Intermediate Thermodynamics: A Romantic Comedy (Chemistry Lessons Book 2)

by Susannah Nix

  “I can say that because I always do exactly what my mother wants,” Jinny called back. “I recognize a master manipulator when I see one.”

  Esther came back out and stuffed the sunscreen in her pool tote with the towels. “Speaking of your mother, how does she feel about Yemi?”

  Jinny’s mouth twisted. “You mean because he’s black?”

  “I wasn’t going to come right out and say it, but yeah.”

  “Weirdly, she seems okay with it.”

  “Really?” Jinny’s mother had never liked any of the men Jinny had dated. The only men that seemed to meet with her approval were Korean doctors and lawyers.

  “I think it’s because he’s Catholic.” Jinny shrugged. “Maybe she’s finally given up on me ever settling down with a nice Korean boy and has reconciled herself to taking what she can get.”

  “You’ve got to admit, after the parade of douchebag mouth-breathers you’ve dated, Yemi is definitely an upgrade.” Esther froze after the words left her mouth, afraid that maybe she’d gone too far and touched on a sore spot. Maybe they weren’t to the point yet where she could make jokes about Jinny’s taste in boyfriends.

  “God, you’re such a bitch,” Jinny said, breaking into a smile. “I totally missed this.”

  Esther smiled back at her. “Yeah, me too.”

  “You ready to head down?”

  “Mmmm hmmm.” Esther scooped up her bag and the two glasses while Jinny grabbed the OJ and champagne.

  As they walked toward Jonathan’s door, Esther tried not to peer through the blinds in his front window—which were always shuttered these days. It was torture every time she had to walk by his apartment, and she hurried her steps to get past as quickly as she could.

  Except this time, Jonathan’s door opened and he stepped out into the breezeway. Right in front of Esther and Jinny.

  All three of them froze in a diorama of mortification. No one seemed to know what to say. Or to be able to move.

  And then a woman emerged from Jonathan’s apartment behind him.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The woman who stepped out of Jonathan’s apartment was beautiful. Tall, slim, blonde, with miles of unblemished, honey-gold skin. Her hair was twisted into a picture-perfect messy bun, and she was wearing a striped jersey tank dress that showed off her perfect figure.

  Esther felt like she’d been kicked in the back of the knees. Her free hand fumbled for the railing to steady herself.

  The woman smiled at Esther and Jinny, her eyes taking in the champagne and glasses. “Hello.” She had a radiant smile. Glowing with vitality. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and still managed to look like a model in a Neutrogena ad.

  Jonathan turned away and locked his apartment door.

  “Hi,” Jinny said, smiling as if this was a perfectly ordinary interaction that was in no way fraught with awkwardness and resentment.

  “Let’s go,” Jonathan said to the woman. He put his arm around her and guided her toward the stairwell without a backward glance.

  Esther watched them walk away, still clutching the railing for support. She felt a physical compulsion to follow, like someone had hitched a tow rope to her stomach and was reeling it in. Then Jonathan stepped out of sight at the end of the corridor, and the rope snapped. Her stomach lurched back into place with the poise of a drunk girl in six-inch heels.

  “That was hella awkward,” Jinny said beside her.

  “Yeah,” Esther managed to say.

  “Who was that woman with him?”

  “I don’t know.” Esther’s stomach was still reverberating from the shock. It felt like a bowl of Jell-O in the midst of an earthquake.

  “Is he dating someone new?”

  “I don’t know,” Esther said again.

  Jinny looked at her, frowning. “Are you okay?”

  She was not okay. Jonathan had a woman in his apartment. On a Saturday morning. With I-just-rolled-out-of-bed hair.

  He’d already moved on. Replaced her. Which…he had every right to do. She’d told him in no uncertain terms there was no future for them. She just…hadn’t expected him to move on so quickly. She’d thought maybe he’d need to spend some time licking his wounds before he invited someone else into his bed.

