He catches her reflexive glance at his leg, and her neck flushes with guilty heat. “So you don’t drive? You don’t fly?”
“I do both when there’s no other choice.”
“Noted, but when you’re on my dig, I’m responsible for ensuring you have the choices you need. I know I haven’t done a great job of looking after you so far. I’ll do better going forward.”
For a moment, something hovers between them, as delicate and golden as the last rays of a Montana sunset. It feels like possibility. Like they might be—
“Hey, Ripley. I think I left my—oh,” Jordin says, pulling up short at the swinging door, an anxious look on her button-nosed face. “Am I interrupting?”
They step away from each other, ridiculously synchronized. “Nope,” Ripley says right on top of Smithson’s “Absolutely not.”
“Oh-kayyyy,” Jordin says, deeply skeptical. She grabs Matteo’s hoodie from the back of her chair and shrugs it on over her tank top and cutoffs. “Are you coming out to the porch? Geraldine made cookies.”
“Be there in a minute,” Ripley says. “You go ahead, Smithson.”
He hesitates. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” she says, thinking he won’t get the reference toThe Last Crusade.
“Easy there, Indiana Jones,” he says with a faint smile.
That’s the moment when she knows for sure that she’s in trouble.
12
June 19:
Seventy Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
Four days ago, on Monday, Geraldine rode out to the dig, Hoodoo’s saddlebags stuffed with the purchases Smithson had considerately not had delivered directly there: bright spandex, wraparound sunglasses, and a teardrop-shaped helmet. By Wednesday, he had two bikes, a mountain bike Geraldine dug out of her garage and a road bike he’s keeping at the ranch house.
Every morning, Ripley hears the door to his bunkhouse whisper open at dawn, while the day is as cool as it’s going to be. He walks softly, his bike shoes barely audible on the wooden stairs. Ripley has to strain to catch the ticking of his wheels as he walks the bike out of camp.
She can’t sleep through all the damn racket.
Two hours later, he comes back flushed and smiling, which Ripley guesses is how he earned those ridiculous thighs. Once, his bike shorts rode up a little, revealing a glimpse of bright color inked above his scar—blue and black, red and yellow.
She finds her mind looping back to his tattoo when she’s prowling the canyon, searching for the rest of Beauty. What the hell does someone as repressed as Smithson ask for on the one day in his life he’s inebriated enough to walk into a tattoo shop? Is it a dinosaur? A coat of arms? A skull with roses for eyes?
It itches her the way everything about him seems to do these days.
On Tuesday, he spent half a day at the big house, taking advantage of Geraldine’s superior Wi-Fi to give a lecture and hold virtual office hours for his visiting professorship at Berkeley. Otherwise, when he’s not on his bike or at the site, he shuts himself away in his cabin. Sometimes when Ripley’s walking by, she’ll catch an email notification sound, a mouse click, and, thirty seconds later, a deflated sigh.
Other times, she picks up snatches of conversation.
“Very modest investment with excellent potential returns.” And “No, she’s not at Oxford.” And “No, she’s a citizen scientist.” And “Of course. If you reconsider, do give me a ring.”
After the call ends, there is always a silence. She pictures him sitting unassailably upright in his Emeco Navy chair, eyes closed, hands pressed flat against the surface of his folding table. Or maybe he’s abandoned decorum, and his elbows are angled against the desk, his hands in his hair.
A minute later, there will be a burst of furious typing. The pop-clicking of his mechanical keyboard covers the sound of Ripley’s footsteps as she walks away.
She’s not eavesdropping, exactly. She just happens to be walking by his cabin often enough to have picked up the pattern.
Patterns like the one where you keep fucking walking by his cabin, Adams.
Or patterns like how he shows up dressed for dinner every night. On his eighth night here, two of Ripley’s crew changed their clothes before dinner too. On the ninth, it was four. On the tenth, even Matteo had brushed his hair.
Twice, he’s sat beside her at meals. She could hardly taste Renzo’s divine capicola pizza last Friday because of the occasionalnudge of Smithson’s elbow against her upper arm. She held a slice right next to her face to drown out the grassy, pencil-y smell of him, wanting the hyperaware, keyed-up feeling to stop immediately and also never to go away.
