The Theory of Attraction (3 page)

“I loaned you the ho-ho-ho dress last Christmas. If that didn’t turn his head I’m out of ideas. That thing is pretty much the nuclear option.”

“I don’t look as much like a ho in it as all that.” We wore the same size, but I was a bit taller than Athena, and flat in all the places she was curvy. The dress had looked okay and had turned more than one head. Sadly, none of those heads were attached to the body of the aloof and indifferent Dr. Reynolds.

“So is this like a date, tonight?”

“I don’t think anything could possibly be further from a date than whatever we’re doing tonight.”

* * *

At least I was right about one thing. It was nothing like a date.

If it had been a date, it would have had to rank with the all-time lame dates in history. Beginning with the way Ivan looked when I answered the door to his ring, promptly at seven.

He was wearing the shorts he’d been gardening in and a pair of boat shoes so decrepit I didn’t know how they stayed on his feet. He’d changed into a polo shirt of a particularly hideous neon aqua, and it was threadbare not only at the collar but around the little logo on the chest.

His hair wasn’t combed.

On the plus side, the shirt made his eyes look fantastic, somehow playing up warmer, softer highlights in the dark chocolate brown of his irises.

Then he frowned, which shouldn’t have surprised me at that point. He was holding out a bottle of wine, and I hadn’t even noticed because I was too busy mooning over his eyes.

“Thanks! Come on in.”

“Don’t thank me,” Ivan said, breezing past me. “It’s Ed’s wine, I was just carrying it for him.”

Sure enough, our neighbor Ed was right behind Ivan, his hands full of computer equipment.

“Ivan said you guys were watching
Young Frankenstein
tonight. I love that flick.”

Ed was already in the apartment, settling in on my couch next to Ivan with his laptop on the coffee table in front of him. I closed the door and joined them, trying to hide my pique. My big chance to get Ivan alone and talking to me about human interaction over a cozy dinner, and
that
was the moment Ed happened by? Ivan rolled his eyes when I threw him a questioning glance.

“And the computer is also here because…?”

“I’m at work,” Ed explained. He was already arranging cables, pulling the power cord from the pile and looking for the closest outlet. “I’m monitoring something.”

“Oh. Do you need to use my wireless, or can you get yours this far away from your place?”

“I can get mine. But Ivan already gave me the key to yours.”

Another eye roll and a shrug from Mr. Inscrutable on the far end of the couch.

Lesson One: when invited to a person’s home, don’t bring along an unexpected plus one.

If Ivan even knew what a
plus one
was. Probably not. I couldn’t picture him at a wedding. Or a formal dinner. Honestly, had he been raised by wolves? Erudite, scientifically inclined wolves? I pictured a cave littered with test tubes and beakers, computers and model rockets. And little baby Ivan, toddling around in a diaper while the wolves conducted their experiments. This, despite the fact that I’d actually met the man’s parents on more than one occasion.

Focus, Cami.

I didn’t really see any way out of it. Ed was only doing what most of the guys in the complex did from time to time. They worked together, they played together, they hung out with one another as though their homes were interchangeable. And up until tonight, my place had always been another one of those hangouts. Besides, I suspected Ivan would rather not broadcast his real reason for coming over. Which was probably why he hadn’t sent Ed packing in the first place.

“I made lasagna. Who’s in?”

Both guys raised their hands. Ivan got up to start the movie. I’d pulled out the DVD already, because I’d planned for us to watch it as part of the lesson.

“Hey,” Ed called as I walked into the kitchen, “could I maybe get a glass for my wine? I’m drinking one glass every night. It’s an experiment.”

He didn’t want to share the bottle, though. Because then, Ed explained, he would have to go back to the liquor store a day sooner than he’d planned. It was not on his way home from work, and of course it was a brand not carried by the local grocery store.

Yes, the evening was off to a rip-roaring start.

By the time the monster came to life on screen, we’d picked up an additional viewer. Lin, another astrophysicist post-doc, had happened by looking for Ivan and stayed to watch the rest of the movie. And to help finish the lasagna, of course.

