Chapter Text
Internship placement — Stirling & Associates, Design/Project Coordination
S |
Stirling & Associates Placements <[email protected]> to me ▾ | 15 May, 09:02 |
Dear Miss Bridgerton,
I am pleased to confirm your placement as a summer intern within the Design and Project Coordination division of Stirling & Associates, commencing Monday 17 June. You will report to Graham Hawthorn, Senior Coordinator.
Please find attached your placement agreement and the firm's code of conduct. We ask that you review both documents carefully and return the signed agreement to [email protected] no later than 31 May.
Please arrive at our offices at 43 Wren Lane, London EC2V 8AH no later than 8:45 a.m. Standard professional dress is expected. Further details regarding building access and first-day arrangements are enclosed.
We look forward to welcoming you to the firm.
M. Stirling
Michaela Stirling
President, Stirling & Associates
| SA_Placement_Agreement.pdf 248 KB | SA_Code_of_Conduct.pdf 156 KB |
The email had even been signed by Michaela herself.
And she still couldn't believe it.
She, Francesca Bridgerton, was going to intern at S&A for eight wonderful weeks. It was practically a dream come true and she still hadn't stopped pinching herself.
Her application had been done on a whim, really. Her university had pumped out the usual batch of internship opportunities, dozens of emails with bullet-pointed lists and attached PDFs, most of which she had skimmed through and ended up deleting. She’d nearly done a double take when she’d seen Stirling & Associates was among the options. On her first go 'round she had clicked the link before she could talk herself out of it, read through the requirements, and thought, Well. That's not happening.
Because why would it? Michaela Stirling's firm wasn’t exactly in the business of taking chances on lackluster twenty-year-olds.
But she had applied anyway. Mostly because Colin had told her to stop selling herself short—“Just apply, Fran. What's the worst that could happen? They say no? You're already expecting that, so technically you've got nothing to lose.” Benedict had even offered to look over everything and made encouraging noises as he did so, and maybe also because some stubborn part of her had refused to let the opportunity pass without trying at least. How did that saying go? Que Sera, Sera?
She had filled out the form one night, utterly convinced she was wasting everyone's time, including her own. Despite what Benedict had said, her portfolio had felt embarrassingly thin compared to what she imagined the other applicants were submitting. Sure she had decent grades, a few extracurriculars, but nothing that screamed unique in a market that seemed to expect everyone to have volunteered at NASA or something. Plus her degree was still in progress, which was probably another strike against her when she remembered she was likely competing with graduates from Cambridge or Oxford with their first-class honours and published research. You know...people who had actually done something with their summers instead of whatever it was Francesca did unless she got lucky. Which was nothing.
Her CV was a modest document, filled with achievements that felt significant in her own head but were surely unexceptional next to someone who had actually worked on real projects and definitely had something more to show for themselves than “proficient in AutoCAD and Revit” and exactly one summer spent helping a family friend renovate a conservatory.
Still, she had submitted it and promptly tried to forget she had ever done so.
Two weeks of no response had felt like confirmation enough, and by the fourth week, she had simply assumed her application had faded into the digital void and that she’d receive a polite rejection email in due course. Except she hadn't. Instead an acceptance email that Francesca had nearly fell out of bed at the time of reading, was still open on her Macbook.
Because she was going to work for The Michaela Stirling.
Michaela Stirling was twenty-four years old and ran a company that controlled a property portfolio worth north of eight hundred million pounds. She had finished her undergraduate degree at nineteen. Her master's at twenty-one and then had taken over as President of Stirling & Associates before her twenty-second birthday, making her not only the youngest in the firm's history to do so, but the first omega to hold the title.
Overnight, the industry practically became a minefield of biting commentary from alpha execs who simply could not stomach an omega had out performed them, making smug remarks about how obvious it was that her success had less to do with relentless intellect and more to do with what an omega in her position simply had to have done to even have a chance of climbing the ranks. Media outlets swarmed with scurrilous articles or news segments citing concerns that always seemed to circle right back to her biology.
Could Omega Stirling sustain the demands of a presidency through a heat cycle?
Could she handle it when the next difficult quarter came? Omegas were so sensitive, after all.
When are omegas too ambitious?
The questions were always framed as reasonable, though it wasn't hard for Francesca, or quite frankly anyone with a brain, to notice how the young alphas in similar positions never received the same treatment. Because such was the way of things. And so Michaela Stirling with her wealth and intelligence that rivalled— though Francesca felt it surpassed—that of the average Alpha was to put it simply, upending the status quo.
So, they started nitpicking the quarterly earnings reports, looking for fraud at even a two-percent dip in projected revenue citing as proof that biology had caught up with ambition, even if firms run by alphas absorbed worse losses in the same quarter. They'd speculate on their tech panels, podcasts and in the comment sections of every profile piece, about what would happen when she went into heat, because they were just so very concerned for her safety.
They'd even have omegas give their opinions on the ordeal, somehow always managing to find the ones that spoke of how Michaela was just being so selfish and greedy, and that she was wasting her youthful years away. That she should let someone who really knows what they were doing take over instead.