  She forced a smile for Jinny’s sake. “I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know,” Jinny said, still frowning at her. “You tell me.”

  Esther started for the stairwell. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “You’re acting weird,” Jinny said, following her.

  “Like you said, it was awkward.” Esther’s flip-flops slapped against the metal as she descended the stairs. “I’m not exactly his favorite person anymore.”

  “You’re not, like, hung up on him, are you?”

  Esther dumped her bag on one of the lounge chairs, studiously avoiding Jinny’s eyes. “I feel guilty. I screwed up and now he hates me, and we still have to live next door to each other.”

  Even though she’d vowed to be more honest with Jinny from now on, she couldn’t make herself talk about Jonathan. It hurt too much.

  Esther changed the subject before Jinny could interrogate her further. “What are you and Yemi doing tonight?”

  Jinny’s face broke open at the mention of his name. “He’s cooking for me.”

  “Yemi cooks?”

  She nodded happily. “Yemi cooks. He’s kind of perfect.”

  While Jinny regaled Esther with tales of Yemi’s superior boyfriend skills—strictly G-rated, thank god—Esther’s mind wandered back to Jonathan and his mystery woman.

  Was it serious between them? Or was she just a one-night stand?

  It was probably serious. Jonathan wasn’t the one-night stand type. Except for Esther, of course, but that hadn’t been his choice.

  How long had it been going on? Where had they met? She didn’t look like a writer. She looked more like an actress. Was he dating an actress? Was she going to be around all the time? Because if so, Esther really did need to move.

  “Hey,” Jinny said. “Are you even listening?”

  “Yeah,” Esther said, gulping down a mouthful of mimosa. “Totally.”

  Seeing Jonathan with another woman hit Esther harder than she’d been prepared for. She’d thought she was starting to make peace with not having him in her life anymore, until she’d seen that woman step out of his apartment. The sight of him with that pretty, skinny nightmare on two legs had left her feeling like an open wound.

  She spent Sunday in her pajamas, knitting in front of the TV and punishing herself with more Hallmark movies. She watched an entire marathon of them. Sickly sweet, inspirational, poorly acted, low production value movies with cardboard characters played by C-list actors reciting stilted dialogue. It was like a juice cleanse, but for her feelings. That was the idea, anyway. Wallow for a day, get it out of her system, then pick herself up and move on.

  Only it didn’t work. She had the wallowing part down; it was the moving on that wouldn’t take. After she finally turned the TV off and went to bed, she wound up lying in the dark, still microanalyzing the encounter with Jonathan and that woman he’d been with. Feeling worse and worse.

  So Jonathan had replaced her. So what? Esther had given him up. Voluntarily, no less. What had she expected? Of course he’d moved on. It was exactly what he should do. Good for him.

  That was what she needed to do too. Move on.

  So why couldn’t she?

  She’d never been this dejected over a man before. The closest she’d ever come was with the friends-with-benefits guy in college. But even that hadn’t been this bad.

  Was this what love felt like? Because this felt like being sick. Aches, nausea, loss of appetite. Insomnia. Persistent headache. It kind of felt like she might be dying, actually.

  Oh, god.

  She’d made a terrible mistake.

  She done exactly what Jinny had said she always did: she’d pushed Jonathan away before he could get too close. Esth
er had told herself it was because she didn’t care about him the way he wanted her to, but that was a lie. She cared about him plenty. Too much. So much it had terrified her. Things had gotten too real, and she’d run.

  She wasn’t incapable of love. She was just too afraid. She was so scared of being rejected that she made sure to do the rejecting first.

  Jonathan was decent and kind and he’d actually liked her. And she’d liked him back. She hadn’t just been attracted to him, she’d actually enjoyed his company. She probably could have loved him if she’d let herself. But instead she’d ruined everything between them. Thrown away their friendship by sleeping with him, then thrown away any chance of something more by pushing him out of her bed.

