed. Mum started out as a maid. Now, she runs the entire place on her own.

After all the sacrifices she's made—all the hours she's poured into me, the love she's never held back—she's only ever asked for one thing: that I do well in school, go to a good university, and get a decent job. One that means I won't have to live paycheck to paycheck.

Would you want to be the one to tell your mother—the best person you know—that you refuse to fulfil the only thing she's ever asked of you? I think not.

I keep telling myself: if I didn't want to go to uni, why the hell did I spend hours applying to all the best ones? I spent weeks on my personal statement. I poured all my charm into my interviews. I think, deep down, I always knew this was going to be the way.

The only saving grace is Him.
No, I'm not talking about Jesus or God—though godly is certainly a way I would describe him.

I met Him at orientation. I never got his name. I know nothing about him. But he's the reason I started thinking maybe four more years of education might not be the worst thing to happen. Not to be that girl or anything—the one who changes her mind because of a boy—but I guess he gave me hope.

I wish I could say we met under some extremely cute circumstances. Like our eyes met across a bar, or a mutual friend thought we'd get on like a house on fire, or I bumped into him and he immediately knew I was the love of his life.

Actually, I met him because I somehow got locked in a bathroom and then got stuck trying to clamber out the window. Luckily (or unluckily, depending how you look at it), he was the first person who came along. The first person who could help me.

He stopped for a brief second, watching me dangle through the window.

I don't know why, but I thought the smartest and best plan of action was to go headfirst out. Only, the window was barely the width of me and halfway up the wall. I had to climb onto the sink just to reach it.

None of that was remotely a good idea. Yet I still went ahead with it. And of course, I got stuck. I'd been there for a good five minutes (which felt like five hundred), trying to force myself through, before he rocked up.

When he regained composure at the weird and sorry sight in front of him, he said, "Do you usually prefer to take windows over doors?"

"No!" I half-howled, half-huffed. "I'm stuck!"

"I can see that."

His voice was so nice it made me look at him properly. Tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, dark-eyed. An absolute stunner of a man stood before me, while I was suspended mid-air like a horrifying circus act. In that moment, death would have been kinder.