Perhaps someone with a botany affinity would have known the difference?
My heart leapt into my throat, startled by the mistake I’d almost made, even though I had no real conception of it. “Why? What is the fern green?”
Wilder looked embarrassed for one fleeting moment. Then he visibly shook off that impulse and grinned. Deliberately. Widely. As if he were trying as hard to convince himself of his amusement as he was to convince me. “This is aspecialelixir, for Professor Robards.”
“My boss, Professor Robards?”
“Indeed. Perhaps you’ve noticed that he pulls his curls back to cover a thinning spot on his scalp?”
I had noticed, but…“How is that any of your business?”
“It’s my business, precisely because itisbusiness. He’s in the market for a hair-loss remedy, though that isn’t the only measure he takes to ward against age-related infirmities.” Wilder waggled the vial, and its contents sloshed softly within.
I had the distinct impression I was supposed to understand the purpose of the elixir. “Is it for his joints? Do they trouble him?”
Wilder laughed, his head thrown back, eyes crinkled with true amusement. “An aching boneishis problem,” he conceded when he’d calmed enough to speak. “But likely not whichever one you’re thinking of. Professor Robards needs an elixir to allow him to perform.”
I blinked at him.
“For hiswife,” Wilder added. After a further pause, he sighed. “In theirmarital bed? Because without it, no one tellshimhow distinctly virile and attractive he looks, at his age.”
My brow rose as comprehension finally dawned. “You’ve made an elixir to help him…rise to the occasion?”
“Precisely. And not for the first time.”
“How?”I demanded with a glance at his notes. There weren’t a dozen words in total on any single page. No formulas at all. They were more like…reminders. Hints that only Wilder would understand. “How do you know how to make such a thing?”
“Trial and error, mostly. More error than anything, in this case. I stumbled upon the formula a year and a half ago, when I was trying for a different kind of stimulant entirely.” His grin grew more heated. “Imagine my bewilderment when an attempt to solve a more innocuous social malady led, instead, to an entirely different manner of…affliction. Although I hesitate to characterize that particular condition as an adversity.”
“You took this elixir yourself?”
“Who else am I meant to test it on?” His grin crinkled the corner of his eyes pleasantly as he leaned closer to whisper, “I will say, even when the result misses the mark a bit, I am generally quite pleased with the outcome of any endeavor in the lab. And that time was no exception.” He winked. “Despite every attempt toremedythe situation, I missed three classes. Otherwise, I would have madequitethe public spectacle.”
I blinked at him. Then I burst into laughter, even as I flushed from head to toe at the mental image of Wilder walking around campus with a distinctive bulge in the front of his robe.
And thoughts of what his attempts to “remedy” the situation might entail.
Had I been involved?
“What was the original ‘social malady’?” I asked, a grin lingering on my face.
His own smile faded at the reminder. “I…It doesn’t matter.”
“It might,” I insisted, shifting uncomfortably on my feet as I tried to come up with a tactful way to explain my concern. “If this is an ailment we shared, due to…evidently…the nature of our relationship. This ‘social malady.’ ”
For a prolonged moment, Wilder only stared at me. Then comprehension dawned behind his eyes, which brightened as he threw his head back and laughed. “No, no, Amber,” he finally said while I stared at him with my arms crossed over my chest. “This was not a physical ailment. And certainly not of an intimate nature. It was an issue of the mind, though I’ll admit, I find it equally embarrassing.”
I shook my head, brows knit together, somehow even more confused by his explanation. “What could be as embarrassing—”
“Nothing.” He turned away from me to neutralize the inside of a used vial before he began washing it. “It doesn’t matter.”
A tiny crack opened in my heart as I watched him, his shoulders hunched, his jaw tight. I felt bruised by the understanding that he was unwilling to trust me with…something.
“Presumably”—I began, as I carefully carried two vials and an alembic toward him from my half-empty workstation—“this is something I was already aware of, before.”
In my pre-amnesia life, when I’d known who I was, and who he was. And whowewere.
“Yes.” He turned to take the vials from me, and his gaze held mine for a second, some unspoken pain welling behind his eyes. “But you look at me differently now. You don’t remember my struggles. My failures. I find myself reluctant to disclose them and watch all of this”—he waved his free hand in a circle around my face, indicating my expression—“change.”
