Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (22 page)

He looks at me with his eyebrows raised, his arms crossed and his hands stuffed in his armpits.

“It does snow, but not a lot, and it tends to shut everything down. Of course, there’s lots and lots of snow in the Olympics and the Cascades.”

I watch him clench his jaw against chattering. “It’s pretty, coming down so fast and heavy like this.”

“Dude, go inside, you’re freezing, and I wait for this bus all the time. I’m wearing ten times more coat than you.”

He grins and pulls his hat down lower. “I’m good. Lusting after your coat, but good.”

Evan saying the word
lusting
makes something unfair happen in my underpants.

I take a deep breath and look right at him. There’s snow on his collar, his shoulders, his hat. “Do you …”

“I get it,” he says. “I always did, actually, in a lot of other ways, but I want you to understand that I get that I’m not going to be able to adapt the entire field of microbiology so that it feels good to you, in the same way, whatever the progression of your changes are.”

“I could stay just like this, forever. Be able to do everything but drive at night and avoid people’s sneaking up on me.”

“You could.”

“Or I could end up with a dog for the first time in my life.”

“Yeah. Though you’d work with a cane for a long time, first.”

A laugh kind of forced out of me in a cloud of cold breath. “How I am supposed to live with that kind of uncertainty?”

“You tell me, I guess.”

I look at him then, and he laughs at whatever look is on my face. “Help me out, sensei.”

“You’re a postdoc, a researcher, in science.”

“Right.”

“So, you know, better than anyone, that you could plan and work for something and at any time it could go sideways.”

“Sure.”

He just looks at me.

“But,” I say, “I’m always doing everything all along the way to adjust for change and screwups and ways the data come out that weren’t anticipated. I mean, a five-year project will be as much about discovery as it is about hypothesis. So, we basically expect it to all go sideways. It probably means we’re doing something right if it goes all sideways.”

He looks at me some more. Doing that almost smiling thing.

I look at the snow falling on the trees and street signs. “Right. Okay.”

“I’m just here to help you adjust and discover.”

“Yes, thank you for driving that point home.”

“Anytime, Grasshopper.”

He nudges me with his shoulder. So I look up at him almost smiling at me. When I look too long, his smile fades away, and we’re both just
looking
, now.

And then I reach up and grab his shoulder and brace myself on my toes and I kiss his cheek, which is cold and stubbly, but his breath is so warm along my ear that I kiss him again, still on his cheek but it’s a spot closer to his mouth.

I hold my kiss there, the location innocent, but the duration indecent, my lip turned out against his skin where I can feel it warming up, where I can feel snowflakes landing and melting.

His shoulder eases in my hand, and so I slide over it, holding him close.

I finish the kiss, but release him slowly.

He whispers, “Jenny,” just as the bus roars up along the stop.

I turn away fast, but feel his naked, mitten-free hand brush my cheek, barely.

I get into a seat that’s opposite the seats closest to the stop, but I still see him. He’s already headed toward the parking garage, his head down.

I keep my fingers on my mouth all the way home.

At home, I turn on all the lights, for once, even though it makes it harder to see the snow. I’m worried that all of this
wanting to kiss Evan
that’s developed from
working hard to avoid and thwart Evan
is some kind of delayed reaction to my diagnosis.

Like, I worked so hard, at first, to reassure everyone that I was going to be okay, just so I could do what I wanted to do, so my mom could continue having her life in Seattle, that now I’m just breaking apart and Evan is conveniently there and so hot in his long-limbed sort of way and doesn’t seem to hate me despite my efforts.

And here in Lakefield, other than lab buddies and confusing surprise cybersex with the anonymous former tenant, all I have is Evan.

Although it must be some kind of against the rules to even longingly
almost
kiss your occupational therapist. And vice versa. I mean, when he held me in the lab it didn’t feel entirely therapeutic.

I would call and ask my mom about all of this, but she would probably tell me to marry Evan, so I elect for a weird conversation with C.

Who is not on, but he’s posted at least two dozen pictures since we’ve talked, mostly of snow and snowflakes—a tiny drift on a mailbox flag, a clump of falling snow
glowing midair and backlit by a streetlight, and one so close and sharp you can see each point of a single flake.

What do you think?

I kind of jump when the message comes through. I feel jumpy and unsettled all over. I feel leftover wanting for Evan that’s not really leftover and with it something like embarrassment, and then maybe sweetness.

Also, I feel anticipation of seeing him again, even if I don’t know what I’ll say, after everything that happened today, but I realize if I trust anyone with the awkward ever after of almost kissing, it’s Evan.

He seems weirdly okay with almost-kissing moments. I don’t know if that’s maturity or gravitas or what.

Or maybe the almost-kissing thing happens to him a lot.

I do know I want to see him again, already, and this has never happened, so he could simply be using my hormones against me so that I will install voice-recognition software and put my lights on timers and relearn to drive.

They’re beautiful
, I say.

The snow, the too-quiet feeling of the snow, is the perfect way to sit in front of these pictures and these messages with my heart confused.

I close my eyes—now, the embarrassment comes.

I broke down in front of my OT and he kissed my forehead and he saw my bra and he must know I tried to really kiss him, kiss him, at the bus stop.

I’ve been thinking a lot about snowflakes
, C writes.

Who cares about snowflakes?

Is my very first thought. My next is the way the snowflakes melted against Evan’s cheek.

My message box is blinking, waiting for me to reply. I think about things going sideways.

I think about when an experiment fails and the only thing to do is to design another, and to use what you’ve learned.

What about them?
I ask.

His cursor blinks a long time then he sends a long message.

About how they are too small to do anything but drift together, but when you look close they seem so singular
.

Drifting is different from moving under your own power, deciding something. It’s currents—in the water or in the air
.