  She’d been so afraid of getting hurt, she’d hurt herself.

  And now it was too late to repair the damage. Even if he’d been willing to forgive her at this point—which seemed like a long shot—he was with someone else. Any chance she’d ever had of getting him back was lost.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Monday morning, Esther stared at her computer screen, trying to remind herself that things weren’t so bad. She was friends with Jinny and Yemi again. She was going to knitting tonight for the first time in three weeks. She had a job, a roof over her head, and a good health insurance plan. Not to mention her cat. There was a lot to be thankful for.

  Okay, her mother was about to be evicted, and Esther had probably thrown away the best shot at love she’d had in years, but life wasn’t perfect. You can’t fix everything, she reminded herself. Focus on the good. Concentrate on things within your control. That was the ticket to happiness. Or at least survival.

  She tried to focus on the assembly file on her screen. She was working on some of the parts for Dan’s sub-assembly and in order to finish the schematics, she’d needed to pull up the 3-D model at the next higher level to see how her part fit with everything else. It wasn’t something the designers did often, because it was a huge file that took a long time to load.

  Esther spun the model around, studying the section where her parts went. Then she leaned forward, squinting at the screen. That…wasn’t right. Was it? She spun it around some more, looked at it more closely, and read all the design notes.

  It wasn’t going to work.

  Dan’s proposal, the one they’d chosen over hers in the bake-off, had a fatal flaw. To accommodate the more spread-out design, the data cables had to be longer. Which meant they’d pick up electromagnetic noise that would give a less useable output by the time it hit the antenna to be transmitted down. And the radio spectrometer they were using had a low power draw that made the signal extra sensitive to loss.

  Esther leaned back in her chair. Yemi was on a conference call behind her, and had his headset on. He was in a peer review session which was likely to go on for another couple hours. If she wanted to get his opinion, she’d have to wait.

  She didn’t need his opinion though. She knew what she was seeing. She knew she was right. Once they started putting their components into the live model, it would be obvious to everyone.

  Esther had two choices. One: do nothing. Wait for Dan to upload his parts to the assembly file, and let one of the other teams point out that he’d screwed up. He’d look incompetent in front of the entire project team, and Dmitri and Bhavin would both look bad for letting him get this far with a sloppy design.

  Then there was option two: go tell Bhavin what she’d found so Dan could fix his mistake before anyone else saw it.

  Option one was sorely tempting. It would feel good to watch them all squirm after they’d discounted her proposal—which would have avoided this issue entirely, by the way.

  The problem was, it might be weeks before they noticed the issue. And once they identified the problem, they’d have to go back and fix it, which would eat even more time. It could cause them to slip their next delivery date, which could cause a bow wave that might slip the entire project.

  It would also be all Dan’s fault, and everyone would know it. It would be vindication. Sweet, sweet vindication.

  The question was whether Esther was willing to let the project slip in order to finally prove to everyone else that she was right.

  With a bone-deep sigh, she pushed her chair back and walked over to Bhavin’s desk. “Can I show you something?” she asked him.

  He followed her back to her cubicle, and she showed him the assembly file. His hand tapped nervously against his thigh as she spun it around for him, pointed out the problem, and let him read the requirements documents for himself. By the time he’d digested it all, his hand was twitching so fast it was almost a blur.

  “I’m gonna need to talk to Dmitri,” he said, and walked off.

  Esther sat back down at her desk, and tried to work on something else while she waited to find out what they would do. When Yemi finally got done with his teleconference, she told him what she’d found.

  “You did the right thing,” he told her.

  “I know,” she said. “But I really wanted to do the wrong thing. What does that say about me?”

  He shook his head, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Nothing. Everyone has bad impulses. What matters is how you choose to act.”