When they couldn't maintain the façade of professional concern any longer because it just seemed as if Michaela kept building, kept more securing commissions, kept assembling a client network that was, by the most conservative industry estimate Francesca could find, triple that of most architects her age, alpha or otherwise, just kept being better, the discourse took a darker turn.
Doctored images of Michaela had circulated for months after her appointment. Jobless bums mapped crude composites of her face onto someone else's figure, almost always porn stars and almost always from faceless accounts, people only bold enough to say and do the things that they did when their real names and faces weren't behind it. All because an omega had dared to do the unexpected.
And said Omega had taken all of it in stride.
Not publicly, of course. Francesca would know otherwise. Michaela had did two interviews in the last three years, both of which Francesca had seen in their entirety. The one on Business Insider which was the only video Francesca felt like she had to limp her way through because the slimey journalist kept asking borderline vulgar questions about Michaela's personal life or the panel at the Royal Institute of British Architects where some alpha from the audience asked if she found the industry "challenging for someone of her nature". Such appearances were never to clear up any rumours or to defend herself in front of an audience that had already formed their own opinions.
No...the omega let her actions speak for her. Every time someone thought they could write off Michaela Stirling, she would always emerge with yet another win. And did she look stunning doing it.
Frankly, Francesca admired everything there was about her. She believed herself a connoisseur in everything Michaela Stirling so to speak. Which was why she knew Michaela had even done a TED talk despite the algorithm's attempt to bury it under alphaslop, and that the comment section underneath had been a wasteland of hateful remarks.
Of course Francesca had replied to every single one of them, her responses growing more scathing as she hit send.
You would not say that to her face, she had written under one particularly egregious take. And if you would, she would dismantle you in under thirty seconds, and I would pay to watch.
To one comment that read: lol she doesn't even know what she's talking about. good thing she doesn't have to talk for me to still want to bend her over a desk though, Francesca had spent hours going back and forth with the chauvinist alpha prick about how his brain probably wasn't the only tiny thing about him. She was not above hiring a PI to find their address so she could tell them that herself, and her head was so hot with rage that she'd threatened exactly that which must have spooked them at the time, because the next thing she knew, the comment and its thread had been deleted.
So yes, you could say she took herself as Michaela's #1 stan very seriously.
On June 17, Francesca arrived at the Stirling & Associates building at 8:12 after practically dousing herself in scent neutralising spray. She had looked up the building dimensions online before coming. Forty-three storeys, it had said. At the time, she had thought knowing would make the reality less intimidating.
It had not.
Inside, the lobby was bigger than her flat at uni. Francesca stood just past the revolving doors with the ceiling soaring above her even on the ground floor.
The receptionist was a stout woman in her forties with a soft smile and a nameplate that read BIANCA in golden letters. Francesca gave her name, watched Bianca's fingers move across the keyboard, and tried not to look like she was about to vibrate out of her own skin.
Bianca glanced up from her screen and said “Bridgerton, right?”
“Yes. Hi. That’s me.”
“Raf’ll take you up.” A nod toward somewhere behind her where a young man was already rising from one of the leather chairs near the window.
He was around her age with dark-hair and an easy smile that was as much of an indication that he’d never experienced a nervous day in his life than anything else. Raf crossed the marble floor with his hand already extended.
“Raf Park,” he said, shaking her hand with enthusiasm. “It’s actually' short for Raphael but only my father calls me that, and he’s sixty-two. So, let’s not.”
“Francesca Bridgerton.”
“A pleasure. You're the new intern for D&P, right? I'm in the same cohort. Been here a whole week already.” He said it like it was an achievement with a completely straight face, and somehow it instantly endeared him to her.
He gestured toward the lifts. “I’m on orientation duty today. Gotta give you the grand tour before they put you to work.” Francesca nodded and followed him in as Raf leaned over to hit one of the buttons. “Graham was supposed to be handling this but the old dog’s in a meeting leaving me to do all the hard work. No biggie, though. Us interns got to stick together.”
The ride up was mercifully short. Raf talked through most of it, pointing out floors as they ascended, though Francesca wasn’t sure she caught them all. This close to him though it became quite clear that Raf was a Beta. Alphas always knew when another alpha was in the room, scent neutralisers or no. And Raf was not that.
On the twenty-seventh floor, the doors slid open to an open-plan space with private offices along the perimeter for senior staff. People sat at desks arranged in clusters, some in meetings in glass-walled rooms, a few standing by what Francesca assumed was the breakroom with tea mugs.
The tour itself had been more thorough than she'd expected from someone who'd only been there a week. Raf had shown her the design studio with its ranking of monitors and the model workshop where someone was currently laser-cutting something that looked important. She followed after the lanky Beta past a row of desks, nodding along as he pointed out the print room, the supply closet and the staff bathroom that was so clean the floors looked like they were sparkling.
