Well, early-ish. Eight-thirty, which isn’t usually an early hour for me, but given how little sleep I got last night, it doesn’t feel great.
It’s Dr. Shearer, the professor whose lab I work in. I snatch the phone off the nightstand and jump from the bed.
“Hi, Aaron,” I say, doing my best to sound awake.
“Heeeey, Easton,” Aaron says. He’s normally a fast talker—he could have spit out a paragraph in the amount of time it took him to sayheeeey. “Sorry to call on your vacation. South Carolina, right?”
Aaron does not give a flying fuck where I am or what I’m down here for. It’s not worth correcting him.
“Yeah,” I say softly. “What’s up?” My heart skitters. I twist my hair up just to get it off my neck—I’m starting to sweat—and begin to pace.
“Look,” he says, and I can hear the wince in his voice, “I’m going over the numbers, and I don’t know that we’ve got the resources to keep your study funded another semester.”
I nearly drop the phone. I perch on the edge of the mattress because my legs have begun to shake.
It makes no sense. My research is going really, really well. It’s already underway. “I don’t understand. You said the grant was approved.”
“It was,” he says. There’s a half-second of silence, as if he’s trying to carefully choose his next words. “Some of the funding was coming from the university, though. That’s the part in question. I’m trying to find a way to make it work, but I just wanted to prepare you. While we’re figuring this out, I’ll see if someone else might be able to take you on, okay? I didn’t want to worry you, but I also just wanted to be...upfront.”
My heart hammers in my chest, and it’s the only thing I can hear. This isn’t about me or my clinical trials. This is about Thomas. This is Thomas flexing his muscles after I told him not to come to the wedding, or someone currying favor with him by squeezing me out.
No one else is going to take me on in Aaron’s place. Not when it might mean incurring Thomas’s wrath.
The Walsh in me comes racing to the surface.You want to play this game, motherfucker? I’m gonna make you wish you were never born.Unlike my brothers and my dad, I would do it through the courts, not through violence, but the impulse remains the same.
I take one long breath in and slowly release it before I respond. “Okay, Aaron,” I say, “thanks for letting me know.”
Did Thomas actually set this up? Yes. Probably.
Don’t jump to conclusions, Easton.
But seriously, what the fuck? Thomas broke up with me in a fairly shitty way, with absolutely no warning, and now he’s taking it out onme?
I don’t have money for lawyers. All I can do is make threats I couldn’t possibly back up and even if I did have the money...myresearch would be dead in the water by the time it was adjudicated.
So I either give it up, or I get back together with Thomas. I already assumed I would be, so I’m not sure why I suddenly resent the idea so much. Maybe I just don’t like having my hand forced. Maybe it’s just that it’s so fundamentally unfair for him to jerk me around the way he has.
I pick my phone up again. Every bone in my body wants to accuse Thomas of doing this intentionally, of being disgusting and petty, but that’s not how I’ll win this battle.
Aaron just said he doesn’t know that there will be sufficient funding for me. Do you know anything about this?
Thomas
No, I’m not even there. But you know how these things work.
No, I really don’t. My research was really promising, and there hasn’t been an issue with my funding since it began.
Hon, you’ve been dating me most of that time. I warned you...there was bad and there was good.
Ah, right. The bad being that people would always claim my career progressed because I was with him. The good being that they were right to some extent: my careerwouldactually progress more easily because I was dating him.
But the timing of it—for Aaron to tell me this right after that tense conversation with Thomas—is suspicious.
We broke up two weeks ago, and maybe word is just getting out, or maybe Thomas decided to show me a few of the cards in his deck.
Swear to me that you had nothing to do with this.
Thomas
