Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (21 page)

It’d made me feel sort of guilty—his enthusiasm for my work in the face of my resistance to his.

Then I’d wondered if he was doing it on purpose as another kind of object lesson.

But watching his face light up as the air rushes by us in the air lock, his sudden grin at me that makes me feel a blush all over my neck, I think he he’s just having regular
fun
.

I probably owe him.

“So we have to stop here before we go in.” I open the door to the locker room that juts away from the air lock. “I have lab clogs to change into, basically just shoes that I don’t wear anywhere else, but there are disposable booties to put over your tennis shoes on that bench. You’ll have to take off your sweater, so you have short sleeves under the lab coat, for safety. Then wash your hands. That’s it. You can wear one of the lab coats on that hook, those are all for visitors and students and stuff.”

He sits on the bench to pull booties over his tennis shoes. I get my coat and hat off, stuff them in my locker.

I realize I’ll have to take off my sweater in front of Evan.

Which, I’m wearing a T-shirt under, but it feels—intimate. We aren’t talking, joking around, like I do with my colleagues in this room.

I can hear him pull his sweater over his head, the shush of clothes being removed in close proximity.

It gives me chills that the cool lab air can’t explain when I hold my breath and pull my own sweater over, and of course it catches the bottom hem of my T-shirt and a large surface area of the skin of my belly and back hits the air and maybe his gaze, I don’t know.

I don’t look.

I just stuff my sweater in my locker and grab an elastic to pull my hair back.

It’s when my arms are over my head, wrapping the elastic around my ponytail, that I realize I’m wearing a purple bra under a thin, white, men’s T-shirt.

I don’t even normally wear purple bras, it’s just that I normally wear this kind of bra, in regular colors like white and black, but apparently Nordstrom Rack had my bra in ten different nonstandard colors because that’s what was in the latest care package from my mom—a rainbow of bras and a freezer bag full of peanut butter cookies.

After the thing with my coat and the bra maybe I should talk to my mom about dressing her grown daughter.

Except, I think she shops for me to feel close to me and to try not to worry so much and I wouldn’t want to take that away from her. Plus, you know. Free bras and
coats.

“Jenny?”

“Huh?” I am holding my lab coat, but for some reason not putting it on, even though it would solve my purple-bra problem.

“Where’d you go?”

When I turn around, Evan is sitting on the bench, his booties on, also stripped down to a T-shirt. His plaid shirt must have had long sleeves.

The way he’s sitting, something about it, maybe it’s that he’s wearing that rumpled-looking T-shirt and it fits kind of tight, how he’s leaning forward, he doesn’t seem like Evan.

He seems like a
guy
, and this impression isn’t helped by the look on his face, which is basically the same as usual, his eyebrows all steepled up, with that kind of near smile, but his eyes seem more direct somehow, and like he’s looking at all of me, not just my brain.

If that makes sense.

“I don’t know,” I answer, because I’ve forgotten his question.

“Sometimes I watch you just go somewhere else, and I just wonder where that is.”

“I was thinking about my mom.” I sit on the bench next to him so I can unlace my boots. The feeling that he’s looking at
me
doesn’t go away.

“Those are some socks.” He’s grinning at me, and I follow his gaze to my socks, which are pink with mustaches printed all over them.

“That’s why I was thinking about her.”

“Your socks?”

“Well, no. But that could be the reason. She got these for me. I was thinking about how she got me my coat, and this bra.” We both look at my boobs at the same time and the second he snaps his gaze away with another grin he’s trying to fight, I want to smack my forehead.

I have a serious filter problem.

I can’t believe I made Evan look at my boobs.

I clear my throat. “Anyway, so I was thinking it’s probably kind of dumb that my mother still buys socks and bras and coats and whatever else for her grown daughter but I could never tell her to stop because it’s the only way she knows how to take care of me, right now. She’s my
mom
and it’s her job to keep bad things from happening to me, and
she can’t stop this thing from happening so she sends me boxes full of socks and cookies and T-shirts with funny things on them and rolls of quarters for the laundry and maybe, for a few seconds when she’s packing her boxes up she feels like she’s stopping a little bit of the bad stuff that’s happening to me. So that means I’m happy to wear purple bras and mustache socks. That’s where I went. What I was thinking of.”

