Bearly Interested (6 page)

Angie slid down from the counter onto her trembling legs. “Fuck,” she muttered under her breath.
I haven’t come that hard ever
. She braced herself with her hand on the counter and exhaled deeply. “How would you like to move in?” she asked him, laughing through heavy breaths.

He was about to say something when she cut him off. “Joke,” she said.

“What a mess.” Angie looked around at the puddles of water all over the counter and floor, and her disheveled, wet clothes.

“If I clean it up and do the dishes do I buy myself another night?” he asked with a grin.

She was still trying to catch her breath. “Deal,” she said.

He turned, hiding his smile, and unplugged the overflowing sink. The water glugged as it leaked down the drain.

Angie stumbled to her room on shaky legs and collapsed on her bed. She was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

five

Angie opened her heavy eyes and groaned.

“Good morning my love,” a hazy outline of a giant said.

She dropped her head on the pillow and rubbed her eyes.

She sprung up into a sitting position like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. “What time is it?” The sun was much too bright coming in through the window. Angie was usually up before the sun made its way to Manhattan.

“Breakfast time,” Sidney said, holding up a tray full of food.

She covered her face with her hand. “I forgot to put my alarm on.”
Idiot!
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“You looked so peaceful,” he said. “How do you like your eggs cooked?”

She ripped off the blankets and ran into the bathroom. It was after ten o’clock. She’d get to work even later than yesterday. This was not good. She was slipping.

She ran out of the bathroom with the toothbrush in her mouth, shoving past him in the hall to get to her closet. She would have to shower at the gym again. If she had time later.

“I made coffee,” he called out.

She tossed her toothbrush onto her bed as she yanked on a new shirt, not even taking the time to change her bra.

“I can’t believe you didn’t wake me up,” she snapped.

“I’m sorry,” he said, standing in the doorway as she pulled on a pair of pants. “Next time I’ll wake you up. I promise.”

She shoved past him, snatched her purse off the table and headed for the door. “There won’t be a next time,” she muttered.

Angie burst into the lab like her hair was on fire. Her team glanced over at her with narrow eyes and tight lips as she grabbed her lab coat off the hook on the wall. She slid it on and rushed over.

The room was humming.
Shit
.

“You guys started the Accelerator without me?” she asked, her hands shaking as she fixed her buttons.

“The deadline is in three days,” Frank snapped, “and you keep blowing us off.”

The team stepped back as she approached the vibrating machine. “No one was allowed to activate the machine except for me,” she said. “The head of the Hamagin Space and Science center in Yokohama, Japan gave us strict orders. I told you that.”

“You’re not the only one relying on this project to be a success,” Frank said. “I’m going to have a teaching position waiting for me at Yale because my name is on this study. It’s fine if you want to blow your career but I don’t.”

Angie glanced around the room with a clenched jaw. No one was meeting her eye.

She walked to the machine and inspected it. The experiment was running but there was a slight ticking sound that wasn’t normally there. She checked the dials and her stomach dropped when she saw the electrostatic suppression dial. It wasn’t turned on. The numbers would be inaccurate. It would take two hours to stop running and then another hour to cool down before it could be restarted and set up properly. Three hours that she didn’t have. They were way behind schedule and it was all her fault. No. It was Sidney’s fault. She didn’t want him here and now look what was happening.

“Next time that you want to disobey my orders,” she said, turning on Frank. His small brown eyes, widened in fear under his thick, round glasses. “Make sure that the fucking electrostatic suppression dial is on.”

Frank jerked his head back and then glanced over her shoulder at the dials. “Oops,” he mumbled.

“Oops?” she said, raising her voice. “You may have broken a five million dollar machine and all you can say is oops?”

“Well if you were here than I-”

“Get out,” she snapped.

“Huh?”

The rest of the team stiffened.

“You’re off the team. I gave everybody strict orders not to touch the Accelerator. You disobeyed it. You’re out.” She thrust her finger at the door and glared at him.

He pushed his glasses up onto his nose and walked to his desk to gather his things.

“You’re being unreasonable,” Bill said, with his wrinkly hands on his hips.

“If you think so than you can follow Frank out the door.” She was tired. And stressed. And she wasn’t thinking clearly.

Her stomach dropped as Bill pulled off his access card from his coat. He placed it on the table and walked off to his desk.

Nausea crept up her throat as key card after key card was piling up on the table in front of her. Her entire team had quit. Had abandoned her. She sensed that they felt like the project was doomed and didn’t want their names attached to it.

They gathered their things quietly and walked out the door without looking back.

