I'd mentally drifted, daydreaming about something that vanished from my mind the second he leapt up out his seat, slamming into the cafeteria table in his haste, and rattling the cutleries scattered on the trays. Then, he was gone, out the door before I had swallowed the last mouthful of my coffee.

'Jesus, Connor!' I called after him, 'what the hell?' I only caught sight of him again when the bright colours from the patches on his denim jacket blurred through the exit, and I stood, confused, dragging my coat off the back of my chair to follow after him.

For a second, I didn't know where he'd gone, but then I heard him shouting, his feet echoing off the boardwalk over the pond outside the zoology department.

Just as I caught up with him, he shuffled and reshuffled the papers in his hand and momentarily lost his grip. They fluttered to the ground and he stopped so abruptly to duck and collect them that I crashed straight into the back of him. 'God's sake, Con,' I muttered under my breath as I peeled a page of his research paper from the bottom of my trainers and passed it back to him.

'Sorry, sorry, I'm–'

'Breathe.'

'Sorry,' he apologised once more, as he pulled all the pages together and scrunched them up in his arms. 'I'm going to lose him!'

I grabbed him under his arms and pulled him back up onto his feet. 'Come on then.'

We closed in on the man he was following.

'Professor?' he called, 'Connor Temple.'

'Yes, sorry, I've never heard of it,' the professor replied, 'I think you want archaeology, around there up to the right keep walking it's on your left–'

Something about his voice caught my attention.

Maybe it was just the way he sounded– I hadn't expected him to have an accent– but at the same time it wasn't surprising. There was just something– a feeling I couldn't determine that made everything suddenly interesting.

I caught the look of dejection in Connor's eyes– silently wondering when I had volunteered to be a comfort blanket for him– then spared a brief thought for my unfinished coffee, before, with a sigh I came to his rescue.

'Uh, no, it's not a place,' I said, cutting the professor off. It wasn't until then, I think, that the professor and his colleague even saw me walking alongside Connor, because as soon as he turned I saw his eyes widen slightly.

He was handsome. Slightly older. The bluest eyes I'd ever seen.

And I smiled despite the fact I was tired and had a stitch and would have preferred a few moments to let my breakfast go down before running half the length of the university.

'It's his name.'

'I'm one of your students,' Connor added.

'Really?' the professor asked, as he finally stopped for a second to glance back at Connor.

'Yeah.' Connor smiled.

'Why don't I recognise you?'

'Well... I never actually turned up for the seminars.'

The Professor began to both nod and shake his head at the same time and mumbled 'Uh-huh,' as he turned away and walked off chuckling.

Connor started mumbling next to me, something along the lines of 'but why would I... I mean...' but I was already too far away to hear him.

'Professor!' And just as he reached the bottom of the steps up to his office, I caught him, and slammed my hand down over his on the banister. He jumped, spinning around in surprise to look down at me, and I cleared my throat. Our eyes connected. 'Wait.'

Connor was suddenly beside me, pulling my hand back from the professors with a sorrowful grimace. 'I'm sorry,' Connor said sincerely, 'she's having a bad day.'

I resented that. I hadn't realised I'd been in a mood with him but it was entirely possible.

'No,' the professor responded. 'It's alright, Miss...'

'Havisham. Anna,' I offered further, 'and um... please, if you could just hear him out. He literally won't stop talking about it.'

'What does he want?'

I opened my mouth to reply, but it wasn't my theory so I paused for a second. '5 minutes. That's all. Not a second more.'

'Don't touch anything,' The professor said, pointing at Connor, as we passed through the door of his office. 'This is my laboratory technician Stephen Hart.'

Stephen nodded at Connor, before he turned to me and smiled, 'hi.'

'Yeah, hey,' I replied curtly as I threw my coat over the back of a nearby chair. I had no idea what to do with myself now I was actually in the room; getting this far was for Connor, and I didn't want to interpose myself any further so I sat back on the edge of a desk behind me and watched the professor lift a pile of papers from his desktop and look around for somewhere to put them. I heard the files thunk down into the bin.

'Oh actually...' Connor started in protest, 'that's my dissertation.' He pointed to the pink folder. The professor reached down to take it out. 'Yeh,' Connor continued, 'see I argue all life on earth derived from organisms carried here by alien space craft. It's pretty sexy stuff.' Grinning, he looked back at me.

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. The file hit the bottom of the bin again.

'It's a work in progress really.'

'That's lucky,' I replied.

I could see the restraint in the professor's face as he tried not to smirk as he reached over to pick something up from the table behind his desk. It was wrapped in some sort of cloth. 'Tell me...' he started pulling the wrapping away and held the object out in front of Connor. I straightened up against the desk, lifting my chin curiously into the air in order to get a better look at what it was. 'What this is?' he finished.

'A fish?' Connor asked obtusely.

'Obviously,' he responded.

'It's a Sarcopterygian,' I said, as I glanced briefly across at Connor out of habit, only to find he was already frowning back at me. 'We've talked about this before, Con,' I continued, 'there was no trace of them in the fossil records for, what, 70 million years? And then one of them just popped up in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It was just totally inexplicable in modern–'

'–evolutionary terms.' Professor Cutter looked right at me, and for a second, I just stared back at him with a strange sense of confusion because we'd just said the exact same thing at the same time, and it was weird. 'Do you study here, Miss Havisham?' He continued. 'I don't recognise you either.'

