“I was curious.I got interested in the Shoemacher fire,” he said carefully.“The science of it.I wanted to understand how it spread, why it spread the way it did.One question led to another, and the next thing I knew I was enrolled in a degree program.”He paused.“The station was a separate thing.Getting it up and running again.That’s just practical.This town, this whole side of the lake, needs one.
She was quiet for a moment, turning the water bottle Rose had packed in the lunch in her hands.“Most people don't respond to intellectual curiosity by enrolling in a degree program.”
“I’m a bit of an academic nerd at heart.”
She laughed—a short, surprised sound.“A cowboy nerd?You’re the first one of those I’ve ever run across.”
He felt his face heating up a little.
“Have you always been an avid student?”she asked.
“Yes.And that’s a very nice way of calling me a geek.”
“Being a geek isn’t bad,” she said quickly.“Geeks made the world go round.They invent new things and make life better for the rest of us.I’m all for geekdom.”
He risked a glance at her.The look in her eyes was earnest.Sincere.She wasn’t making fun of him.
“My brothers always called me the family geek.They said I did enough reading for all three of us.”
“You’re the youngest, right?”
“Correct.Cooper’s the oldest and Tucker’s the middle child.”
“I know Cooper rode bulls for a little while on the rodeo circuit, and Tucker was a paramedic for the rodeo.What did you do on the rodeo circuit?”
“I rode saddle broncs.How did you know I traveled with my brothers on the rodeo circuit?
She grinned.“Small town.Everyone knows everything.”
They ate their bags of potato chips in companionable, if crunchy, silence.
As Gray reached into the sacks to pull out slices of apple pie for each of them, she tilted her head.“What's the most useless fact you know?From all that reading you do.”
He didn't have to think about that one.He answered immediately, “If you remove all the empty space from the atoms in the human body, every person on Earth could fit inside a sugar cube.”
“Each person gets their own cube, of all of us in a single cube.”
“All eight billion of us.In one sugar cube.”
Bonnie stared at him.“That cannot be true.”
“It is.”
“That's horrifying.”
“Most people find it more wondrous than horrifying.”
She shuddered theatrically.“I'm going to be thinking about that at two in the morning tonight when I can’t go to sleep.”
“Sorry.”
“No you're not.”
“Nope,” he agreed, “I’m not.”He flashed her a slow, sexy smile that said he was glad she would be thinking about him alone in the dark tonight.Even if it was because he’d shared a gross science fact with her.
She looked down at the slice of pie quickly, startled by his brief flirtation.It was her fault, of course.She was the one who’d brought up thinking about his dumb fact in the middle of the night.
Outside, a pick-up truck without an obvious muffler rumbled down Main Street.Crud.That was Irma’s truck.She was nearly as bad a gossip as Ruth.The truck noise faded, but in about a minute the same loud truck was back, passing by the Municipal building again.
