Up until now, campus has mostly let me exist in peace—Summer-related incident aside—but apparently that streak ends here, in a lab full of witnesses, with blot papers scattered at my feet and my luck finally deciding to cut and run.
“I can help you fix it,” I say, already crouching toward the papers before looking up into the flaring nostrils of one very angry grad student.
“How about you be careful in the first damn place?” he snaps, loud enough to swivel a few heads—Damon’s included.
Alright, sure. I guess hedoeshave a good excuse for being upset. But to be this rude? He’s been obnoxious and loud since he and his buddy stepped into the lab, and I’m ninety percent certain at least half his procedures were sprinted through. But personal opinions aside, he’s notexactlywrong. It is my fault.
Now we’re both staring at a mess he’ll have to start from scratch, and guilt gnaws at me while my brain flips into triage: stop the spill, salvage anything with a readable label, and survive the dozen pairs of eyes currently auditing my disaster. I neither need nor want to be the center of attention.
Yet here I am.
“Listen, why don’t you show me your catalogue and I’ll help you reset the run?” I say, aiming a smile at his blotchy-red face. “Two sets of hands and we’ll rebuild it quickly.”
He looks me up and down with all the disdain reserved for shark fin soup. “No, thanks, you’d only make it worse.”
“You’d be surprised, I’m sure I can be useful.”
“Will you just go away?” he shouts. It’s funny how oftendebatein academic settings translates to a man raising his voice at a woman until she stops talking. “This is why they shouldn’t let girls in the lab.”
Oh, no.Absolutely not.I am a peaceful person—except when forced to negotiate with Excel—but nothing needles me faster than a guy who handles his samples with bare hands, skips half the prep, slaps the wrong labels on the tubes, and then announces women shouldn’t be in STEM. Has his brain been parked in formaldehyde since thenineteenth century? The comebacks stampede my brain:shove it; better yet, park yourself on a Bunsen burner set to high; or, if you’re feeling immortal, go repeat that line to the framed photo of Rosalind Franklin in the hallway.
But a voice, clean and unhurried, beats me to it.
“Mr. Colt. Surely I heard you wrong.”
We pivot like a lazy turntable. Holden leans in the doorway—arms crossed, height almost too much for the frame. His face is bored; his eyes aren’t. Coffee-dark with that thin ring of hazel I pretend not to remember, and right now,furious.
The room reacts as one. A couple gasps. Paper rustles. Someone whispers, “Colt’s dead,” and someone else, “the chick too,” which—comforting. The girl by the wash sink forgets to close her mouth and actually drools. Maybe not the right time, but who can blame her.
You’d think his showing up would take the heat out of being talked down to and eating tile under thirty pairs of eyes, right? Holden, of all people, on my side? Then why are relief and annoyance elbowing each other like lab partners who won’t share a pipette? I’m grateful, truly, but there’s nothing like being humiliated by one man and rescued by another to prove we still don’t speak the same language.
“I—uh.” Colt rubs the back of his neck and cuts me a pleading look. I almost—almost—feel bad; Holden’s gaze is a riptide, anger swirling in those beautiful eyes, and if it were aimed at me I’d run. And, given the mess I made of his lab, I might be next.
“You seemed chattier a minute ago,” Holden adds, one dark brow lifting a deliberate millimeter. “Something about women in labs? Careto enunciate?”
Colt remains silent, and Holden doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. “You will apologize,” he says, each word clipped and punctuated by a step forward, “then you will collect what’s left of your work and remove yourself from my section. If you need a refresher, the harassment clause lives on the syllabus I’m now pretty damn sure you didn’t read.”
Color drains from Colt’s face. “Sorry,” he mutters in my direction, then bolts through the opposite door, very committed to eye contact with no one.
Holden takes a few steps back towards the doorframe, the authority dialed down for public consumption, the undercurrent of anger still very much there. “Ms. Taylor,” he says, eyes on mine for one beat too long, “are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Good.” And that’s that. He turns on his heel and is gone as abruptly as he appeared, shoulders squared, watch flashing once under the fluorescents, as if this didn’t just crack my top ten most mortifying lab moments. The room resumes its hum like nothing happened—pumps, fridges, the soft tick of timers—while my pulse tries its very hardest to settle.
When I’m finally convinced no one’s still watching, I head for my bench. Naturally, my lab coat snags on the corner of a desk and yanks me backward like I’m on a leash. If this scratchy polyester penitentiary manages to strangle me, at this point I just hope someone has the decency to lie at my funeral and say I died saving a whale.
“You’re goingthroughit,” Kai says, dragging a stool over and perching, one corner of his mouth smirking, the other busy with a Nerds Rope.
I drop onto mine with a thud. “No food in the lab.”
He pockets the candy without blinking. “You’re right, we wouldn’t want yetanotherreason to summon Wilkes so he can come scowl at us, would we?”
I bury my face in my hands for a beat. “Ugh, I hate you.”
He chuckles, perfectly unbothered. He claimed he finished his work in the first hour, which is adorable, and has spent every minute since delivering what he calls essential campus updates. In retrospect, he is at least forty percent of the reason I wasn’t looking when I manhandled Colt’s samples. I will be listing him as a co-author on the incident report.
What upgrades this from mortifying to catastrophic is that it’s my first contact with Holden since he hauled me out of the Pacific a week ago. We’ve sustained a tidy week of mutually assured avoidance—mostly my strategic rerouting around his known office hours and, if the empty doorways are any indication, his. Separate orbits, nonoverlapping home ranges. Until now.