Along the way he introduced her to who would be her coworkers for the next few weeks. There was the social media manager, Chloe Glynn, a redhead with bright pink lipstick. She shook Francesca's hand and said, “Oh, you're so cute, we're going to be best friends.” There was Glinda Medway from Finance, but the elder woman didn’t seem keen on conversation at the time. And Michaela’s assistant, Kamya Iyer, who simply looked up from her screen, gave a brisk nod, and said, "Welcome. Raf, did you show her the emergency exit protocol yet?" which Raf apparently had not, and had practically scrambled to do so. It was hard not to notice that like Raf, they were all Betas too.
Francesca’s curiosity was building as the tour went on nearly twenty minutes and yet there was still no sign of Michaela Stirling. And soon enough Francesca could quell her impatience no longer.
“So,uh…." she said, aiming for casual and likely landing somewhere around transparently curious. "is Miss Stirling not coming in today? I thought…well since I’m an intern and all, shouldn’t I have to meet with the President or something?”
Raf's step faltered just barely, though he recovered just as quick, rubbing the back of his neck as he did so. "Uh…Miss Stirling doesn't really... do the whole meet-and-greet thing. She's a very busy woman. Very Busy. I've only seen her twice myself, and one of those times was from across the room. And we have Kamya for stuff like that, anyway. And well…me."
“Oh.” Francesca tried to keep her voice neutral. “Right. That makes total sense.”
Raf must have seen something in her face because he laughed then, only this time a little too bright. "Honestly, you probably don't even want to meet her on day one anyway, right? Better to ease into it than to start with the final boss. Literally. Gives you time to settle in.”
“Right,” Francesca said again and nodded this time to show she understood. Because what else could she do?
Raf led her to an empty desk near the window—her desk, apparently—and it was clean too, which Francesca appreciated because she wasn't so sure she could handle starting her first day by wiping someone else's coffee rings or snack crumbs off the surface. She still remembered that one stint she had in Student Servcies a few semesters back of which she hoped never to endure again.
Francesca set her bag down beside the chair and stood there for a moment, trying to take in the fact that she was actually here. That this was happening. She pulled out the chair and sat down, the leather creaking beneath her.
Raf lingered nearby, hands shoved in his pockets. “Alright,” he said. “I'm gonna head back to my desk before Kamya sends a search party. Mine's over by the pillar if you need anything, or if you get lost, which you probably won't, but if you do—”
“I'll find you,” she said, and managed something close to a smile.
“Good.” He grinned. “Your first assignment should be coming through by lunch. Graham usually emails it over but he’s still in that bloody meeting so... in the meantime, there's a welcome packet in the breakroom, some more on-boarding forms to fill out, and employee handbooks you should probably at least skim over to keep you company. Also your credentials and the WiFi password should be on a sticky note in one of your drawers.” He finished with a clap her on the shoulder. “And don't sweat it too much. You're gonna do fine, Bridgerton.”
Raf gave her a two-fingered salute and then he was gone, weaving between desks until she lost sight of him.
In front of her a ThinkPad sat docked beside a monitor on the desk, and she pressed the power button to wake it. She used the sticky note like Raf told her to log in, and after a brief loading screen, she was staring at the company desktop background.
She opened the email client first where a single: Welcome to Stirling & Associates sat in the inbox, sent from HR with attachments about the employee handbook, the building evacuation plan, and a link to the internal training portal. She clicked through a few of them, though she felt most of the information didn't stick. The handbook alone was fifty-seven pages of dense paragraphs.
She clicked over to Teams where her name appeared in the top bar with a little green dot next to it, and for the next few minutes, familiarised herself with the layout. There were already a few channels she had access to: General, Design Team, Social, and Random. She opened Random first out of curiosity and found a thread from Chloe about someone having left a Tupperware container in the fridge for three weeks.
Francesca smiled despite herself and closed the window. That seemed to be the end of what she had access to anyway, so she pulled up the on-boarding forms and began filling them out: Name. Address. Emergency contact. She had put Benedict down first because she knew he'd actually pick up, then deleted it and put Mum instead. She seemed the sensible choice, after all.
The morning passed in a haze of paperwork and orientation links. At some point, a calendar invitation appeared in her notifications for a team meeting on Thursday. Then in came a Teams message from Chloe with a gif of a woman falling through a door with the caption: welcome to the chaos.
Francesca sent back a simple: Thank you! Happy to be here.
She stared at the screen for a second too long, caught between the urge to add something funnier and the fear of overshooting, eventually settling on just backing out of the chat.
After that the next few hours passed in a strange stretch of stillness broken only by the click of her keyboard. Francesca had filled out every form the welcome packet demanded, read through the fifty-seven page handbook twice, though the second pass was mostly to feel like she was doing something productive, and watched three separate training videos about data security and fire exits.
She had been there nearly three hours now and the closest she had gotten to Michaela Stirling was a nameplate on a door she'd glimpsed through the glass on Raf's tour.
