Dedicated to someone who has always been a friend and has supported my meager writing from the very start, a true published author if you will!

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PTOOEY!

After spitting his coffee out, Dan grimaced. All in the mostly-student & university teaching staff customer base of the artisan café and bakery had turned to gape and gawk at his outburst.

Disgusted with himself for drinking cold coffee, he was currently more pissed at his earlier decision to not stand up and order another cup than the flush spreading on his face for embarrassing himself in front of his peers yet again.

At this point though, if Dan had to drink one more asinine cup of coffee, he would go mad.

He had not started his collegiate journey drinking at least three cups of coffee a day, but his chosen field made him choose either to drink a ton of coffee or pull all his hair out from sheer exhaustion out of all the work the professors called on him to do.

Did they think he was superhuman or something? There was only twenty-four hours in a day!

The warm and inviting atmosphere of the quaint café situated right outside of campus contrasted heavily with Dan's foul mood this evening. Not even the sound of cellos crescendo from the speakers, or the smell of freshly baked French-inspired pastries could make him crack a slight hint of a smile.

Truthfully, Dan had been fiddling with his laptop for a long time, and still the SDE model, short for Stochastic differential equations, that he built was not running smoothly in MATLAB.

In real life, he suspected the SDEs could only be used on stock prices, so his professor was essentially getting his cohort to do his investment portfolio assessment for free.

Usually, it would not take him this long to get the model to work properly.

What had he done this time to mess up so bad?

Exasperated, he combed through his hair, accidentally catching a glimpse of his tussled raven mane and disheveled frame in the afternoon light streaming in from the window.

Had it already been several hours since he'd last taken a break?

Checking his analog leather watch, Dan moved to pack up his things just as a waitress with a tag that read "I'm majoring in fine arts!" approached him with a black-lined notebook in hand.

"Would you like anything to go with your order?", she said matter-of-factly, making the Korean doctoral student assume she didn't want to be here as much as he did at the moment.

"No thanks," he responded back, letting a fake grin spread to his eyes.

Dropping it once the liberal arts major left his sight, he sighed.

That's what happens if you didn't go in STEM, he conceitedly thought.

Leaving a small tip with the check, he headed out, clicking the heels of his dress shoes together once he left the tiny café behind.

The sun was setting, and it seemed like a good time as ever to take a nice stroll around the block before his first night class.

Sometimes it paid not to be a Graduate Teaching Assistant, not that he got paid a lot for his efforts, (twenty-three thousand a year was nothing to write home about), but at least he wouldn't have to go to class so late and work so many hours grading other student's work if he had not selected academia.

Honestly, if was not for the fact that he lived and breathed statistics, he probably would have chosen a field that didn't require so much teaching.

As an introvert at heart, getting up in front of a class and speaking was the most nerve-wracking experience had to do, and he had to do it everyday in front of an academic audience.

Not looking ahead of him, he smacked right into a telephone pole, and felt his head throb with pain.

Aigoo.

Great! What else could go wrong this day?

Tying a dark umbrella to his backpack lest the rain start suddenly, which it happened to do in the Buckeye State, he wiped his hands off with hand sanitizer wipes, and pulled out the antiquated macramé bracelet the airport girl had dropped so many months ago at JFK.

As far as he knew, her name was Olivia, at least that is what 'Steven', the guy she was with at the festival, called her.

Clicking the button to use the crosswalk, he stopped in his tracks when he spotted the girl in question.

The tiny knots seemed to slip from his fingers till he encircled his fingers tightly on the scarlet macramé bracelet, causing textile burn to form on his feeble hands.

Without hesitation, he let his feet carry him on his way, and forgot to think twice as he normally did.

"Shamrock girl?", he asked, biting his lip in nervousness as he approached her on the cement sidewalk.

She furrowed her eyebrows and tipped her head to the side. "Who's asking?"

"We met at an airport parking lot a while back...umm...you lost your green sun hat, and I picked it up?"

Still, she looked at him with a blank expression on her face.

"Then you left your red macramé bracelet on the floor on your way out?", he added, hoping she would recollect, and he could quickly go on his way.

"Not ringing any bells," she replied, attempting to leave his immediate vicinity.

Stranger danger is the only thought that ran through her head at the time. Even with all her problems, she still remembered the high incidence of crimes around the area surrounding campus.

"Wait!", he called out, grabbing her wrist, and gently placing her scarlet macramé bracelet on it.

"Thanks", she reluctantly muttered, then turned to leave in quick succession.

"I also saw you at a music festival the other day," Dan hurriedly confessed.

Startled at his inclusion of that irrelevant tidbit, he strained to not cover his mouth with his hands.

Better to play it off cool like he had meant to say that.

Olivia faced him, invaded his personal space and inquired, "What music festival?"

Leaving Dan at a sudden loss for words, she walked off radiantly into the sunset.

Literally.

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Author's note: Disclaimer-My characters aren't always the greatest people. While Dan over here is similar to Tomas from MA in his apparent disdain for the arts, these two characters are actually fundamentally different.

Tomas is written to eventually turn out to be a supervillain, and so I try to let his flaws, like thinking people who are in arts are wasting their time, in full view of the reader.

Dan is someone that is in STEM, a mathematician. Not only that, in statistics which a lot of people view either with hate or with admiration for those who practice it. His point of view towards people in liberal arts/humanities is one that is expressed by a lot of fellow engineering/math/STEM people either jokingly or earnestly. (Again-not discounting engineering being hard as an engineering student myself, but the superiority thinking and measure of smartness by what field you're in has got to stop.) Anyways, he falls in love with a pianist (music major) by what the synopsis says, so...I assume readers can connect the dots.

This story is set primarily in college about college students/college-aged people so as such I will feature and address topics that college students can relate to-sexism, racism, free speech, stress, grades, dating, mental health, campus crime, dealing with sick days, balancing work and study, etc.

I am not trying to offend anyone by writing about these nor am I trying to trigger anyone's past experiences. Just tell a romance story with these subjects in mind, that's all. Thanks.