Why had his mind gone there?
Sliding into his chair behind the desk, he sipped his tea and checked through the fresh register. New names, new handwriting, new spelling disasters waiting to happen. The first trickle of Year Sevens arrived, bright-eyed and wide-shouldered in blazers still too big for them. One was visibly mouthing the building layout to himself, as if preparing for a mission. Chatter, scraped chairs, the faint buzz of nervous energy that only happened on day one gave Jude another reminder of why he loved this. Teaching. Getting to know the people of the future.
He did the usual: fire drill reminders, form expectations, a sheet with emojis to mark how they were feeling. Half picked the smiley face. A few circled the one with sunglasses. One kid drew devil horns on his and wrotetired af. Jude gave that one a silent point and a raised brow. Thing was, he’d learned his name quicker than all the others: Henry.
When the bell rang, he sent them off to their first lessons with a reassuring smile and a mental note to check in with the anxious mouth-mumbler tomorrow.
Then it was Year Ten History.
A sudden shift in energy—older faces, deeper voices, stubble trying to make a point. Nail polish. Too much hair gel. Some returning with boyfriends or girlfriends they hadn’t had last term. Others exactly as they’d always been: quiet, flying under the radar.
Alfie Carter among them.
Jude caught his eye and offered a subtle nod as he ushered them in.
They hadn’t talked much since the fire. The summer had swallowed the weeks. And Alfie had been recovering from his injuries. Jude, too. In his own quiet way. But that shared experience still sat quietly between them, unspoken but present. A thread woven in smoke and survival. He wouldn’t make apoint of it here, though. Wouldn’t embarrass Alfie like the whole teaching staff were hellbent on doing to him. But he could feel the bond. The connection. It was there. Unshakable.
He guessed that happened when you refused to let someone be lost to their fate.
But to keep things normal, he launched into the standard start-of-term spiel. What to expect. Which textbooks they’d need. An overview of the units—The Cold War, Nazi Germany, Crime and Punishment. A few groaned at the reading list. One asked if they’d be doingreal historyorboring dates again. Then he set a short task, something to ease them in gently, letting the room settle.
While pens scratched paper and chairs creaked gently, Jude wandered to the window and stared out across the field. The dew was still burning off the grass. A PE lesson had started on the far side, a few boys milling around cones, passing a ball in lazy arcs. And there was Warren Bailey in the middle of them. Hands on hips. Laughing at something one of the lads had said.
The sun caught his hair.
Jude took another sip of coffee.
Still warm.
Still a bit too sweet. And strong.
Exactly how he liked it.
Warren crouched beside a football, demonstrating how to shift weight cleanly into a kick. The boy tried, scuffed wide, and Warren only laughed with him, clapping his shoulder before resetting the ball.
Jude lingered his gaze a fraction too long.
There was something about him. More than the easy smile and the looks Jude would’ve had to be six feet under not to register. It was the steadiness. The way he stood. His patience in his listening and the calm threaded through every movement. It was out of place in the usual swagger of a PE teacher.
Jude had lived cautious around men long enough to trust his instincts, and they were humming then. Because noticing him was one thing. Wanting to notice him? That was different. Unsettling. Because that man…he was everything Jude had denied himself to believe was real. And it was almost as if the world had dropped a man on his doorstep tailor-made to disarm him. To make him believe in safety again.
But Jude knew better than to believe in gifts that easy.
He took another sip of his coffee.
Then a hand shot up near the middle of the room.
“Sir, are we going on a trip this year?” Lily. Blonde, confident, and constantly twirling her hair whenever her new boyfriend Lucas was within six feet, was one of his more able students who needed to focus more on the text rather than the boys.
Like he could talk as he blinked away from the window.
“Um… yes. Hopefully. I still need to get it signed off by Mrs Turner.”
“Will it be overnight?” she pressed, eyes already sparkling.
“Yes. Hopefully.”
Lily squealed and a ripple of excitement spread through the class. Whispers about room sharing, snacks, playlists for the coach ride, who’d be paired with whom, and which poor soul would forget their toothbrush and try to borrow someone else’s.
