“Well. My mom would probably like you.”
“Of course, you don’t mean that in a way that means you like me.”
I laugh and smack him on the arm. He leans way over like I almost knocked him down and grins down at his shoes again. “Of course not. I mean that in a ‘she’d be glad someone thought they had to take care of me’ kind of way.”
“That’s the thing, Jenny”—he stands up and grabs a lab coat off one of the XL hooks—“I don’t want to take care of you. I want to help you take care of yourself.”
“And I just want all of this to stop. I don’t want to need you, at all. Ever.”
He looks at me, in this new way he has where he seems to take me all in. “Then take me into your lab and show me why.”
* * *
“I thought we were going to get to use the big thing, the ESEM.” Evan is standing in my lab with a cotton swab in his mouth.
“We are, but we’ve got to start with the basics.” I hold out my hand. “Okay, that’s good, hand over the swab and take a seat at the bench next to me.”
He sits on the lab stool where I’ve set up a compound microscope, a couple of wet-mount slides, and methylene blue.
“Okay, watch me make this wet mount, then I’ll give you the swab and you make yours.”
I drip distilled water on the slide and roll the swab from the inside of Evan’s cheek firmly against the wet slide, then drop the slide cover over. When I look up to hand him back the swab, I find him hovering right over my shoulder. When he takes the swab, his thumb brushes over mine.
So, it’s kind of sexy. I don’t know.
His eyebrows scrunch up as he copies what I did to make the wet mount, but you can tell he’s having a great time because he keeps breaking out in these grins where you can see all the places his teeth overlap a little.
“Got it.” He leans back and gestures at his slide.
“A plus. You can throw the swab away in that box under the bench with the red biohazard liner.”
“Okay, now what?” He spins on his stool to face me.
“This next part is pretty cool. You’ll put a couple of drops of the methylene blue stain on one side of the slide cover, and the square of superabsorbent paper on the other. The paper will pull out the distilled water from the wet mount, and draw the stain under the slide cover, pulling it across your sample. Once you see all blue being pulled into the paper, the slide’s done.” I talk while I make the slide.
Methylene blue is pretty close to the color of Evan’s eyes.
“Like that.”
“Neat.”
“Yep. Now you do it.” I hand him the bottle of stain. He prepares the slide perfectly, and when the blue has pulled into his paper and he lifts it up, he looks at me with total delight.
I kind of laugh at him just because it makes me happy to see someone happy like that with something so simple and something I think is so cool. He laughs back and nudges my shoulder with his. I hadn’t realized that we’d drifted so close together.
“So, here’s the hard part, but the best part.” I pull the compound scope so it’s right between us and turn it on. “You’ll look through here, and this whole part houses the lenses. You set the slide up on the stage, try to center the slide over the light source, then secure it with those clips. You’ll look through the scope and adjust the stage up and down until you see the color of the stain and maybe some blobs. Then use the coarse adjustment until you feel like you can almost see individual images on the slide. The fine adjustments are last, and they will make everything sharp.”
We’re on heavy lab stools, so I don’t scoot away but just lean back to let him work the scope. Plus, I may have to lean back in to help him focus. His upper arm rests against my shoulder, and it’s nice, like his hand on my back had been.
He seems so comfortable with being close, with incidental touching, I wonder if it’s because of his job, or him, or what.
“I see blobs.” He turns his head from the eyepiece, his hand on the coarse adjustment.
“Okay, let me see.” I lean in, and he moves his head just enough to the side to fit mine.
I can feel the warmth of his cheek though we’re not touching.
I reach down automatically to the coarse-focus knob and my hand covers his.
He moves his hand away, but slow, like he’s being respectful of the equipment and of me. He doesn’t jerk from the closeness and touch at all.
He doesn’t move away from me in any way, like he’s just fine right inside my space, half of his chest along my back and shoulder, his head bent with mine.
It feels amazing, and confusing, and maybe a little more amazing because it’s confusing.
My stomach drops heavy and sweet into my pelvis and it’s that, the familiar, early throb of wanting and horniness that stills my hand in the middle of my adjustment on the scope.
Feeling horny feelings is a little different than feeling safe and accommodating feelings.
I breathe out, slow, and get the focus into a place that just a few tiny nudges with the fine adjustment will bring the cells up. I leave it there because I want him to have that moment where he can see everything, and it looks like the slide will be a pretty good one.
“Okay, it’s almost there, just use the fine focus.” I move my head from the eyepiece, and he’s right there, reaching for the adjustment knob before I’m completely moved away. Our temples press together for a moment, and his hand moves under mine again.
When I take a breath to steady myself, it doesn’t work because I just suck in mint and the warm, clean smell of his skin.
Which somehow makes me think of how easy it would be to just turn my face into his neck.
“Oh,” he says, then, under his breath, and I can feel his big body go still.
“Yeah? You got it?” I keep my voice low, too, because I totally understand.
“I do.” He takes his hand off the knob and rests it on the bench. I sort of want to put my hand over it and weave all my fingers through his.
