Oh,shit. Shit, shit, shit. I couldnotthink about her naked. Not here. Not yet. And it wasn't about the touch-and-go nature of public erections. No, it was that I wanted to do thisright.
"It's not quite clear how they came to exist," she continued, her voice taking on new authority. Her words were clear and efficient, and even her gestures rang with professional fascination that bordered on obsession. "They possess no mantle minerals, and that's fucking weird, but what's more strange is the lack of high-pressure minerals, like hexagonal carbon polymorph."
"No hexagonal carbon polymorph?" I asked. I had no idea what we were talking about. I mean, sure, I knew my share of chemistry, but this was beyond my share. "That's crazy."
"I know, right?" she said. "Fun fact—their isotopic values are low, which isn't how diamonds are supposed to behave. Some researchers have suggested that radiation was involved in their formation, given the presence of luminescence halos, but that calls into question a spontaneous fission of uranium and thorium."
"Right," I murmured, nodding in thanks as the bartender placed two beer bottles in front of us. "The luminescence halos. Of course."
She held up her index finger, pressing pause on the black diamond mystery while she sipped her beer. "Oh, sorry," she said, tapping her bottle to mine. "Here's to…surviving this weekend."
Here's to evading your big brothers. What they don't know won't hurt them. Right?
"To surviving the weekend," I said. I took a sip, but then returned the bottle to the bar top. Reaching over, I pulled her chair closer to mine. Fuck cool and friendly.
"Right, right," she said. She was looking down, inspecting the way I had us pressed together, and then back up at me. "What's this about?"
"You." I pressed my thumb right there, to the tender hollow where the stone sat. It was just a moment, a fleeting touch. A second longer and my hand would've moved up her neck and into her hair, and then we'd never hear the end of this wonky explanation because my mouth would be fused to hers. "You were telling me about this," I said, my eyes locked on her lips.
"Yeah…"
She eyed me for a wary beat, then pushed her glasses up her nose and leaned into me.Leaned the fuck into me. Her shoulder was on my chest and her head was tucked under my chin, and this,thiswas what I needed after the week from hell.
Patting my knee twice as if I was a well-behaved golden retriever, Erin blew out a soft breath. She relaxed in pieces, her shoulders sagging first, and it moved down her body. Back, hips, legs. I imagined her toes uncurling inside her boots. From this angle, I could see her lashes brushing against her cheeks, and I didn't even think about it when I pressed my lips to her temple. It was natural, for both of us. This was what she needed, too.
"So, carbonado," she said, patting my knee again. God, she was fucking cute. "The theory that keeps me up at night is this one—that it was formed deep inside an early generation giant star, one that exploded forever ago into a supernova. Which makes this"—she tapped the stone—"an artifact of forever ago. Of a time before words and thoughts and anything at all."
"That's…incredible," I whispered into her hair. Her voice did things to me. Really good things. And the nerdy science talk? Oh, shut the fuck up. I was done when I saw her, and I was well done now.
Her tongue darted out and ran along her top lip as her shoulder jerked. "Whenever the world is too much for me, I remember that this rock might have been thrown out of interstellar space when time began. Before the world was anything, this ball of carbon was flung into earth's atmosphere in one of the cosmos's greatest tantrums. I've had a lot of bad days, but never one as bad as this rock."
She really did know things I couldn't begin to comprehend. I hadn't expected it to involve black diamonds or supernovas but the means didn't matter. It was the method that had me entranced. And I wanted—no,needed—to know her.
"Is the world too much today?" I asked.
A quick nod. "A little bit, yeah."
She offered nothing more, and that was okay. The world was kicking my ass right now, too.
I tapped the tiny stone winking at me from her nose. "And what's this?"
"Diamond," she said. "The kimberlite variety. Nothing interstellar here."
"Boring," I murmured, and that earned me a hearty laugh. "Hawaii. Italy. Grad school. Volcanoes. Tell me everything. When do you finish?"
In other words, when can I keep you forever?
She wiggled her fingers as if she was counting on them. "Three…no, four months ago. I've been working on some random stuff since then. You know, testing stray theories and cleaning up messy data sets. I'm heading to Iceland soon," she added, and those wiggly fingers came to a rest on my thigh. My cock nearly strangled itself twitching toward her touch. "I'll be splitting my time between Iceland and England. Iceland for the field research. England for a new doctoral program. There's some innovative work being done at Oxford around environmental changes, climate, sea levels. Mostly planetary physics stuff. I don't know what I'm going to find, but it will be interesting."
"Does Matt know that?" I asked, already knowing the answer. He didn't. He was a sharer, and he would've shared that. Since meeting him five years ago in a Boston Marathon qualifying run, I'd been an unwitting recipient of his Erin updates. He probably hadn't anticipated that I'd call upon that information while his sister was edging her way into my lap.
She squinted at the liquor bottles shelved behind the bar. "I don't know. Maybe. I might've mentioned it." She held out her palms in surrender, and that came with the unfortunate consequence of separating her touch from my thigh. "Also, I might've forgotten."
I grabbed her hand and put it back. "You're on loan to an Icelandic research station from Oxford?"
"You say that like it's a big deal. Trust me, it's reallynota big deal. It's how my little corner of the world works. Aren't you on loan from Harvard to some specialized pediatric neurosurgery program and have surgical privileges at every hospital in Boston?" she replied. "At least, that's what Matt told me."
Oh, I loved knowing that she had my info. It was better than having hers. "How old are you?" I asked. Demanded, really. I knew only that she was the youngest of the Walshes, and had filed that into the general category ofunder thirty.