A part of her wondered what Michaela was doing right now. If she was in a meeting or in her office signing things. If she ever came out to wander the floor like some bosses did in those cheesy movies, making casual rounds and asking how things were going with a coffee cup in hand. The thought felt almost absurd. Michaela Stirling, making small talk by the water cooler, but Francesca entertained it for a moment anyway.
She had just finished a fourth video, this one about the correct procedure for handling confidential documents, when footsteps approached from the direction of the private offices. Francesca looked up to find a man in his late forties heading toward her, holding a coffee mug in one hand with reading glasses perched on a thin nose.
There was silver threading through his temples and the sleeves of his dress shirt were rolled up to his elbows, exposing broad forearms. Though despite his build, he too screamed Beta.
“Francesca, I hope?” he asked, stopping beside her desk.
She straightened immediately. “That's me.”
“Graham Hawthorne.” He extended his hand and she shook it. “Senior Coordinator for D&P, and I believe I owe you an apology. The planning committee meeting ran over a bit. You weren’t waiting too long, were you?”
“No, not at all,” she said quickly. “Raf showed me around, and I've been going through the onboarding materials. There was plenty to keep me busy.”
Graham gave a nod, a flicker of approval crossing his features. “Perfect. Raf's already a solid sort for an intern who's only been here a week. I'm sure you'll do the same.” He took a sip from his mug. “Right then. Let me give you a proper orientation since you've been left to the mercy of training videos all morning.”
What followed was a far more thorough walk-through of the D&P's specific workflows if that were even possible. He showed how they tracked revisions, who to CC on what, which printers connected to which network, how the internal ticketing system worked, and the particular hell of the firm's legacy filing system that predated cloud storage and had never quite been fully migrated.
“Jenny in structural is excellent but she's got a temper about half-done work,” Graham said, pausing outside a closed door with a nameplate reading J. HARCOURT. “Good to have on your side, though. She’s saved us from more headaches and lawsuits than I can count.”
Her stomach chose that moment to make a sound from the gap left by the pathetic piece of toast she'd managed to choke down before bolting out the door this morning.
Graham either didn't hear or politely ignored it. And her stomach didn’t seem to like being ignored by either her or Graham, and growled loud enough to draw his head sideways.
His eyebrows lifted just slightly, and Francesca felt her cheeks go hot.
“Sorry I…probably should have eaten a bigger breakfast.”
Graham's expression softened. “Right. Well, it's nearly lunch, anyway. So...tell you what—before you head off, I've got a small task that should keep you from feeling like you've wasted your morning entirely.”
He led her back toward his office, where he pulled a printed folder from his desk drawer. “This is the current-phase materials for one of our projects.” He handed her the folder along with a keycard on a lanyard with a label that read ARCHIVE ACCESS - LEVEL 2. “We need the full set from the second-floor records room. It’s all organised by project code, so it shouldn’t give you much trouble to find. All you need to do is bring back everything you find tagged blue under that code, and we'll see if we can get you to shadow Jenny this afternoon if she's in a decent mood.”
Francesca took the folder and glanced at the project code: WP-0421.
“Second floor,” she confirmed. “Records room.”
Graham's mouth twitched near a smile. “Try not to get lost. And take your lunch after, can’t have you keeling over on your first day now can I? There's a decent fish-and-chips spot two blocks east, or the canteen on the ground floor does a passable jacket potato if you're not too picky.”
Nodding, she left his office and took the lift down to the second floor. The records room wasn’t hard to find, and she swiped the keycard to let herself in. The room was small with metal shelving lining the walls, most of them filled with boxes and ring binders, a single light fixture flickering overhead.
Francesca found the shelving unit labelled W and ran her finger along the labels, pulling rolls from the sliding shelves, checking each label twice for WP-0421 before adding them to the growing stack in her arms. She ended up with eight blue-tagged rolls in total, and had gathered them carefully, adjusting her grip until she found the balance point.
What she had not accounted for, was the fact that such large-format rolls, while individually manageable, were an ergonomic nightmare when stacked in both arms at once. She’d almost made it to the lift without incident, turning down the corner toward the doors—
And walked directly into solid mass.
The impact sent the rolls flying. Francesca felt them leave her arms in slow motion, felt her body pitch forward as she tried and failed to compensate. Her hands shot out instinctively, fingers managing to catch one of the rolls mid-air courtesy of her alpha reflexes snapping into gear with a grip that made her forearm flex beneath her blouse.
The other seven, however, bounced off the floor with a series of hollow thuds that seemed to carry through the entire corridor.
“Shit—I'm so sorry, I wasn't looking where I was—” Francesca started, already bending to gather the fallen rolls, and then she looked up.
And the words died in her throat.
Because Michaela Stirling was standing two feet away in a cream silk blouse tucked into a black pencil skirt that fit her like it had been painted on. Her dark hair was swept back from her face in a bun and her mouth was set in a line that could have been irritation or could have been the natural resting expression of someone who had better things to do than stand in a corridor with a clumsy employee. And her eyes—dark, deep, frustratingly more beautiful in the flesh—made Francesca’s brain go blank.