  At four o’clock, Bhavin came back, and headed straight to Esther’s desk. “Nice catch,” he said. “You just saved all our asses.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Dmitri sent an email out to both teams, copied to both the project manager and the VP above him, announcing that they were scrapping the previous sub-assembly plans and going with Esther’s proposal instead. Without naming names, he explained the interference that had necessitated the change, and reiterated to the designers the importance of checking all the requirements documents and taking into account the other systems involved.

  The email concluded by praising Esther by name for discovering the issue before it became critical and providing an elegant fix. He even used the phrase “team player.” Take that, Diane.

  Esther was still riding the high when she got to knitting that night.

  Jinny had arrived before her, and already announced that she and Esther had patched things up. Esther was welcomed back from her sabbatical with open arms, and caught up on all the news she’d missed. Vilma’s younger son had made the varsity soccer team. Penny’s cousin had had her baby, and yet another cousin was now expecting. Cynthia had finished all her tiny animal sweaters and had proofs from the photo shoot to pass around. And Olivia had bought herself a pair of clear Converse All-Stars that she’d apparently been dying to show Esther.

  “They’re perfect for wearing with hand-knit socks, because you can see the socks through them!” She stuck out her feet so everyone could appreciate them. “Aren’t they badass?”

  Esther agreed they were indeed badass and she needed to get herself a pair immediately.

  As the ladies chattered around her, a feeling of contented belonging settled over her. She leaned forward to snag one of the peanut butter cookies Penny had brought, feeling keenly how lucky she was to have these women in her life.

  Friends were important, and she needed to do a better job holding on to the ones she had. Esther mentally added it to her self-improvement to-do list, right under Stop pushing away people who care about you. Let friends know they matter to you. She hadn’t fixed on a third item for her list yet, but she was considering Be a nicer person. Maybe. She still had some self-reflection to do on that one.

  Esther was done sabotaging herself. She might have screwed things up with Jonathan irrevocably, but at least she’d learned from her failure. She was trying to be a better person. A less broken person.

  Two hours later, as they were all walking out to their cars, Cynthia fell into step beside Esther. “So what exactly happened with you and that guy?”

  Esther assumed she meant Jonathan, and glanced across the parking lot, to where Jinny was getting in her car. “Nothing happened.”

  Cynthia gave her a don’t bullshit me look. “Somethin
g happened.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Is that right?” Cynthia said, not buying it.

  They’d reached Esther’s car, and she unlocked her door and shoved her bag inside before turning to face Cynthia. “I fucked up. But it’s over now. We’ve all moved on.”

  Cynthia’s eyes narrowed. “It’s not like you to do something like that.”

  “Sure it is,” Esther said. “I have one-night stands all the time—I mean, not all the time, but—”

  “I’m not talking about that.” Cynthia waved her hand dismissively. “Look, I get why you thought you needed to trick Jinny into going out with that guy. We all knew Stu wasn’t shit, and she was headed right back to him. I’m not saying you were right, but I understand the impulse, at least. But the fact that you’d sleep with this guy? Knowing it might hurt Jinny? That’s what’s not like you.”

  “Yeah, well.” Esther looked down at her feet.

  Cynthia touched her arm. “You’ve never been the type to lose your head over a man. So if you’re losing your head over this one, maybe you should ask yourself why. What’s so special about him?”

  Esther was pretty sure she knew what was so special. But she wasn’t ready to admit it to Cynthia or anyone else. New Improved Esther was still a work in progress. She hadn’t recovered from her big heart-to-heart with Jinny yet. It would be a while before she was ready to let herself be that vulnerable again.

  Besides, it didn’t matter anymore, because Jonathan had moved on. It was great that she’d had this epiphany and all, but her life wasn’t a rom-com. There wasn’t going to be any running after the boy and winning him back with declarations of love. It was best to forget it and move on with her life.

  “There’s nothing special about him anymore,” Esther said, meeting Cynthia’s eye.

  Cynthia raised a dubious eyebrow. “Mmmm hmmm.” She headed off toward her car, lifting a hand in farewell. “See you next week,” she called over her shoulder.