'No– Yes!' I corrected myself, 'I mean– I turn up to my lectures... Most of the time. I just started my P.H.D. Theoretical physics.'

'Seriously?' Stephen questioned.

I shrugged again. 'Yeah. I have a lot of interests and a few BSc's, to be honest. I don't really sleep much.'

'It's hard to still a curious mind, I know,' the Professor said, 'In the case of evolution, Darwin provides most of the answers. It's the pieces that don't fit that interest me.'

'See that's why I was wondering whether you've seen this,' Connor said. He pulled a newspaper from his file and holding it out for the Professor. 'Some sort of giant undiscovered predator,' Connor said, following the professor across the room as he dismissed the newspaper and passed it to Stephen. 'Oh no– no no no no no no.' He snatched the paper back. 'This is the real thing.'

'Connor, you should get out more,' the Professor said, 'go to a bar. Meet a nice girl–life will be a lot less confusing.'

'Hey. I've already got a girlfriend. Sort of,' he stated. And before either of the faculty staff could turn their heads to me I lifted my hands in surrender.

'He's my cousin,' I stated.

'That's not really the point,' Connor continued, 'there's an eyewitness who claims to have seen it.'

'People claim to have seen the loch ness monster, it doesn't mean to say it's there,' the Professor said.

'Well not now obviously because it died years ago. The government, they took the body away and covered the whole thing up.'

'This is just a hoax, forget it.'

'Your wife wouldn't have ignored it–'

'Connor!' I said in outrage, before the words have even finished tumbling inelegantly from his lips, but the professors gaze shifted to me, and softened.

'It's alright, Miss Havisham. Listen, my ex-wife was a serious scientist. She wasn't some gullible monster hunter.'

'Sorry.'

'It's okay.'

'I just thought you might want to check it out, that's all. It's not as though the forest of Dean's far away though.'

Stephen lifted his head.

'The forest of Dean?' The Professor repeated.

With the palpable change of atmosphere, I straightened up.

'If we leave now we could be there by lunch,' Stephen explained as he looked up from his watch and almost immediately started for the door.

Connor spun around, eyebrows raised with excitement, as he leant forward to hug me. A quiet 'thank you!' split his lips and he ran off after Stephen.

'Alright Anna Havisham...' Cutter said, 'get your coat.'

The man who came out to meet us looked pale as death, and fidgeted with his cap the whole way across the yard as he stammered out an explanation on the way to the trailer. 'I'd just finished my round when I caught a glimpse of it on the monitor.'

The rear of the lorry was destroyed. The metal was torn hanging off the frame like it was nothing more than fabric.

'Can you imagine how much force it took just to rip this thing open?' Connor mumbled aloud, 'look at the size of the marks.'

I ran a finger through the liquid dripping down from the holes, and lifted the finger to my nose to smell it. 'Yeah, that's blood.'

'You know if you want my opinion, I think it's– you don't do you.'

'Well if I found these gauges in the wild I'd be certain we were looking for a large predator,' Stephen said.

'But we're in the forest of Dean...'

My eyes scanned each hole as I moved along until I found myself standing at the end of the trailer and turned to the fence, about to start looking for an opening big enough for someone to squeeze through. I wasn't sure what I was expecting– my brain seemed to have made the connection that I had to be looking at a human culprit unless the world was a lot madder than I had realized– but there was no way. The second my gaze moved from the lorry it was drawn to large section of fence that had fallen down.

Fallen.

In reality there was no way it had fallen. Honestly it looked like it had trampled– something had gone through from here to the forest and the fence was just collateral.

'Professor?' I called, 'you might want to see this.'

He came straight to me. 'Jesus–' he noted sharply.

'It was huge and it was so fast it was gone across the yard in a second.'

'Stephen?' The professor called. 'Come give me a logical explanation for this.'

'It's a hoax, obviously.' But the incredulous words dissolved in his mouth as he rounded the end of the trailer and his eyes snapped up to the twisted ruts of steel. 'Just a difficult one to pull off.' He finished stubbornly.

'Can I say something–' Connor announced as he appeared at Stephens side. But Cutter was already walking away.

'Is he alright?' I interrupted.

'Helen Cutter came to this area 8 years ago to investigate a creature sighting. She disappeared in this forest; her body was never found. Just a rucksack. No blood, clues, nothing...She just vanished.'

A few hours later, I was staring into the fish tank at the bar in the Eddington hotel. I'd left Connor upstairs in the room we were sharing, because he was taking too long to get ready, so I'd gone down to the bar to meet the others only to find I was the first one there.

I tapped gently at the glass, chin propped up on my hand as I stretched over the sofa arm, and watched how the fish swam closer to inspect my finger.

The sofa opposite me sighed beneath the weight of the body crashing down on it, and if I hadn't expected it to be Connor, I wouldn't have turned to look and accidentally locked eyes with a complete stranger.