She had prepared for this moment every morning since she’d received the offer in the mail—‘Hello, Miss Stirling. I'm Francesca Bridgerton, the new D&P intern. It's an honour to meet you.’—and she had thought it sounded professional and composed and exactly like something a person with a developed frontal lobe would say.
Was her frontal lobe even developed anyway? The studies said it wasn’t at her age.
Anyway, what came out instead was: “I'm—the rolls—I had them, I had all of them, I was bringing them up for Graham, for the current-phase materials, and I didn't see you, I wasn't looking, which is obviously my fault, I should know better than to walk with armloads of—” She was babbling. She could hear herself babbling, and still could not close her bloody mouth. “—materials around a corner. I was just trying to get these back up before lunch—and I'm so sorry if I hurt you, are you hurt? I didn't mean to—”
Francesca's hand, the one that had caught the roll, went slack.
The tube hit the marble floor with a clatter that seemed louder than the others, the paper unfurling in a long white sheet of floor plans and elevations, and Francesca had to lunge for it before anyone could trample on it, which meant she was now on her hands and knees, scrambling to roll the sheet back up, her face burning hot enough to power a small city.
She gathered the remaining rolls with trembling hands, cradling them against her chest, and looked up again, still half-crouched on the floor.
Michaela Stirling was still standing there. Though her eyebrow was arched now, her gaze travelling from the scattered rolls to Francesca's flushed face and back again.
Say something, Francesca's brain screamed. Apologise again. Explain. Do something. Anything.
The omega made the decision for her as she just stepped around Francesca and the mess she had made on the floor, and continued down the corridor without a single word, the red soles of her Louboutins flashing briefly with each step.
Francesca watched her go, still kneeling on the floor and holding a half-rolled set of drawings, her face burning.
The walk back to the twenty-seventh floor was a blur of self-loathing and elevator music. Graham had not even been in his office by the time she got back, though he had left a sticky note on her monitor that read Jenny says 2 PM works. Good job. — G.
Good job. As if she hadn't just made a complete fool of herself in front of the most important person in the entire building, and wasn’t currently tempted to request a transfer to a different continent. She didn't even have much of an appetite anymore, but Graham had said to take lunch, so she would.
She rode down to the ground floor, and followed the signs toward the canteen. It was busier than she had expected, filled with employees at various tables. She joined the queue and scanned the options that just seemed to get more lackluster as she took them in, eventually settling on a jacket potato with cheese and beans because it felt like exactly what she needed right now.
She paid, found a small table near the window, and sat down with her tray. The potato was actually decent, and filling. She ate slowly, watching the street through the glass, letting her mind drift away from the day’s earlier humiliation.
She didn't see Michaela again for the rest of the day. Which was good for her currently bruised ego. The shadowing with Jenny, if one could even call it that, lasted exactly forty-five minutes before the senior structural designer had shooed her away with a gruff “come back tomorrow, I've got actual work to do.”
Francesca had taken it in stride, nodded, and retreated back to her desk where she spent the remainder of the day pretending to review the employee handbook a third time while her brain replayed the corridor incident on an endless loop.
By half past five she packed her bag and practically fled the office, giving Bianca a tight smile on her way out the lobby. She was halfway to the Tube when she felt her phone buzz in her pocket.
Colin: It’s five, which means it’s the perfect time to catch up with my favourite sister over drinks.
Colin: This is a family summons btw, so it’s non-negotiable.
She had replied with a single eye-roll emoji and a confirmation.
They met up at Colin’s favourite pub where her Alpha brother was already at the bar flirting with the Omega bartender. Even when Francesca went to sit beside him, she had to clear her throat just to get Colin to tear his eyes away and he turned, not before throwing the bartender a wink, his face splitting into a grin.
“Darling sister. Or should I say, the newest cog in the great machine of S&A.” He laughed and slid a glass of sauvignon blanc toward her. “You saw how I rhymed that?”
Clearly he was on his way to getting pissed, but she humoured him by taking a swig from the glass anyway.
“Alright,” he said, leaning forward. “Spill. What happened?”
Give it to her brother to not even allow her a moment of reprieve.
She sighed. “I made a complete fool of myself in front of Michaela Stirling is what happened.”
Colin's eyebrows shot up. “Oh, this already sounds excellent. Tell me everything.”
“This is serious, Colin.” Her head fell into her hands. “I'm going to be fired before the week is out and it'll be your fault for telling me to apply in the first place.”
“Doubtful. But I'm choosing to focus on the part where you met Michaela. Did you at least get her number?” Francesca hit him with her bag and he yelped. “Okay okay. This is all very serious.”
He then smoothed his face into what he must have thought was a stern expression and he was lucky Francesca didn’t even have the energy to hit him again. She instead recounted what happened in all of its excruciating detail, and Colin, to his credit, was still trying to keep his face arranged into an expression of deep sympathy, but it was becoming increasingly undercut by the laughter trembling at the corners of his lips.
“This isn’t funny.”
He feigned confusion.
“I never said it was.”
“You’re laughing.”