Angie sank to the floor as tears rushed down her cheeks, her insides rattling more than the stupid machine above her.

“Knock knock,” Sidney said as he opened the door of the lab.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Angie was a mess. She had been running around frantically trying to set up the Accelerator to run another test, something that normally took her team of five other people to do. She finally got the rattling fixed and got the machine up and running and now she was desperately trying to follow the figures as they came spewing out of the Accelerator.

She was standing by the display screen with her legs crossed. She had to pee so bad that it hurt. The last thing that she needed in the world was Sidney coming in and doing anymore damage to her experiment than he already had.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

He held up a basket full of food and smiled. There was a wine bottle sticking out.

“Sidney I can’t right now,” she said, scribbling furiously on her clipboard, trying to keep up with the machine.

He barged into the lab and placed the basket on a table. “Where is everyone?” he asked while pulling out dish after dish.

“They quit,” she said, her chin quivering. This was all too much to handle.

“That sucks,” he said, opening the wine. “Do you need help?”

“What I need,” she snapped, “is for you to go.”

The cork popped out as he pulled it out of the bottle. “What you need. Is a glass of wine and a foot massage.”

She slammed her clipboard onto the desk. “You’re not listening to me,” she screamed. “I need you to leave.”

“I can wait outside.”

The machine was beeping like a bomb about to go off. She rubbed her forehead. Her head was throbbing. “No,” she said. “I want you to go back home. Please.”

His mouth dropped open, his posture suddenly stiff and rigid. He stared at her with confusion in his eyes.

Angie rubbed her forehead, her chest feeling tight. The machine spewed out numbers faster than she could deal with.

“Look,” she said, squeezing her tense hands into fists. “I told you I can’t do this right now.”

“Okay,” he said, placing the cork back in the bottle. “We can do it at dinner.”

“No,” she snapped. “This. Us. A relationship. I can’t do a relationship right now.”

Sidney winced like he just got kicked in the dick. His hands started trembling.

She turned away from him, back towards the machine. “I never asked you to come here,” she said. “Just go back home.”

“But we’re-”

“Don’t say it.”

“Mates,” he whispered.

“No. We’re not. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

He raised his head like something just dawned on him. “It’s the city that’s driving you crazy,” he said. “Come live with me in the woods. The city is so unnatural. You’ll see.”

She huffed a frustrated breath. “Maybe the city is unnatural for a bear shifter but it’s where I live.”

The machine beeped and shook violently. “Shit,” she cursed as she smacked the metal beast. The display screen went blank. “No, no, no,” she said, smacking her hands on her head. “This can’t be happening.”

Sidney rushed forward, rolling up his sleeves. “I can fix it.”

“Don’t touch it,” she yelled. She pushed his chest away with all of her might, which wasn’t much. “Just go.”

He backed away, his hands shaking like an earthquake. His face winced in pain and then all of a sudden he was curling in on himself with white hairs sprouting from his face.

“No, no, no,” Angie said, hiding behind the machine.

When she peeked around it there was a fully formed polar bear standing in her lab. The last, last thing that she needed.

The bear went straight for the picnic basket and took a bite out of the lunch. He sniffed the bottle of wine and it fell off the table, smashing on the floor. The large bear lumbered around the lab, sniffing the air and knocking over vials, beakers and other expensive pieces of lab equipment.

He turned towards the Accelerator and stumbled over. Angie jumped in front of it blocking his access.

The large bear lowered his head and looked at her with sad, brown eyes. He inched his head forward until his wet nose rubbed against her ribs. He purred softly as he brushed his head gently across her stomach. Angie sighed and buried her fingers into the soft, white fur on his head. She scratched his skin with her fingernails, bent over and kissed the bear on the top of his head.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, a tear dropping onto his furry head. “But it’s just the way that it has to be.”

The polar bear lowered his head and walked back to the table. The large white body began to convulse and shake. It shrank in on itself as the hair receded back into pink skin.

Angie wiped her wet eyes, picked up the clipboard and turned back to the machine. She double checked the dials as Sidney got dressed and walked out the door.

Angie left the lab thirty six hours later. She had dozed for fifteen minutes every five hours and ordered a shit ton of pizza to keep her going. But now she was finished. Mentally and physically.

She managed to get the machine running smoothly again and she figured out a system that helped her track the numbers faster. She was still behind but she was catching up. The Japanese Science Center would be picking it up on Sunday. It was after one in the morning on Friday night so she was planning on sleeping a couple hours, taking a shower and pulling another all-nighter tomorrow. With a little bit of luck she might pull it off.