There’s a soft knocking, and I think—shit, this table, because it’s old, and despite my earlier fantasy, it’s probably not a good idea for me to fuck her on it. But—no, it’s not the table, because then the doorbell rings, and Kit stiffens and pulls away, her busy hands coming to rest right at my waistband, and I think if that fucking antique doorbell weren’t so loud, you could probably hear my dick calling out,lower! Just a little lower!
“I—uh. I should get that,” she says, but she winces when she looks down, sees the bulge in my jeans.“God. I’m so,sosorry.”
I can’t even form words at the moment. All my higher-order thinking skills have relocated to my balls. I step back from her and she scrambles off the table, snagging her glasses. Her hair is a mess from my hands in it, plus she’s still got a few pieces of plaster stuck there in the back, and maybe I got one over on that tank top after all, because it’s twisted and bunched up a little, and she straightens it as she walks to the front door.
Once she’s out of sight, I turn back toward the table, discreetly adjust myself so that whoever comes in doesn’t get sexually harassed just by my existence. Holy hell, I need a cold shower. I settle for another drink of water, a rough pass of my hand through my hair. I don’t think I’ve ever been so turned on in my life from a single kiss.
“Greer is here!” Kit says from behind me, and her voice is so transparently, falsely cheerful that I feel better, more at ease knowing she’s as thrown off as I am.
“Hi,” says Greer, in that small, sweet voice she has. Greer is no dummy—she knows she’s walked into something, and so I make even more of an effort to control my expression, to pretend I’m not going home with the worst case of blue balls I’ve had since eleventh grade.
“Hey, Greer. How’s school?”
Kit gives me a grateful smile, and it’s hard not to feel proud whenever I get even a scrap of approval from her.
“Oh—it’s okay. It’s good. We just started an entrepreneurship unit in my business class,” she says.“That’s kind of your thing, right?”
“Kind of,” I say. Greer is holding her purse in one hand and a few DVDs in the other, and even though I’m doing my best, it’s awkward in here. I get the sense that dining room table has something to say. I turn back to it, grab my phone and keys and tuck them into my pockets.“I should go,” I tell them, but I’m looking at Kit, and she’s flushed and fidgeting. If she asks me to stay, if she makes any move to suggest that she wants me to hang around, even if it’s with her and Greer, even if I’m spending my evening sitting on her couch and watching—I think that’s a copy ofPredator, which is unexpected—I’ll stay.
But she seems cautious, and I don’t want to press her.“I’ll make some calls about upstairs,” I tell her.
“Thank you. Really.”
I can sense that Greer is looking back and forth between us, but she too seems locked in place. I hate the heavy, frozen feeling in the room, and I have to do something.
So I do what feels, weirdly, like the most natural thing. I step forward, setting my hand on Kit’s upper arm, where her skin is bare and warm, and I lean down to press a firm kiss on her mouth, a quick, intimate touch, as if I’ve done it a million times, as if this woman didn’t just give me the best first kiss I’ve ever had.“I’ll call you,” I say, right against her mouth, then set another quick kiss there.
And then I’m headed toward the front door, calling out a quick goodbye to Greer. I barely hear the way she squeaks out a surprised “‘Bye!” before I’m on the porch, already wondering when I’ll see Kit again.
Chapter 13
Kit
Monday morning, and no call from Ben, not that I’m waiting around or anything. Not that I kept my ringer on high all day yesterday. Not that I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily Ben put me on that table, about how hard and strong he was all over, about how he tasted like chocolate and kissed like a dream.
Not any of that.
It isn’t that he left me hanging. He’d texted me Sunday morning to let me know he’d be at the salvage yard all day, filling in for his dad, who’d had a rough night of pain. He said he had a call in to the plaster guy, and he’d keep me posted.
But he hadn’t made any reference at all to what had happened, either.
I think of calling him, because I am genuinely a little worried for Henry, who tries so hard to act as if he’s not in any pain at all. But if I call to check on Henry, will that seem like I’m really only calling to check on Ben? And anyways, what is Henry to me other than the owner of a business I’ve been frequenting the last few weeks? Would I be crossing a line?
This kind of thinking—it’s not the way I am, not at all, and I’m frustrated with myself and with Ben, and with everything else that’s been bothering me since Friday. Alex and I shared a mostly silent breakfast on Saturday, except for when he tried to apologize, again, but I was so desperate not to get into it again that I’d put him off. I’d given him a half-hearted tour of the house before he’d headed off to the airport, and in turn he’d asked half-hearted questions as we moved from room to room. But it wasn’t the same, and I feel the pain of our fight as though it’s a bruise on my body. It’s tender and fresh and I’m trying to avoid it with every move I make.
So I’m up early, headed in to work by six, hoping I can get a couple of hours on the microscope before most of the grad students show up. The walk is good for me—it’s going to be another hot day, but right now it’s cool enough that I can move without sweating. The blooms of the crepe myrtle trees that line my street are fat and heavy with dew, and the air is sweet with the smell of cinnamon rolls from the bakery on the corner.
Block by block, I let my mind go to the place where I feel safest, to work and the lab, to where I can untangle problems I know how to fix.
By the time I arrive at my basement office, I’m feeling a bit more myself, and it’s at least an hour and a half before I hear signs of life in other parts of the building. I make progress on scanning a couple of my samples, but soon enough, it becomes a busy morning—I help Akeelah with her sample preparation, and Todd, playing to type, refuses my offer of help in positioning the beam on the microscope for his initial scan, but then fucks it up and has to ask for me to fix it anyway. I meet with Dr. Harroway, who was my professor in Intro to Non-Ferrous Metals when I was a graduate student, and show him a new animation I did one night last week for explaining crystal structure to undergrads. He’s so thrilled that he asks me to come do a lecture to his class this fall.
I’m eating lunch in my office when Dr. Singh knocks softly, his manner always so gentle and tentative that I sometimes wonder how he has managed to survive in this field, let alone how he’s managed to become one of its most respected scholars. He seems entirely comfortable in the background of things, and I think this is why I find it so easy to work with him.
I move a stack of papers from the extra chair I have and invite him to sit. When I first started working here, only two weeks after I’d graduated, I’d struggled to talk to Dr. Singh in any other way than progress reports—as his student, I’d always felt compelled to tell him how far along I was on my experiments, on my thesis. As his colleague, I frequently found myself doing the same, giving him an account of how I’d spent my day. He’d listen patiently until I finished, but then he’d just go straight into what he’d sought me out for in the first place—usually to tell me about a meeting or to ask a question about the microscope—without acknowledging my rambling. Eventually, I got used to the idea that he wasn’t checking up on me.
“I have good news,” he says, a faint look of displeasure crossing his face as he tries to get comfortable in the chair. It’s not going to happen since that thing looks as if it came from an elementary school classroom in the 1980s, but Dr. Singh would never complain.“We heard back from theJournal of Applied Metallurgytoday. With some slight adjustments, they want to publish our paper.”
He says this with the same measured tone that he says everything, but this news is big, and we both know it, so we’re sort of dumbly smiling at each other across my desk. We worked for years on this paper, having started it in my final year of the master’s program. It has data from some of my most successful work on the microscope, data that I was hoping to save for this kind of publication. I’m so excited that I clasp my hands together in pride, squeezing them tightly to prevent an outburst of actual applause.“Congratulations,” I say, and Dr. Singh shakes his head, his smile dimming.