“I’m not. This is my serious face.”
Francesca groaned. “Ugh, spare me, Colin. Go on. Laugh. Get it out of your system. I know you want to.”
And he did, a bark of laughter tearing from his lips that even drew a curious glance from the bartender. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry—it's just—only you could somehow manage that, Fran.”
“Shut up."
“No, no, that's—that's genuinely incredible. You've been there, what? Eight hours? And you've already given Michaela Stirling a story she'll surely tell at dinner parties.”
“I hate you.”
The other alpha just blew a kissy face at her. Eventually his laughter dwindled, though the amusement never quite left his eyes. “Give it a week, yeah? By Monday, you'll look back on this and laugh. And if it makes you feel any better, there’s a very high chance that maybe she was just as flustered as you were. Ever consider that?”
“She's Michaela Stirling. She doesn't get flustered.”
That made Colin chuckle. “Everyone gets flustered, Fran. Even Michaela Stirling.” Francesca doubted that very much. “And who knows? Maybe it’s meant to be and by summer’s end, you’ll join Ben as the next Bridgerton to bring an omega home.”
Francesca snorted. Now she knew he was talking rubbish.
They were two and a half pints in when a presence materialised at Francesca’s elbow. A blonde woman stood beside her, maybe mid-twenties in a black tube top and jeans. This close the floral-ness of her omegan scent was unmistakable.
“Sorry to interrupt,” the omega said. Her voice had a slight rasp to it. “But I couldn't help noticing you from across the bar. I'm Tracy.”
Francesca blinked. “Oh. Hello. I'm Francesca.”
“Francesca.” Tracy bit her lip. “I like that.”
“Thank you,” Francesca said. “It's—it's a family name. Sort of.”
Tracy laughed even though Francesca was sure there was nothing funny about what she had said and leaned in just slightly. “Can I buy you a drink?”
Francesca looked at her half-empty glass, then back at Tracy. “Um… I'm kind of still working on this one, but—”
“Another round, then,” Tracy said smoothly. She signalled the bartender before Francesca could protest, ordered something Francesca didn't catch, and turned back with that same smile. “So. First time here?”
“Not really. My brother and I come here sometimes.” She gestured vaguely at Colin, who raised his glass with a grin that was entirely too much teeth.
“Colin. Her older, wiser brother. More good-looking too…”
Tracy acknowledged him with a look of blatant disinterest, her eyes already sliding back to Francesca almost immediately. “You're local, then?”
“Sort of. I just started a new internship, actually, at Stirling & Associates.”
Tracy’s eyebrows lifted. “Impressive. What department?”
“Design and project coordination.”
“Really?” Her voice pitched higher. “I work in interior design myself. Small world honestly.”
And then they were talking about design software, about London's architecture scene, about a renovation Tracy had worked on in Shoreditch. Tracy was actually fun to talk to. A few minutes later, the blonde was called away by her friend, but not before she let her hand linger on Francesca’s thigh a moment longer before withdrawing to reach into her pocket and pulling out a pen.
She grabbed a napkin from the bar, scribbled something on it, and slid it across the wood toward Francesca. “It was lovely meeting you, Francesca.” A pause. “Text me. I’d love to give you a house tour some time.”
Francesca stared at the napkin where there was a phone number, written in neat loops.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. I will. Maybe. I mean—thank you.”
And then Tracy was gone, leaving Francesca staring at the napkin with mild confusion.
“Wow, I think I just made my first networking connection ever,” she said to Colin who was currently staring at her with an expression of pure, undisguised disbelief.
“Francesca.”
“What?”
“Francesca, you absolute walnut.”
“What?”
“That woman was just flirting with you for, like, five minutes.”
Francesca's brow furrowed. “No…I think I’d know if she was flirting with me. She just wanted to show me around one of her houses.”
“Yeah to shag in.” Colin set his glass down. “She touched your arm approximately seventeen times. She bought you a drink and barely looked at me once. She gave you her number. What part of that registered as anything other than knot me please, alpha?”
“I—really?”
“Really.”
Francesca looked down at the napkin again. The number stared back at her, unchanged.
“Huh.”
“Huh,” Colin echoed, deadpan. “That's your takeaway?”
“I mean... I wasn't expecting that.”
“Clearly.” Colin picked up the napkin and waved it in front of her face. “You're going to text her, you know?”
“I am?”
“Yes. Absolutely. You're going to text her, and you're going to be charming, and you're going to get a date out of this even if it kills you.”
“Weren’t you just going on about how Michaela and I are meant to be?”
“I never said that.”
“Except you did…”
“Must’ve been the wind…" Colin leaned forward. "Listen Francesca, for us alphas…opportunities like this don’t come often, an omega approaching first? This is a sign.”
“A sign of…”
“Destiny,” he said. “Now about the text that you’re absolutely going to send when you get home. Run it by me. Right now.”
Francesca shrugged. “Um…I don’t know. maybe Hi, this is Francesca from the bar—”
“Did I order boring with a side of….boring? No,” Colin cut in, shaking his head. “An omega like that isn’t looking for words, dear sister. They need action. They need to know their alpha is serious.”
