Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (24 page)

He keeps his gaze steady. “I thought you were great,
first
. Also, great is pretty much an understatement, and some of the things I think about you are pretty shallow.”

“Shallow?”

“Yeah, the package that all the great parts are wrapped up in, shallow.”

“Oh.”

He smiles and rubs his hand over his face. “It’s been confusing, what I want for you. Figuring out what you might want for yourself. Wanting—”

“We’re not talking about that yet.”

“Wanting?”

“Yes. We should table almost everything that starts with
I want
.”

“Because?”

“Because I find that I really do want to fight. But not for you, for me. For Jay Knee Right. I’d rather do that with you, but I get if that’s not possible. I just want to do this, finally.”

He stands up and holds his hand out. “Come here.”

He pulls me against his body and I’m not sure what to do, at first, because he’s so warm and solid and my cheeks are against that rounded part of his shoulder and through the thin T-shirt I can smell him, minty and softly soapy with this perfect sort of overwarm skin smell, and his long arms are all the way around me.

So I put my arms around him, and I let my fingertips drag a little over his ribs, and his hands settle just above my waist, both hands flat against my spine, until he hooks his fingers into the edge of my bra strap, and I wouldn’t think that would be something that made my nipples get hard and tingle but it is, because maybe he can hug me, but he can’t do that, not really, he can’t get his fingers under my bra strap in a restless way like all he’s thinking about is how to take it off.

He’s not supposed to want that, but he does want that.

He wants me.

Oh, and I want him. I also want one more chance to start over, just enough, that I understand how it is that I want him, so that I know that I want him because he laughs at pratfalls and loved his mom and was into my microscopes and brings me grilled cheese and not because I haven’t taken a minute to stop and look around me at the world.

I
want me.

“Okay,” I whisper into his collarbone, and try not to follow my whisper with a kiss, but that is impossible. I put my finger against the spot I helplessly kiss. “Right here.”

I feel his breath at my temple before I feel his lingering kiss there, then his lips move against the spot. “Right here.”

I feel his voice vibrate against my chest from his, and I let myself squeeze one more time before I step away, but before I do he squeezes back, even harder.

“So, thanks for lunch.”

“Anytime.” He skates his hand over my arm to the wrist, and then grips my hand, just briefly and lets go.

He turns to look at the pictures on my desk, me and mom in front of the pig at the Seattle Public Market, a few hiking with friends, one of me in my old lab, and one I printed off from C’s feed of the matchbook cars—I have the little car he told me to find parked next to the frame.

He picks C’s picture up, and the car.

“Isn’t that cool? I have this friend, sort of a pen pal really, who takes these pictures, like this.” I turn the frame in his hand to look, too, and then I look at Evan. He’s staring at me, in full basset wrinkle.

“This is your friend?” His voice is quiet, and he seems a little weird, like he’s thinking of ten things at once and I’ve interrupted him.

“Yeah. You okay?”

He looks down at the car in his hand and gives it back to me along with the photo.

“Jenny?”

“What is it?” He’s looking at me, but sort of like he’s expecting me to say something. Then he looks away and hugs himself, rubbing his forearms like he’s suddenly chilled. “Hey, are you okay?”

“I think so, I just … I don’t know.” He looks at me, then grabs the cap of my shoulder, squeezes it like he’s about to say something, like I’m about to say something.

“Evan?”

“I’m good.” He looks down at his feet, with his almost smile. “Hey, do you need a ride? We could talk a little more?”

I kind of blink at that. Not the offer, that’s just Evan, but the weirdness and the shift and then an offer for a ride like the entire temperature of the room hasn’t changed. “No, but thanks, I should finish up here.”

“Great. Okay.” Then he starts to leave, grabbing his coat, but then stops and steps toward me again, leans over and kisses me in the middle of my forehead.

“See you,” he says, softly.

And then he’s out the door, shrugging into his coat.

* * *

Something about seeing Evan in my space, touching him in my space, almost talking about this inevitable inevitableness between us makes me yearn for even more connection.

I’m meeting C.

I’m committing to OT so that I can understand what it is I want from it and what it is
I
think I will need.

Jenny Wright is the kind of woman who needs friends.

I wander into Bob’s office, where he has two monitors set up with spreadsheets of data on both.

“Hey.”

He turns around in his chair and smiles. He’s a good guy, Bob, and has done the most to orient me to the lab and hold my hand through all the nonbench work. He’s wearing scrubs, which means he’s been in his lab today, and his brand-new deep pink Mohawk is all messed up from running his hands through it.

