Ren
Fossil prep is my favourite part of my job.
Just me, an air scribe, and sodium bicarbonate. Or maybe some dolomite depending on the fossil, my foot on the pedal underneath the desk and something old, preserved, and wonderful beneath my fingertips.
It’s my favourite feeling, to see dust and dirt and sediment fly away to reveal something beautiful.
But today, right when I’m setting the pressure—only 10 psi, I’m dealing with an eggshell after all—I hear the swing of the lab door, the slow creak of the hinges, followed by measured, assured footsteps that could only belong to one person.
“Are you going to avoid me forever?” His voice sounds the same as it always has. Oozing with a confidence that could only belong to a man who thinks he’s so above you in the stratosphere he couldn’t possibly be wrong.
It’s not helped by the fact that Scott—academically speaking, and strictly academically, seeing as he’s wrong almost always in real life—has never so much as misspelledMicropachycephalosaurus hongtuyanensis,and he’s certainly never mixed up a period of the Mesozoic Era on a multiple-choice exam in college.
“I’m busy,” I say, words clipped through clenched teeth as my fingers move through robotic movements, clicking the regulator dial on the compressor line clockwise towards ten. I’m glad I know all of this like I know the back of my hand, because out of the corner of my eye I see Scott’s hands, folding down over the back of a haphazardly tucked-in lab chair.
And I know all about those hands even though I wish I didn’t.
“Renny. Come on.” The chair scrapes across the floor, and his words scrape across my skin.
“Not my name.” I scrunch my nose, trying not to think about the way those hands held an air scribe, not unlike this one, and how he used it to chip away at me for years and years until I was nothing but fragments you could barely see under a microscope.
“We have to talk eventually. We work together now.” He drags out the wordtogether, all weighed down with honey, like it’s some sweet thing. But it’s a lie. We don’t work together. I work for him.
And even if it was some grand partnership, Scott doesn’t know how to collaborate. He turns the chair backwards, swinging a leg around either side, his polished Oxfords resting against the tile floor, and he stares, assessing me from behind those stupid glasses until his brows snap together. “Why are you using an air scribe? You should be using an air abrasive.”
“It’s a Micro Jack Mini Pulse, it works at 10 psi. I’m not blasting it with a ZPT-BT at thirty-six and there’s a chunk of tuff—you know what?” The metal ridges of the scribe start to bite into my palm when I tighten my grip to stop my hand from shaking. Pressing my eyes closed, I take a steadying inhale and try to repeat one of the self-assurances my therapist has been drilling into my head for the better part of four years. I turn,raising the scribe towards him. “I know what I’m doing, believe it or not.”
The arch of his brow spells outnot, and it presses down so heavy on all those calming mantras of whatever roof I’ve been building over myself that it collapses and leaves nothing but the unsteady, insecure version of me he hated so much buried in the rubble.
“You want to talk? Fine. We’ll talk.” I throw the scribe onto the bench, and it skitters across the metal until it careens off the edge, landing on the floor with a resounding thud. The corners of my eyes pinch with a wince—it might be a small tool, but it’s not cheap.
Scott’s gaze cuts to the tile floor, and his throat starts to work with a snort like I’m proving his point, but I flash my palm before bringing my hands together. “You’re a narcissist, Scott.”
His eyes drag back to me, amusement lifting a brow. “Did your therapist tell you that?”
“Yes, actually.” I nod, pointing my fingers towards him. “And she doesn’t like you very much.”
“Disliking someone doesn’t make them a narcissist.” His thumb taps out his disapproval against the back of the chair. “I’d suggest you double-check your—”
“You know whatdoesmake you a narcissist?” A shriek builds in my throat, and I do my best to keep it in, but a sort of high-pitched sound escapes with my words when I start ticking things off on my fingers. “An exaggerated sense of self-importance—your dreams were always much bigger than mine, right? Even though they were practically the same! Your insane need to walk around like some sort of puffed-up penguin because you just need everyone to admire how great and wonderful and smart you are. Can you actually see through those glasses? They might as well be blinders to the feelings and wants and needs of other people.” I throw a hand towards the black frames sittingperfectly on his face. “Don’t even get me started on the stupid pedestal you’ve crafted for yourself to sit on. But you know what’s really the cherry on top, Scott?”
He sits there, unimpressed, and unblinking, a parent waiting for a child to finish throwing their tantrum so they can lay down the punishment, somehow looking down at me even though I push to stand, sending my lab chair careening into the bench.
“The fact that of all the jobs in all the world—you had to take mine.” My hands clench into fists at my sides, a sob catching on the last word.
Because it was supposed to be mine.
One of the first things I reached for and did for myself after years of being told my dreams weren’t worth anything.
After years of starting to believe it, because what were my dreams, really, in comparison to his?
The only thing I thought I wanted my entire life was to be chosen by someone—and then an eighteen-year-old Scott Saunders sat beside me on a lab bench not unlike this one and smiled at me.
It didn’t matter to eighteen-year-old me that that smile didn’t meet his eyes, and something unfriendly lived somewhere behind them, lurking just around the corner.
It didn’t matter to twenty-year-old me or twenty-three-year-old me or even twenty-five-year-old me.
Not when he looked at me for so many years like he loved me.