Francesca frowned. “And how would I do that over text?”
Colin's grin turned wolfish. “By sending a dick pic.”
Francesca choked on her drink.
“Colin!”
“What? I'm serious. It’s practically an alpha rite of passage. I don’t make the rules.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“It is because I'm right, and also because I'm older.”
“You're four years older.”
“Exactly. I’m practically ancient. Respect my wisdom.”
Francesca shook her head, but a reluctant smile tugged at her mouth despite herself. The alcohol was helping. She still wanted to sink through the floor every time she thought about the corridor, but at least she wasn't spiralling alone.
“Colin. I am not sending a stranger a picture of my—” She lowered her voice, though to her ears it still felt as if everyone in a forty-mile radius could hear her next words clear as day. “—cock. That's insane.”
“Sister...when have I ever steered you wrong? Listen to your big brother, won't you? And I say, you show that hot omega what you’re working with…”
“Isn’t there a better way of doing this that doesn’t involve crime?”
“Psh, you're an alpha. She's an omega. You're both adults. If you send her something that lets her know exactly what she's getting into, she's going to appreciate the honesty.”
“Yeah, honesty of crime.” Francesca lifted her head, drained half her pint in one go, and set the glass down with more force than necessary. “I'm not doing it.”
“Fine.” Colin held up his hands in surrender. “Fine. Play it safe. Be boring. See where that gets you. I, for one, see your future and it's a bitchless one, I tell you.”
“I am not sending her a dick pic.”
“Yeah sure…”
“I’m not,”she said again, but her voice was weaker this time.
Colin just smiled. “Absolutely.” He raised his glass, seemingly willing to drop it for now. "To day one. May day two involve significantly less floor time."
Grateful for the change in subject, Francesca clinked her glass against his. "I'll drink to that."
Her flat off-campus was dark when she stumbled through the door that night. She kicked her shoes off somewhere near the entrance, missing the mat entirely, and left them there because stooping to pick them up felt like way too much work right now.
She migrated to the kitchen, filled a glass at the sink, and drank half of it standing there like some sort of zombie. She set the cup down afterwards, and made her way to the bathroom, shedding her blazer and skirt somewhere along the hallway.
The shower helped, marginally. She stood under the spray and let the hot water beat against her shoulders until the shower glass fogged up completely. By the time she stepped out, wrapped in a towel with her hair dripping onto the bathmat, she felt a tad more human.
Francesca dried off in front of the mirror, not really looking at herself, and padded into her bedroom with damp hair dripping onto her shoulders. She collapsed onto the bed and made herself comfortable between the pillows. Her phone was on the nightstand, the screen dark, and she grabbed for it with a huff.
She fetched the napkin from her coat pocket and squinted down at what Tracy had written there. It was surreal to think that the earlier interaction with the omega hadn't just been a friendly chat. Honestly Francesca would have been fine either way, but found herself feeling the same courage that had made her send in her application to S&A. She was typing the number into a new contact when she got to the last digit and paused. Was that a five or a six? She held the napkin closer. Then farther away. Then closer again.
She stared at it so long the numbers started to blur. Probably a five, she decided, and hit save.
A new message thread opened almost instantly and Francesca’s mind wondered back to Colin’s words at the pub.
An omega like that isn't looking for words... They need to know their alpha is serious.
She shook her head. I'm not doing it. I'm not.
That’d be insane and reckless and exactly the kind of thing that got people arrested or at the very least blocked. If she was lucky.
But then another thought surfaced, slippery and insistent, definitely from the knot-headed part of her brain: You've never even taken one. What's the harm in trying just once? Just to see if you could.
Apparently her brain had latched onto the idea with the stubborn grip of a terrier with a chew toy. This didn’t mean she had plans to send anything. Obviously. But maybe... maybe she could at least see what it would look like? Just for herself? Just to know if she could take a photo that didn't look completely ridiculous. Technically it wasn’t wrong to take such photos for yourself, right?
Francesca looked toward her closed bedroom door. Then back to her phone.
She pulled open the towel and let it fall to the bed beneath her. For a moment she sat there feeling exposed and stupid, but still vaguely curious. Then she wrapped her hand around her soft cock, and gave it a few slow strokes that were far more clinical than anything else. Just to get things moving.
It took longer than she wanted to admit to get hard. She wasn't exactly in the headspace for it, after all, and in this, the alcohol wasn't helping, but after a few minutes of awkward fumbling, she got there she supposed.
This is ridiculous.
Francesca lifted the phone anyway and angled it down, trying different positions that were first either too dark, too close, or had bad lighting from her arm casting a shadow across everything. She adjusted the phone again, shifting on the bed, and tried another time. The camera was being a bit slow and she might have had to tilt her hips into the frame to get the angle right, but finally she got one she thought might be decent.
In it her cock was half-hard and flushed and was actually…not bad under the light cast from her bedside lamp.
