Ripley could have told him not to waste his time trying to discourage a pack of bone hounds. As a rule, their species loves mysteries and takes delight in being persistent little fuckers. Every Saturday night from now until September, they’re going to pop up in Alphabet like a mob of curious meerkats.
Last night, Cara bought the first round—a row of gasoline-smelling shots mixed from two unlabeled bottles. She dubbed them Fossil Fuel and insisted everyone had to do one. As one of the designated drivers, Cara conveniently didn’t have to down it herself.
Ripley had been about to refuse, but for some reason she’d looked down the bar. At the end of the row of grinning people was Smithson, a serving of questionable liquid perched between fingers so elegantly jointed they might take flight. He’d tipped his mouth in a small, secret smile, angling his not-quite-clean shot glass in a toast:Congratulations, Ripley Adams.
The awkwardness of the morning faded, and she couldn’t help but grin back, raising her glass.
When the coughing settled enough for Ripley to lift her head, Smithson had materialized at her end of the bar, looking like he couldn’t decide whether to give her a few solid thumps on her back or offer her a tissue from a wallet-size pack he’d produced from some mysterious location. “All right there, Ripley?” he said mildly. She nodded, her throat aflame, trying to breathe away the idea of his hand spread out between her shoulder blades.
It must’ve been the phantom feeling of his fingers against her neck that made Ripley pick up the second shot. And the warm beer chaser.
After that, things got loud and blurry.
At some point, Griff pulled the grimy, broken jukebox away from the wall, and the twins took off the back panel with disturbingly sharp multitools Ripley didn’t know they carried. A short time later, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was blasting through the bar. She remembers how Smithson’s neck took on a damp sheen from dancing, his hair curling at his nape in the rising humidity.
Ripley can summon snippets of the ride home. She rested her head on a sleeping Griff at one point. She also remembers sort of tumbling off Griff’s shoulder, and Smithson hauling her up against him. Her brain is fuzzy on the details, but her body offers up sensations: the tense sinew of his arm, the wing of his hand across her hip bone, a river of vetiver waterfalling off his hot skin. His body felt loose and giving under hers instead of tight like he usually was in a car. She might have—she clamps both hands across her eyes—snuggledinto the push of his heartbeat against her cheek.
She can’t seem to stop nonessentially touching him.
Luckily, it doesn’t matter now. His two weeks are up, and soon he’ll be gone.
Standing up sucks a great deal, but Ripley needs a shower and the beigest possible breakfast before she talks to Smithson. They can hammer out the details of the investigation this morning.
Then there’ll be nothing standing in his way when it’s time for him to leave.
Hair loose and dripping, Ripley shambles back across the commons to hang her towel on the communal clothesline. Cara’s sitting alone at the long table, eating a bowl of oatmeal withcranberries and pecans. From the dust on her clothes, Ripley guesses she’s been down at the dig, making the most of last night’s sobriety and this morning’s disgusting good health.
With great effort, Ripley manages, “Think it’s gonna rain?”
“She stirs,” Cara says. “How you feeling?”
“Real good, Cara. So good. Thanks for that, by the way. Is there any more oatmeal?”
“Take as much as you want. You’ll need it after all that dancing.”
A hazy image of shaking her ass while clapping along to General Public’s “Tenderness” rises in Ripley’s mind, thick and sludgy like raw crude. The jukebox didn’t have any songs more recent than the mid-eighties, but there were some bangers good enough to get even the boss out on the dance floor.
And Smithson. Ripley isn’t sure if he actually has decent dance moves or if that was the Fossil Fuel. “On second thought, kill me,” Ripley says, scooping oatmeal into a bowl, then immediately putting half of it back. “Wait, what’s thatlookfor?”
“What look?”
“Thatlook,” Ripley says, mirroring Cara’s raised eyebrows, wide eyes, and cocked head.
“You and James seemed pretty cozy last night.”
Ripley sets her oatmeal on the table and carefully sits down. “I was floppy-drunk and he was holding me up. Besides, I was nonspecifically cozy with Griff too.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t spend the night looking like you wanted to sink your teeth into Griff’s traps.”
“Definitely kill me,” Ripley says.
Cara undoes her ponytail and shakes out her hair. “God. I should have guessed the one time you acted like a normal twenty-eight-year-old, you’d immediately want to walk it back. He’snice,Rip. It seems like you dig him. Pun intended. He isn’t your boss, your employee, or your ex. So what if you two started a summer thing?” She pulls her hair through the gap in her bubblegum-pink hat and starts braiding.
Ripley tries to imagine Smithson feeding her bites of his breakfast like Matteo does with Jordin. Or eliminating an entire word from his vocabulary like Griff’s done since promising Cara he’d never tell her no.
Maybe it’s the hangover, but she can’t picture it. All she sees is Smithson walking up the white marble stairs of the Valley Life Sciences Building at UC Berkeley, a building she’s never even seen in real life.
“I don’t know. The powerful famous guy, the struggling woman. People willfully misinterpret those kinds of relationships,” she says gloomily.
