“Thank you,” he said when he managed to work himself upright, the towel tied around his waist.
She nodded, like it was all part of the job.You, sir, are but one of the many charmingly flustered nudists I have assisted in the wee hours of the night.
“So,” she said, now that they’d achieved a socially acceptable level of exposed flesh. “What happened?” Jean felt like a coast guard captain who’d just pulled someone from the wreckage of their kayak.
“I was out on the patio.” He rubbed his chin and jaw with one hand. (She suspected this was the gesture he’d started to make earlier; it had the look of a habitual motion.) The other hand remained at his hip, anchoring the towel. “It’s been a while since I slept indoors.”
Jean nodded at him to continue, filing that information away for later.
“And then I got up.” He hesitated, another wave of color spreading across his face. “To do something inside.”
Her theories, in no particular order: 1. Drugs; 2. Jerking off; 3. The shits. Jean was proud of herself for not asking a hotel guest if he had intestinal issues. And her friends thought she had no filter.
“I got distracted,” he continued, and this time she couldn’t help herself.
“By what?” She knew in her bones it was going to be something weirder than scrolling Instagram.
“Journal of Herpetology?” His voice lifted at the end, turning it into a question.
Bingo, Jean thought. This guy was a gold mine.
“You probably haven’t heard of it.” The wistful glance he shot her suggested he hoped otherwise.
She tried to let him down gently. “No, but I think I can guess. It’s a journal, and it’s about herpetology. Am I close?”
“The study of snakes. And other reptiles. If it was just snakes it would be theJournal of Ophiology.”
Jean nodded as if she’d known that all along. In her defense, the study of STDs was not a completely unreasonable guess. “Journal of Snakeologydoesn’t have the same ring. Or justSNAKES!All caps, exclamation point.”
“It’s a very reputable publication. One of the top scientific publications in the field.” Not the kind of place to give itself a funny name, in other words. She liked that he sounded apologetic rather than offended.
“Okay. So you grab your journal. Hot off the presses, a real page-turner, and…?”
“I have an article,” he admitted. “I like looking at it.”
It took Jean a few seconds to decipher the mumbled bit at the end. “In theJournal of Herpetology?”
“Yes. I mean, I’m second author.”
“Congratulations.” She considered throwing him another towel to celebrate, like a dolphin trainer flinging fish.
The hand holding his makeshift white kilt twisted, drawing Jean’s attention to his narrow hips. “It probably seems like a small thing to you.”
Me as in the person whose job is delivering towels in the middle of the night?His sense of social hierarchy seemed to be broken. “No, I totally get it. My best friend is always trying to get articles published, so I know it’s a big deal to have a byline.”
“What’s her field?”
Rather than selling her roommate down the river by admitting that Libby’s writing career was still in its fledgling state (in the barely hatched sense), Jean kept it broad. “Human psychology.”
“Very competitive.”
“No kidding. I keep telling her to look for back doors. You have to be willing to do whatever it takes to make a space for yourself. If that’s what you really want.”
He nodded, but it looked a little sad.
“Can I see it?” she asked, to distract him from whatever thoughts were bringing him down. “The article.”
It seemed like an unnecessary clarification, considering she’d already gotten a good look at everything else, but a lot of things sounded dirty under the right circumstances. Late at night, in a luxury vacation cottage, with a handsome man wearing only a towel, for example. And a king-size bed clearly visible through the doorway behind him.
