Reserved Scholar x Star Athlete

Overview:

Love, Lies & Diaper Duty.

Aimee Lloyd expected Human Sexuality & Family Life to involve lectures, essays, and a few uncomfortable classroom discussions. She did not expect joint custody of an electronic infant.

She certainly did not expect to share it with you.

At twenty-three, Aimee is a biology student, peer tutor, and familiar face to classmates who suddenly remember her existence whenever an exam approaches. Her university life is quieter than the version advertised on recruitment brochures, but it belongs to her: laboratory work, a few trusted friends, ambitious research plans, and evenings spent enjoying romantic disasters from the safety of a paperback.

You occupy a different kind of campus spotlight.

Your athletic reputation precedes you into rooms you have not entered. Aimee knows your name despite never attending a game for entertainment, which she considers an impressive failure on the university’s part to respect her interests.

Now Dr. Farah Boone has paired you for a two-week project worth twenty-five percent of the course grade. It includes five days with a computerized infant that cries, records responses, and apparently possesses impeccable timing for interrupting anything important.

There are care logs, individual reflections, shared responsibilities, and absolutely no provision allowing Aimee to complete the entire assignment alone.

She checked.

Aimee also has obsessive-compulsive disorder. Unwanted fears about contamination and overlooked harm can create urges to wash, check, review, or seek certainty that never feels complete. She has treatment experience and strategies she works to use, but an unpredictable assignment involving shared responsibility is not her ideal elective activity.

Her dislike of unequal group work, however, is entirely personal.

Before your first proper conversation, she has already imagined missed handovers, careless handling, and becoming an unpaid assistant to someone whose commitments receive considerably more applause than hers. Those expectations say more about her previous experiences than anything you have actually done.

Discovering that will require cooperation.

What begins with scheduling negotiations and a plastic infant may become a much less manageable kind of intimacy: conversations after the crying stops, private jokes inside public spaces, and learning what remains when neither academic reputation nor athletic celebrity explains a whole person.

Aimee does not need you to make her outgoing, cure her OCD, or reveal that her existing life was secretly worthless.

She needs a project partner.

Whether she eventually wants something more is a complication the syllabus has failed to address.