Evan looks down at his feet. “I like the purple bra,” then he looks right at me, but not at the bra, for which I am grateful. “And your socks.”

“Well. My mom would probably like you.”

“Of course, you don’t mean that in a way that means you like me.”

I laugh and smack him on the arm. He leans way over like I almost knocked him down and grins down at his shoes again. “Of course not. I mean that in a ‘she’d be glad someone thought they had to take care of me’ kind of way.”

“That’s the thing, Jenny”—he stands up and grabs a lab coat off one of the
XL
hooks—“I don’t want to take care of you. I want to help you take care of yourself.”

“And I just want all of this to stop. I don’t want to need you, at all. Ever.”

He looks at me, in this new way he has where he seems to take me all in. “Then take me into your lab and show me why.”

* * *

“I thought we were going to get to use the big thing, the ESEM.” Evan is standing in my lab with a cotton swab in his mouth.

“We are, but we’ve got to start with the basics.” I hold out my hand. “Okay, that’s good, hand over the swab and take a seat at the bench next to me.”

He sits on the lab stool where I’ve set up a compound microscope, a couple of wet-mount slides, and methylene blue.

“Okay, watch me make this wet mount, then I’ll give you the swab and you make yours.”

I drip distilled water on the slide and roll the swab from the inside of Evan’s cheek firmly against the wet slide, then drop the slide cover over. When I look up to hand him back the swab, I find him hovering right over my shoulder. When he takes the swab, his thumb brushes over mine.

So, it’s kind of sexy. I don’t know.

His eyebrows scrunch up as he copies what I did to make the wet mount, but you can tell he’s having a great time because he keeps breaking out in these grins where you can see all the places his teeth overlap a little.

“Got it.” He leans back and gestures at his slide.

“A plus. You can throw the swab away in that box under the bench with the red biohazard liner.”

“Okay, now what?” He spins on his stool to face me.

“This next part is pretty cool. You’ll put a couple of drops of the methylene blue stain on one side of the slide cover, and the square of superabsorbent paper on the other. The paper will pull out the distilled water from the wet mount, and draw the stain under the slide cover, pulling it across your sample. Once you see all blue being pulled into the paper, the slide’s done.” I talk while I make the slide.

Methylene blue is pretty close to the color of Evan’s eyes.

“Like that.”

“Neat.”

“Yep. Now you do it.” I hand him the bottle of stain. He prepares the slide perfectly, and when the blue has pulled into his paper and he lifts it up, he looks at me with total delight.

I kind of laugh at him just because it makes me happy to see someone happy like that with something so simple and something I think is so cool. He laughs back and nudges my shoulder with his. I hadn’t realized that we’d drifted so close together.

“So, here’s the hard part, but the best part.” I pull the compound scope so it’s right between us and turn it on. “You’ll look through here, and this whole part houses the lenses. You set the slide up on the stage, try to center the slide over the light source, then secure it with those clips. You’ll look through the scope and adjust the stage up and down until you see the color of the stain and maybe some blobs. Then use the coarse adjustment until you feel like you can almost see individual images on the slide. The fine adjustments are last, and they will make everything sharp.”

We’re on heavy lab stools, so I don’t scoot away but just lean back to let him work the scope. Plus, I may have to lean back in to help him focus. His upper arm rests against my shoulder, and it’s nice, like his hand on my back had been.

He seems so comfortable with being close, with incidental touching, I wonder if
it’s because of his job, or him, or what.

“I see blobs.” He turns his head from the eyepiece, his hand on the coarse adjustment.

“Okay, let me see.” I lean in, and he moves his head just enough to the side to fit mine.

I can feel the warmth of his cheek though we’re not touching.

I reach down automatically to the coarse-focus knob and my hand covers his.

He moves his hand away, but slow, like he’s being respectful of the equipment and of me. He doesn’t jerk from the closeness and touch at all.