She wasn't even sure what she was going to do with it at this point. Probably just delete it after. Or keep it for herself. Who knows?
Her thumb went to save icon.
Except her thumb, clumsy and several drinks deep, landed on a send button that had seemed to appear out of nowhere. How did she even get into WhatsApp? Was she using the app's camera the entire time instead of the one that belonged to the phone like a complete idiot?
The message whooshed away before she could do anything about it.
And Francesca watched with trepidation where the two grey ticks sat, innocuous and damning, the image thumbnail loaded beneath them.
No. No, no, no, no, no—
She scrambled to unsend it, fingers frantic against the glass, but she was too slow—the little ticks turned blue beside the image, the timestamp updating to now.
Francesca's soul left her body.
Unknown: don’t you alphas get embarrassed catfishing people all the time?
Francesca's brain was still struggling to reckon with how she had, in fact, just sent an unsolicited photograph of her genitals to a woman she had met exactly once, and that woman's response was neither shock, nor outrage, or even a playful wow, forward, but an accusation of catfishing.
She blinked and read the message again.
Francesca: How do you know I am an alpha?
Francesca: And do alphas really have a reputation for sending fake pictures?
Unknown: Only an alpha would have the audacity to do exactly the catfishing being discussed and try to play dumb. And yes. Constantly. I’ve never had the chance to ask one why they are this insecure before, though. So I’ll ask. Is this like a thing where you get off on people believing your cock is actually this big?
Francesca's mouth fell open, a strange mix of indignation and dizziness swirling in her chest. She was still naked, still sitting on her bed with the towel pooled under her, and she was having a conversation over text with a woman who apparently thought she was both a liar and a fraud. She could almost laugh at the absurdity.
Francesca: I can assure you I am not a catfish. That is my cock.
She hit send before she could reconsider, then immediately wanted to crawl into the earth and never emerge. Apparently she was arguing with strangers about her cock size now.
Unknown: Sure it is.
A few seconds passed.
Unknown: Prove it.
Francesca's eyebrows shot up. How exactly was she meant to prove that what was in the photo was actually attached to her body? Was the image not evidence enough?
Francesca: How exactly am I supposed to prove that?
Unknown: Don’t play coy now.
Unknown: You know i'm asking you to send a video. And it better be the exact same thing in that photo.
Francesca's face went hot. Clearly it was this woman who was the audacious one, not her. At the pub, she had seemed sweet, flirtatious according to Colin but harmless. Now she was demanding additional photographic evidence as casual as ever. This was stupid, insane, all the things.
She should type out a dignified refusal, apologise for the accidental photo, and wish Tracy a good evening. That was the sensible, adult thing to do. The thing a person with a developed frontal lobe would do.
But her thumb was already moving toward the camera icon.
No—stop—put the phone down—
She swiped to the video section.
Francesca, what are you doing?
She propped the phone against her water bottle on the nightstand, and angled it toward the bed, mostly torso and below, her face out of frame.
This is insane, she thought, even as she pressed record. This is actually insane. I'm going to wake up tomorrow with my cock on TMZ.
For three seconds, she sat there naked, her body frozen with second thoughts. Then, because apparently she had lost every ounce of self-preservation she possessed, let her hand wrap around her cock again. She gave it a slow pump, thumb brushing over the head, just enough to show that yes, this was attached to a living, breathing person.
She rushed to stop the recording and sent it before she could change her mind.
The response took a moment longer this time. Long enough for Francesca to start second-guessing every choice that had led her to this moment. She was about to type out an apology when the three dots appeared
Unknown: Your cock is bloody huge. Hard to believe that thing’s real.
Francesca: It’s real.
Unknown: But I have to ask. What were you trying to accomplish with the first photo?
Francesca hesitated. She could lie and say it was a dare, or a joke, or that she'd misclicked. That last part was technically true anyway. But the alcohol was still sloshing pleasantly in her system, and honesty felt easier than crafting a believable excuse.
Francesca: My brother told me to do that. You actually met him briefly at the pub if you remember. I personally thought it was a terrible idea, and then I got curious about what one would even look like. One thing led to another...and here we are.
The silence stretched.
Unknown: Lovely story but I couldn’t help but notice you’re talking as if we’ve already met.
Francesca stared at the message, her brow furrowing.
Francesca: What do you mean? We met at the pub like two hours ago.
Unknown: Ah…
Francesca: Tracy?
Unknown: Never been called that before.
Francesca's blood went cold.
Unknown: Wrong number?
She examined the contact name she had saved as Tracy. She looked at the napkin still sitting on her bed beside her, crumpled and smudged, and she picked it up, squinting at the final digit.
Five, she had thought. Definitely five.
She looked at the phone number in her contacts. Then back at the napkin.
The last digit must have been a 6.
Which meant she had just sent an explicit image, followed by a verification video, to someone who was most definitely not Tracy.
Unknown: I'm going to take your silence as confirmation that you have, in fact, sent your first nude to a complete stranger.
Francesca was definitely going to end up on a sex offender registry.