I’d taught zero lessons in socialization. Ivan hadn’t said a word the whole evening, aside from thanking me for dinner. When the movie ended, I got the impression he was willing Ed and Lin to leave just as hard as I was. But our combined psychic abilities were no match for the cluelessness of these two particular geeks, who remained on my couch arguing about Mel Brooks and Ed’s wine experiment until well after ten.

I tried dropping polite hints, but nothing worked. After several tense moments, I realized I felt tense partly because I had that you’re-being-watched feeling.

Ivan was watching me. I wasn’t even sure he realized he was doing it. His eyes followed me around the room as I tidied up and tried to convey that general “let’s wrap this party up” feeling. Maybe because it was after ten (time to brush teeth), so he was out of his routine, or maybe because he really didn’t know what to do, since participating in the conversation would obviously not serve the purpose of getting the other two to leave. But he seemed a little lost, isolated. And he was watching me as intently as though his line of sight were a lifeline. I’d wanted that for months, but getting it made me so self-conscious I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands.

Then it passed. Lin finally said something so egregious it pulled Ivan into the argument, and the talk quickly passed over my level of understanding as I’m a computer programmer, a script monkey, not a rocket scientist. I only knew that once they’d reached this stage, any pretense at civility was pointless and if I didn’t kick them out they’d be there all night. Two arguing geeks were stoppable. Three arguing geeks created an infinite argument vortex of doom that sucked time down like a black hole.

“Okay, that’s it for tonight. Thanks for coming over, but I’m fixing to head for bed.”

Three heads snapped my way. Lin had the grace to look a little chagrined. He made a nice apology and headed out, with Ed close on his tail. Before he was all the way out the door, Ed asked Ivan to carry his wine bottle for him.

But perhaps the evening wasn’t a complete loss. Ivan turned at the door and, to my astonishment, smiled. A sheepish, crooked smile, but I still counted it. He did it so rarely, it was like seeing a rose that only blooms once a year in the spring.

“Sorry.”

I didn’t think I’d ever heard him apologize for something before.

“No problem. There was plenty of lasagna. Oh, and the salad was great with all those fresh tomatoes. You can take my word for that.”

He hadn’t eaten the tomatoes, of course.

“So the lesson for tonight is…I should have lied more?”

“What, to Ed?” I considered this a moment. “Not lied. I wouldn’t call it that. There are times when the other person doesn’t need all the information you may have to give. I don’t think that’s really even a lie of omission. It simply isn’t their business. You can keep some things to yourself.”

“Like only caring about my project being funded?”

“Exactly.”

He smiled again. I realized he had a slight dimple on the right side. Charming. He leaned against the jamb of the open door, as though he was a little reluctant to go. The muggy night air was creeping in, probably bringing mosquitos with it. I didn’t care.

“If I’d told him the truth and said why I was coming over here, and that I didn’t want anybody else here with us, that would have been more effective.”

“But he would have known something you didn’t want him to know. And knowing Ed, he would have teased you pretty mercilessly about it. He might have also assumed you were lying to get him out of the way.”

“Why would I do that?”

I wanted to beat my head against the door. Ivan was either as genuinely clueless as he appeared, or he was simply in no rush to spend time alone with the horny nerd-girl next door. “To get more lasagna for yourself, of course.”

“I see. So, same time tomorrow night?”

“A little earlier,” I suggested. “If we go out to eat somewhere the guys don’t typically go, we’ll stand a much better chance of actually accomplishing something.”

Ivan answered slowly, and I had to resist reading more meaning into it than he probably meant there to be. “I wouldn’t say we accomplished nothing this evening. I wouldn’t say that at all.” He gave me that intense, concentrated look again, exactly like when he was watching me clean up earlier. A creeping tendril of desire swirled through my belly.

And then he strolled off into the thick, hot night.

* * *

At work the next day, it was almost as hot inside as out. Though the temperature had cooled to a mild ninety-four, the ancient and put-upon air conditioning unit in the refurbished hundred-year-old house where I worked had finally conked out for good that weekend, so we’d arrived for the morning to find the house already hot, stuffy and smelling slightly of mildew. There was a slight breeze through the windows we’d all had to pry open, but not enough to help much. Only enough to ruffle the papers I had stacked so neatly on my desk moments before.

