I couldn’t only think of five things.
I thought of six things, too.
But the last one felt too personal, and it didn’t really feel like the kind of thing I could share with an almost stranger—even if we are both adults.
It feels too personal to be thinking about now, surrounded by a wall of over one hundred plated fossilized fish while I work through a regular inspection.
“You didn’t have to stay,” I say, trying to blink away the blush on my cheeks. “Museum closed half an hour ago. I think that signals the end of your workday.”
Imani shrugs, adjusting her glasses where the frames have slid down the bridge of her nose. “I have an hour until I have to be on campus for my seminar.”
“How’s the rotation going?” I ask, looking up at the endless stretch of fish.
“Not great. Turns out not many biology students are very interested in invertebrates. They all think paleontology is an easy elective they can use to pad their GPAs before med school applications.”
“Did you tell them invertebrates make up 97 percent of animal species? Pretty important, if you ask me.” I toss a smile over my shoulder before squinting at a coelacanth. “I should rotate this one out, see? There’s flaking starting around the vertebral column.”
Imani cranes her neck towards the low, mounted lighting behind the glass. “Is there something wrong with the display?”
“The consolidants are probably just aging. This is the oldest one in the collection.” Frowning at my tablet, I click through the records and documentation for the fish, before peering back up at the display. Everything looks normal, environmentally speaking. “I’ll have facilities run an audit just to make sure nothing tripped, and the temperature stayed steady since the last one.” I give Imani a wobbly smile. “That’d be my luck—some sort of massive malfunction of the temperature and the humidity that destroys our fish collection. Scott would have a field day with that. Imagine how he’d walk around. I wouldn’t even get to touch our new collection when it arrives.”
She makes a face, clenching her fists and rounding out her shoulders in some horrible imitation of Scott, and her laugh rings out, endless, and so much bigger and louder than the frame that contains it.
I wonder if the way my best friend’s laughter sounds to me is the way mine did to Miller the other night.
Stop apologizing. It’s cute.
“Yeah.” She nods fervently, adjusting her glasses again. “Let’s double-check everything before you’re done. We don’t need to give him any other reason to walk around like—what did you say you called him the other day in the fossil lab?”
“I was about halfway into calling him a puffed-up penguin before I crumbled, like usual.” I sniff a sad laugh.
“Hey—” Imani wraps a hand around my arm. “None of that. You’re working on it. I’d like to see anyone else get up and dust themselves off after a decade with him and resume normal activity.”
Shame gnaws at something in my chest, and I mumble, “Most people wouldn’t have spent a decade with him.”
She tries to give me a stern look. “We’ve spent the better part of the last four years working through those types of things in therapy. And that was before he slithered back into your life. We can allow some grace for that.”
“We can?” I ask through a laugh that’s half dry, half hopeful.
I know she’s right, logically speaking. When I finally worked up the courage to leave Scott behind, I found this job. I found a therapist. I found new friends.
I tried to start finding myself.
But then he found me again, just because he could, and it feels so much like I’m back at square one. He stole another dream from me when he took the job, and it’s hard not to wonder whether I’m the type of person who should have any dreams at all.
“We can.” Imani gives me a proud little nod before she pulls her phone from the pocket of her pants, glancing around surreptitiously, like Scott might pop out from behind the model of the anglerfish. “Speaking of things that Scott might have a field day with.”
She shoves her phone directly under my nose, and I have to pull my head back to see what’s on the screen.
I almost laugh.
It’s a picture of Miller and me, standing in front of the produce.
“That didn’t take long.”
Imani smashes a finger against the screen. “What’s going on? I saw you talking at the gala, but I didn’t think—”
“Nothing,” I tell her, but disbelief purses her lips. “I drank too much after my run-in with Scott. He walked me home. We came to a ... mutually beneficial agreement to help one another out.”