He doesn’t move away from me in any way, like he’s just fine right inside my space, half of his chest along my back and shoulder, his head bent with mine.

It feels amazing, and confusing, and maybe a little more amazing because it’s confusing.

My stomach drops heavy and sweet into my pelvis and it’s that, the familiar, early throb of wanting and horniness that stills my hand in the middle of my adjustment on the scope.

Feeling horny feelings is a little different than feeling safe and accommodating feelings.

I breathe out, slow, and get the focus into a place that just a few tiny nudges with the fine adjustment will bring the cells up. I leave it there because I want him to have that moment where he can see everything, and it looks like the slide will be a pretty good one.

“Okay, it’s almost there, just use the fine focus.” I move my head from the eyepiece, and he’s right there, reaching for the adjustment knob before I’m completely moved away. Our temples press together for a moment, and his hand moves under mine again.

When I take a breath to steady myself, it doesn’t work because I just suck in mint and the warm, clean smell of his skin.

Which somehow makes me think of how easy it would be to just turn my face into his neck.

“Oh,” he says, then, under his breath, and I can feel his big body go still.

“Yeah? You got it?” I keep my voice low, too, because I totally understand.

“I do.” He takes his hand off the knob and rests it on the bench. I sort of want to put my hand over it and weave all my fingers through his.

I just look at his hand, instead.

There’s a white scar through the middle knuckle that has the faint impressions of where suture knots rested as the laceration healed. I wonder how he hurt himself. I want to run a finger along it.

“What do you think?” I really, really want to know.

“There’s a bunch of different things, and some things that I think are on top of other things. The color is more translucent than I expected.”

“Right. Different densities of material will take the stain differently. What else?”

“There’s more than one kind of thing. I think a couple of strings from the swab. Then little dots, pieces of things. I can tell what the cells are, though. I can see the walls, and the nuclei?”

I kind of laugh, because it’s just so awesome, the way his voice is serious but his mouth is smiling.

He looks away then, and he’s just inches away.

His eyes find mine.

“Thank you for showing me this,” he says.

“Yeah, of course.” Now I’m looking at him, not just at his brain.

He straightens up, but I sit up with him, and we’re still looking at each other and I don’t know what’s going to happen or what he’s going to say and suddenly, I am looking at his mouth.

I can’t believe I’m doing that, so I look back into his eyes.

But his eyes don’t seem surprised at all.

Then he reaches up and he curls that big hand around the nape of my neck and I swear to God, all the breath in my body rushes to the surface of my skin in this insane flash of heat that makes it so I can’t breathe back in, not ever, it feels like.

His face is so serious, and my brain is totally scrambled against working out what will happen next, even though I must know because he pulls me to him, without any hesitance at all, without any of the reluctance I would think he would have given how dedicated he is to his professional life.

He pulls me right to him, and then, his mouth is against my forehead, pursed in a kiss, but not exactly, because I can feel him breathing, and his hand on my nape has tightened, to hold me right there.

I can’t even process this, and I close my eyes, and as soon as I do, everything in
the entire world is his hand on my neck, his mouth on my forehead.

“Jenny,” he whispers along my hair.

He says it again, without even his voice, just his breath. Holds me to him, right there.

I keep my eyes closed.

I need the entire world to stay just like this.

* * *

He’s standing at the bus stop with me until my bus comes because I wouldn’t let him give me a ride home.

The snow is coming down again; during the last week it had reliably started up in the afternoons and snowed all night. I liked to snuggle in my bed and listen to the plows in my neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning, their bright lights whooshing by my windows.

Every morning had a new unspoiled blanket, with only a few little alley-cat prints in it.

Even a full two and a half weeks from Christmas, they are predicting a white one.

I smile and look up at the fat flakes coming down.

“Does it snow in Seattle?”

He’s wearing a striped, wool ski cap with a sporting-goods logo and one of those heavy canvas coats with the big cargo pockets all over. He’d be warm for a crisp fall stroll, but standing still in the ankle-deep slush at the bus stop, the snow coming faster and faster, and the occasional blasts of below-freezing wind, he is obviously miserable.