No small feat, either, stacking paper neatly when it was that humid. The pages wanted to stick and rub instead of sliding tidily against one another to get in line. Everything felt damp, even the stapler and the surface of my desk. I was covered in sweat. I had shut my computer down around ten, when the heat in the building rose above eighty-five. When my boss, Agatha, finally told us all to give it up and go home for the day, I was too drained to even cheer. We all offered up a feeble mumble of thanks and cleared the building within two minutes flat.

It was only eleven-thirty, and I hadn’t eaten. On a whim, I picked up some burgers and headed for the astrophysics lab. Not entirely a whim, actually. The building was notorious for being overcooled, and right now that arctic blast seemed like the perfect antidote to the heat.

Ivan’s mother sometimes called me when her worries about her son got the best of her. This had started about six months after I moved into the complex, after Ivan’s parents came for a holiday visit and we got to know each other a little. As his nearest neighbor, good friend, and the only relatively normal-seeming person in his small social circle, I guess I seemed the likeliest candidate for surrogate mother. That and the whole female thing.

Her concern was not entirely misplaced, because Ivan often forgot to eat when he was involved in a big project, and he’d been known to let himself get to an almost delusional state of hunger before he realized the problem and remedied it. I liked feeding people, and Mrs. Reynolds made it up to me when she came to visit every few months by providing me gourmet treats I couldn’t afford to buy all the time on my worker-bee salary. Imported olives, smoked oysters, organic chocolate with a high percentage on the label. And she told me things about Ivan’s childhood that I was sure he would rather not have people know. He was a very smart, very poorly adjusted little boy, and she still saw him that way. It wasn’t wholly inaccurate, I guess.

Although I wondered if she’d be quite so willing with the information if she knew what I had in mind for her delicate, maladjusted baby. I had a very active imagination and was working on a dry spell of over two years. I’d thought up things I didn’t even know the names for.

She’d called me that morning, and I was able to report that Ivan had eaten at least one meal that I knew of (lasagna) and even vegetables (green salad, hold the tomatoes), within the previous twenty-four hours.

The first thing I did when I walked into the lab was disclose that conversation to Ivan. I might be willing to pass along information about the man’s eating habits, but no way would I go behind his back to do it.

Ivan, however, never seemed bothered by his mother’s behavior. I would have been incensed if my mother called my friends to check up on me. Ivan seemed to take it as a normal part of her parenting style. “She just remembers the time I had to be hospitalized for dehydration and malnourishment during the run-up to a state science fair. Ever since then she gets worried if she thinks I’m working too hard.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Twenty-one years.”

“Wait…you were
eight?
And she’s
still
checking up on you because of this?”

He’d nodded and gone back to staring into his computer monitor like it held the secret to the universe.

It was pretty evident the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. However, that knowledge was now completely supplanted by the vision of Ivan running down the street all sweaty and shirtless. These things overrode my concerns about his genetic stability and turned me into a veritable nurturing machine.

So I brought him lunch (which he had indeed skipped that day) and stayed while he ate. He kept working as he munched, and I didn’t even know if he tasted the food. I didn’t even know if he knew I was alive.

Well, obviously he knew I was alive, in a literal sense. He could see that I was a human being on the planet, he knew all about my physiology, he even knew that I lived in the townhouse next to his. In fact he frequently pointed that out, because he felt my footsteps when I was upstairs were unaccountably loud given my relatively small size for a fully grown human.

He actually stated it that way, “fully grown human.” I sometimes wondered if he thought of himself as something other than human. Lord knows I occasionally thought he might well be some sort of alien.

Some sort of weirdly hot, incredibly brilliant alien.

Hopefully not a gay alien, though. Or an alien who was too jaded by porn to be interested in real girls. He had such nice hands. And something about the way he typed, so fast and automatic, struck me as deeply sexy. Or maybe that was the way he had rolled his shirt sleeves up, exposing the lean forearms that I now knew led to surprisingly firm biceps, toned shoulders, and beyond. In the summer I was so used to seeing him in shorts and scruffy T-shirts. The button-down made him look like a grownup. A grownup with hands that looked as though they knew their way around more than a keyboard…