Or, in the middle of something where no one can face truth or honesty and tells stories instead. Drifting together. Drifting apart
.

It doesn’t mean anything except that you’re passive in the current, or that the current is stronger than you are
.

I read through his message a few times.

First, I think,
I don’t want to drift anymore
, but I don’t write that.

Another message from C blinks through.

We should meet
.

Oh.

Just to start a friendship? It feels like we should, I know it might be awkward, and I don’t want you to feel unsafe. We can’t be that awful, because of the way tenants are placed in the house, it’s possible we walk right by each other all the time, anyway
.

My hands are shaking, but in the interest of avoiding drift, I write,

I’ve thought of that, too. What are you thinking?

I’m really tied up at work, there are some things I need to figure out here
.

But it gets quiet, probably for you, too, when the University’s winter break more officially starts, which this year is the 21st. So maybe a couple days after that? Unless you’re traveling somewhere?

I’m not traveling. My mom decided to fly in Christmas Day and stay through the New Year.

Christmas Eve’s Eve?

Ha. Yeah. I know where you live, of course, but we could meet someplace neutral since it will be our first time meeting in person. The mashed-potato place, Potato Mountain that’s across the street from the corner store?

11 a.m.?

December 23, 11 a.m., you and me and mashed potatoes
.

My hands feel a little shaky, and I can’t really see why I shouldn’t meet this person. He works on the same campus, he lived here six years and my landlord maintained he was a “good guy,” though I didn’t want details.

Our chemistry, while pixilated, is obvious.

He is well rounded—has an artistic hobby.

He has been keeping me company all this time when I hadn’t wanted to keep anyone else’s company. I called my mom. I dutifully called and emailed my friends from home, though it was a struggle because they were worried and their worry and questions made me uncomfortable and a little more depressed and just … weary. This last week I’d noticed that my colleagues had piled in one car together, laughing, to go to a pub they’d invited me to, as well, and I had very politely turned them down and come home to talk to C about his pictures.

The campus was so quiet.

I had kissed my OT today.

Deal
.

When I tell him good-bye and shut my laptop, I’m glad I turned the lights on like Evan’s always telling me to do. Because I need to see everything right now, and not be in the dark. My life used to be simple.

The little house I shared with my mom and our coffee brunches with a view of the sound.

The hours at the bench figuring out how small things get messed up and then live anyway.

Clear days when I took my bike on the ferry to Bainbridge and could see Mount Rainer.

So I’m really glad the lights are on, right now.

I’m glad the snow will fall all night long, all over this day where I was blind in about a hundred different ways and none of them had to do with my vision.

Then everything will look all new tomorrow.

I’m sleeping with the lights on, too.

I’m starving.

I’ve had four meetings today, and then had to write a surprise project summary for a grant application. I got an email from a peer-review committee requesting some information about the numbers in the results section of a paper our lab submitted last year. I wasn’t even here then, but since numbers are kind of part of my job, or at least certain kinds of numbers like these, I’ve had to sit down and at least figure out what I’m going to ask everyone for, probably at another meeting.

The thing about science is that there is that whole methods part. And the part about how whatever you do has to be repeatable. Also, money. Which means that if you’re a scientist, you’re also kind of an administrator.

I’m new around here, with the least amount of administrative experience, which paradoxically means I am the one doing most of the administrative work lately. My science wasn’t quite ready to go when I was brought on, but everyone else in the lab is in the middle of projects.

So I am the designated project manager.

Also, my funding could be a little better for what I want to do, and the best way to lock in funding for the middle of my project is to find grant money for it now.

LSU’s lab is actually a great one, very low drama with great people, but after the years of doctoral work doing pure science and a year postdoc with University of Washington doing the same, I miss … well…

I miss
science
.

I look out of my office door, longingly, at the ESEM, where I can see it through the double-walled glass of the lab, across the hall.

“I miss you, ESEM,” I whisper. “I love you.”

“Who do you love?”

Now I am not looking at my ESEM, I am looking at a coat, buttoned onto a man, who is now standing in my doorway. I look up.

Evan, my occupational therapist who I have sort of kissed, is looking down at me in my chair and giving me the Mona Lisa.

“I love my microscope,” I answer, and I sound entirely unflustered, which, point to me.

He holds out two greasy paper bags. “I have some lunch.”

I try to slide my feet off the desk but my rolling chair scoots back too fast, and then, my ass hits the ground.

Hard.

Point to Evan.

“Holy shit.” He laughs and reaches out his hand. I grab it and he pulls me up while I let my mind go blank, a handy skill for the frequently embarrassed.

“Are occupational therapists supposed to laugh at their clients? It seems kind of cruel.”

“You caught me off guard. I’m a sucker for pratfalls and that was a great one.”

I hold on, tight, to my chair as I sit back down, and then I pull one of the guest chairs next to my desk with my foot. “Sit down. You brought me lunch? Here?”

He sits down, looking around. My office is pretty spartan because I would always rather be in the lab, but I have managed to get my books in here, my journals, a few pictures, and of course my collection of plush microorganisms and iconic cells.

“Yeah, I tried to call earlier, but they said on the phone you were in meetings until three or so and I took a risk that you would be starving. Is that?”

“A sperm plushie? Yes. And here’s its egg. See how much bigger the egg is? And this halo of fuzzy yarn around the egg represents the nutritive goo for the sperm. We think it might also repel undesirable sperm.”

I realize that I am holding the sperm in one hand and the egg in the other and I am, basically, puppeting reproduction for him.

I slowly put the sex toys down.

Point two for Evan.

But he’s grinning and is relaxed in a way that makes it look like he hangs out in my office all the time. “So it’s not like I don’t appreciate the food, whatever it is—”

“Grilled cheese and fries from the Campus Coney.”