The man was now sitting opposite me, dressed in a suit, hair slicked back, balancing a glass of wine on his crossed knee, and met my stare with a grin.

'Hi.'

For some reason his tone annoyed me, like that alone was enough to secure him at the very least my number. So, I didn't reply, I just stared at him with a blank expression.

'Oh, so that's how it's going to be?'

I didn't want to give him any reason to continue his attempt at a conversation; I wasn't interested, so I looked away and raised my eyebrow.

'Aw, come on, gorgeous,' he cooed, stretching out his arm across the back of the sofa, 'talk to me.'

He was already drunk, probably. It was difficult to tell with this type of man. Men who had definitely played rugby in and college, and then went into business and spent the next 20 years of their lives strengthening their livers.

I bit the inside of my cheek– considering taking it easy on him for, like, a split second– before I realised my mouth had already opened 'I'm not here doing charity work.'

The man didn't flinch. 'If you tell me your name I'll buy you a drink.'

'Why would I want to do that?'

'Because you haven't got a drink.'

'But I do have a boyfriend,' I said.

Disgusting. It's disgraceful: men respect other men's property more than a woman's right to not be interested in them.

He chuckled.

'Aha, gotcha.' I narrowed my eyes at him. 'You haven't got a boyfriend. You wouldn't have said it like that if you did.'

I wasn't thrown. I knew he believed me, he was just trying to undermine me. It's called negging. It's like a battle of wit. He should have come better prepared.

At that moment Cutter walked in, head down, scratching his chin as he beelined for the stools at the bar. And what seemed like a good idea came to me.

'Oh, and there he is.' I got up without another word and walked straight towards him. 'Professor?' I put a hand on his shoulder, and as he turned his head, I leant in and pressed my lips against his.

It wasn't supposed to last longer than a second or two, and I'd planned to pull back once I was sure the guy had seen. But his hand made sudden, soft contact on my waist, his lips pressed back against mine with a softness and determination I totally wasn't expecting and when I pulled my lips from his I saw his eyes were closed, and the look of confusion lingered in his furrowed brow.

'I'm so sorry,' I apologised quickly 'there was a guy– it doesn't matter...'

'No,' he opened his eyes, but had to blink a few times to clear his haziness, 'that's quite alright, Anna Havisham. I'm very glad I was here to help.'

'Can you do me a favour?'

'Another one?'

I tutted, 'Just, one more thing,' and I looped an arm around his neck as I glanced back over my shoulder to wave to the man. 'You couldn't just wave to that guy over there, could you?'

'Is that the guy?' His arm circled my waist and pulled me closer to him.

'Yeah. I was about one second away from telling him to go fuck himself.'

'So instead you thought you'd break his heart. That's very kind of you.' And then he lifted his free hand from the back of the stool and gave a short, sarcastic wave to the guy.

'Thank you!' I hooked a foot around the leg of the stool behind me and dragged it closer before I sat down.

'Any time.'

Cutter put his arm around the back of my stool as the silence between us started to grow, and just to fill it, I exhaled, and asked '...what do you think it is?'

'I can't dismiss the evidence.' He responded. Then, the nervous smile slipped from his lips. 'I'm just trying to keep an open mind.'

'People always say that as if it's a good thing.'

'I think it just depends on how you define the term monster. A wild panther may look pretty terrifying on a dark night.'

'So, is that what you think we're dealing with?'

'That's my best guess, if it exists at all.'

'I'm not sure what exactly I should hope for, Professor. And I don't want you to tell me what it is, I want to know what you think it could be.'

'Call me Nick,' he responded, 'and you... Miss Havisham, do you believe in monsters?'

'It's Anna,' I replied, 'and I've seen monsters, I've met them, but they weren't creatures from the dark.' I could see his brain whirring in the way his eyes glazed over as he looked at me, like he wanted to ask, he wanted to question me about it but he wasn't going to. And I was grateful for it. I sat up straighter, taking a couple of deep breaths until I looked down at my watch and sighed. 'Um, we should probably–' I pointed towards the door, to the exit. The guys would be down here any second. Perhaps they already were.

'Yeah,' he agreed, and then he sighed slowly, 'I've just... I've gotta do this again now because otherwise I just know I'm gonna regret it.'

His hand pressed against my cheek and before I realised what he was doing, he pressed his lips against mine again. His hands slipped back to my waist and he squeezed, like he didn't want to let go, and my arms slowly reached up to wrap around his neck just to ensure he didn't slip away.

My heart was pounding so wildly in my chest it was almost distracting me to the feeling spreading like warmth throughout the entirety of my body.

His lips moved against mine, a hot open-mouthed sort of kiss that told me it may had been even longer for him since he's kissed anyone than it had been for me. Either way, it was too long. And I didn't want to pull back because it felt good. His hand slipped back to my neck sort of unconsciously before he pulled back, leaving a final chaste kiss on my lips and sliding off his stool.

I couldn't breathe; I didn't know how to all of a sudden. My lungs burnt from the exhaustion of desperately trying to replenish the air, and I attempted to steady every leaping nerve inside me by exhaling a long, calming breath before Nick led the way to the exit.