I just look at his hand, instead.
There’s a white scar through the middle knuckle that has the faint impressions of where suture knots rested as the laceration healed. I wonder how he hurt himself. I want to run a finger along it.
“What do you think?” I really, really want to know.
“There’s a bunch of different things, and some things that I think are on top of other things. The color is more translucent than I expected.”
“Right. Different densities of material will take the stain differently. What else?”
“There’s more than one kind of thing. I think a couple of strings from the swab. Then little dots, pieces of things. I can tell what the cells are, though. I can see the walls, and the nuclei?”
I kind of laugh, because it’s just so awesome, the way his voice is serious but his mouth is smiling.
He looks away then, and he’s just inches away.
His eyes find mine.
“Thank you for showing me this,” he says.
“Yeah, of course.” Now I’m looking at him, not just at his brain.
He straightens up, but I sit up with him, and we’re still looking at each other and I don’t know what’s going to happen or what he’s going to say and suddenly, I am looking at his mouth.
I can’t believe I’m doing that, so I look back into his eyes.
But his eyes don’t seem surprised at all.
Then he reaches up and he curls that big hand around the nape of my neck and I swear to God, all the breath in my body rushes to the surface of my skin in this insane flash of heat that makes it so I can’t breathe back in, not ever, it feels like.
His face is so serious, and my brain is totally scrambled against working out what will happen next, even though I must know because he pulls me to him, without any hesitance at all, without any of the reluctance I would think he would have given how dedicated he is to his professional life.
He pulls me right to him, and then,
his mouth is against my forehead, pursed in a kiss, but not exactly, because I can feel him breathing, and his hand on my nape has tightened, to hold me right there.
I can’t even process this, and I close my eyes, and as soon as I do, everything in the entire world is his hand on my neck, his mouth on my forehead.
“Jenny,” he whispers along my hair.
He says it again, without even his voice, just his breath. Holds me to him, right there.
I keep my eyes closed.
I need the entire world to stay just like this.
* * *
He’s standing at the bus stop with me until my bus comes because I wouldn’t let him give me a ride home.
The snow is coming down again; during the last week it had reliably started up in the afternoons and snowed all night. I liked to snuggle in my bed and listen to the plows in my neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning, their bright lights whooshing by my windows.
Every morning had a new unspoiled blanket, with only a few little alley-cat prints in it.
Even a full two and a half weeks from Christmas, they are predicting a white one.
I smile and look up at the fat flakes coming down.
“Does it snow in Seattle?”
He’s wearing a striped, wool ski cap with a sporting-goods logo and one of those heavy canvas coats with the big cargo pockets all over. He’d be warm for a crisp fall stroll, but standing still in the ankle-deep slush at the bus stop, the snow coming faster and faster, and the occasional blasts of below-freezing wind, he is obviously miserable.
He looks at me with his eyebrows raised, his arms crossed and his hands stuffed in his armpits.
“It does snow, but not a lot, and it tends to shut everything down. Of course, there’s lots and lots of snow in the Olympics and the Cascades.”
I watch him clench his jaw against chattering. “It’s pretty, coming down so fast and heavy like this.”
“Dude, go inside, you’re freezing, and I wait for this bus all the time. I’m wearing ten times more coat than you.”
He grins and pulls his hat down lower. “I’m good. Lusting after your coat, but good.”
Evan saying the word lusting makes something unfair happen in my underpants.
I take a deep breath and look right at him. There’s snow on his collar, his shoulders, his hat. “Do you …”
“I get it,” he says. “I always did, actually, in a lot of other ways, but I want you to understand that I get that I’m not going to be able to adapt the entire field of microbiology so that it feels good to you, in the same way, whatever the progression of your changes are.”
“I could stay just like this, forever. Be able to do everything but drive at night and avoid people’s sneaking up on me.”
“You could.”
“Or I could end up with a dog for the first time in my life.”
“Yeah. Though you’d work with a cane for a long time, first.”
A laugh kind of forced out of me in a cloud of cold breath. “How I am supposed to live with that kind of uncertainty?”
“You tell me, I guess.”
I look at him then, and he laughs at whatever look is on my face. “Help me out, sensei.”
“You’re a postdoc, a researcher, in science.”
“Right.”
“So, you know, better than anyone, that you could plan and work for something and at any time it could go sideways.”
“Sure.”
He just looks at me.
“But,” I say, “I’m always doing everything all along the way to adjust for change and screwups and ways the data come out that weren’t anticipated. I mean, a five-year project will be as much about discovery as it is about hypothesis. So, we basically expect it to all go sideways. It probably means we’re doing something right if it goes all sideways.”
He looks at me some more. Doing that almost smiling thing.
I look at the snow falling on the trees and street signs. “Right. Okay.”
“I’m just here to help you adjust and discover.”
“Yes, thank you for driving that point home.”
“Anytime, Grasshopper.”
He nudges me with his shoulder. So I look up at him almost smiling at me. When I look too long, his smile fades away, and we’re both just looking, now.
And then I reach up and grab his shoulder and brace myself on my toes and I kiss his cheek, which is cold and stubbly, but his breath is so warm along my ear that I kiss him again, still on his cheek but it’s a spot closer to his mouth.
I hold my kiss there, the location innocent, but the duration indecent, my lip turned out against his skin where I can feel it warming up, where I can feel snowflakes landing and melting.
His shoulder eases in my hand, and so I slide over it, holding him close.
I finish the kiss, but release him slowly.
He whispers, “Jenny,” just as the bus roars up along the stop.
I turn away fast, but feel his naked, mitten-free hand brush my cheek, barely.
I get into a seat that’s opposite the seats closest to the stop, but I still see him. He’s already headed toward the parking garage, his head down.
I keep my fingers on my mouth all the way home.
At home, I turn on all the lights, for once, even though it makes it harder to see the snow. I’m worried that all of this wanting to kiss Evan that’s developed from working hard to avoid and thwart Evan is some kind of delayed reaction to my diagnosis.
Like, I worked so hard, at first, to reassure everyone that I was going to be okay, just so I could do what I wanted to do, so my mom could continue having her life in Seattle, that now I’m just breaking apart and Evan is conveniently there and so hot in his long-limbed sort of way and doesn’t seem to hate me despite my efforts.
And here in Lakefield, other than lab buddies and confusing surprise cybersex with the anonymous former tenant, all I have is Evan.
Although it must be some kind of against the rules to even longingly almost kiss your occupational therapist. And vice versa. I mean, when he held me in the lab it didn’t feel entirely therapeutic.
I would call and ask my mom about all of this, but she would probably tell me to marry Evan, so I elect for a weird conversation with C.
Who is not on, but he’s posted at least two dozen pictures since we’ve talked, mostly of snow and snowflakes—a tiny drift on a mailbox flag, a clump of falling snow glowing midair and backlit by a streetlight, and one so close and sharp you can see each point of a single flake.
What do you think?
I kind of jump when the message comes through. I feel jumpy and unsettled all over. I feel leftover wanting for Evan that’s not really leftover and with it something like embarrassment, and then maybe sweetness.
Also, I feel anticipation of seeing him again, even if I don’t know what I’ll say, after everything that happened today, but I realize if I trust anyone with the awkward ever after of almost kissing, it’s Evan.
He seems weirdly okay with almost-kissing moments. I don’t know if that’s maturity or gravitas or what.
Or maybe the almost-kissing thing happens to him a lot.
I do know I want to see him again, already, and this has never happened, so he could simply be using my hormones against me so that I will install voice-recognition software and put my lights on timers and relearn to drive.
They’re beautiful, I say.
The snow, the too-quiet feeling of the snow, is the perfect way to sit in front of these pictures and these messages with my heart confused.
I close my eyes—now, the embarrassment comes.
I broke down in front of my OT and he kissed my forehead and he saw my bra and he must know I tried to really kiss him, kiss him, at the bus stop.
I’ve been thinking a lot about snowflakes, C writes.
Who cares about snowflakes?
Is my very first thought. My next is the way the snowflakes melted against Evan’s cheek.
My mes
sage box is blinking, waiting for me to reply. I think about things going sideways.
I think about when an experiment fails and the only thing to do is to design another, and to use what you’ve learned.
What about them? I ask.
His cursor blinks a long time then he sends a long message.
About how they are too small to do anything but drift together, but when you look close they seem so singular.
Drifting is different from moving under your own power, deciding something. It’s currents—in the water or in the air.
Or, in the middle of something where no one can face truth or honesty and tells stories instead. Drifting together. Drifting apart.
It doesn’t mean anything except that you’re passive in the current, or that the current is stronger than you are.
I read through his message a few times.
First, I think, I don’t want to drift anymore, but I don’t write that.
Another message from C blinks through.
We should meet.
Oh.
Just to start a friendship? It feels like we should, I know it might be awkward, and I don’t want you to feel unsafe. We can’t be that awful, because of the way tenants are placed in the house, it’s possible we walk right by each other all the time, anyway.
My hands are shaking, but in the interest of avoiding drift, I write,
I’ve thought of that, too. What are you thinking?
I’m really tied up at work, there are some things I need to figure out here.
But it gets quiet, probably for you, too, when the University’s winter break more officially starts, which this year is the 21st. So maybe a couple days after that? Unless you’re traveling somewhere?
I’m not traveling. My mom decided to fly in Christmas Day and stay through the New Year.
Christmas Eve’s Eve?
Ha. Yeah. I know where you live, of course, but we could meet someplace neutral since it will be our first time meeting in person. The mashed-potato place, Potato Mountain that’s across the street from the corner store?
11 a.m.?
December 23, 11 a.m., you and me and mashed potatoes.
My hands feel a little shaky, and I can’t really see why I shouldn’t meet this person. He works on the same campus, he lived here six years and my landlord maintained he was a “good guy,” though I didn’t want details.
Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance Page 17