“Hey, Jenny. What’s up?”

“I just wondered if you had dinner plans? Maybe we could ask Melissa and anyone else hanging around, too?”

He grins and rubs his hands together. “Finally.”

“I know. I’ve been kind of antisocial.”

“Yeah, but that’s cool, you’ve had a lot to deal with.”

“So, yeah? Dinner?”

He holds up a finger and turns around to call Melissa and after wrapping up at the lab I’m deep in a trencher of dinnertime pancakes at The Windmill getting grilled by Melissa.

“So who was the guy?” She spears a sausage link and points it at me, her dark hair a crazy fluff around her face, as usual.

“Evan?”

Bob and Melissa and the doctoral student, Lisa, all look at one another and grin.

“Um. He’s my occupational therapist?”

Melissa laughs. “Really? I’m actually supposed to call one, to help with ergonomics at the lab after my bike wreck. Can I call yours?”

“I’m sure you could, he works on campus at the medical center, and he’s really good, I think, if you I want, I could—”

“I’m kidding, Jenny. You know, because he’s
hot
.”

“Yeah?” I say, my neck burning. “I—”

“Oh, you’ve totally noticed,” this from Lisa.

I look at Bob. He looks at me, says, “I’m here for the Ohio-cured bacon.”

“He’s my OT. We have a professional relationship.”

Lisa pulls her cat’s-eye glasses down to the end of her nose and looks at me over them, like she’s a schoolmarm. “So fire him. There must be a kajillion OTs at the health-science campus.”

“I probably just have a crush because, you know. Whatchacallit.”

“Transference,” Bob supplies.

“Yeah, that.”

“Which, if he’s bringing you lunch, it’s also countertransference.” He digs into more bacon while Melissa and Lisa glare at him and I feel a little sick and too full of maple syrup.

“Dude,” Lisa says, “it’s probably not transference, there’s a whole bunch of criteria for that. Like, have you been really resistant to your exercises and things you’ve been learning in therapy?”

I feel a little queasier. “Yeah, kind of.”

Melissa interrupts, “But it’s not as if you’ve been going really deep into emotional stuff, either.”

I look at them, helpless.

Lisa sighs. “Well. Life is complicated. Also, Freud was a dick. Or dickless, I can’t remember.”

“Was the transference thing Freud’s? Or was it Jung’s? Or that Otto guy, maybe.” Bob wipes his mouth.

I close my eyes. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not a good idea. He really is professional, and this stuff hadn’t come to the surface until recently, and he keeps trying to talk about it. He came today, out of his office, to tell me I’m probably going to have to work with someone else.”

“What’d you say?” Melissa asks.

“It’s possible I said no?”

Melissa smiles, her funny dimple by her eye engaging. “You should probably figure out what you want, which, if I were in your shoes, would be really difficult, so I
don’t blame you. I think, though, someone can be both a person who helps you, understands how to help you with their expertise, and someone who is simply a person you
like
, even really like, are even attracted to. It says something good about him that he would be honest with you about that and want to terminate the professional relationship no matter what happens, and honestly, you should probably listen to him.”

Oh. Yeah. Put that way, Melissa is right. I feel a little queasy again, for not being fair to Evan and that he obviously needed to feel okay with everything. I wonder if this was why he seemed so weird when he left today. “I’ll talk to him. I promise.”

“And you know,” this from Bob, who had pushed his plate away, “this kind of thing? It should happen more often. You were brought in not just because you’re a good scientist but because the lab thought you’d be a good fit. So, you know, start fitting.”

“Right,” I say. Because he is. I’d forgotten how right other people can be.

When I get home, I call my mom even though I actually want to call Evan and make things right. I tell her, right off, that I’m feeling better because maybe I am going to finally get somewhere in therapy. In everything.

“Were you not getting anywhere?” she asks.

“Not really,” I admit to her, and it feels so good to admit something to her, and it makes me realize that here is another thing I have lost, my easy honesty with my mother, my best friend, really, in all these months of trying to protect her. “I’ve been making it hard on myself, actually.”

“How hard?”

“The hardest. You know how I’ve always turned in all my homework, and signed up for all the class projects, and was the line leader?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I’ve been doing the opposite of that.”

“Tell me why, right now, I shouldn’t get on a plane.”

Then I say, “Because of Evan,” but then I talk mostly about me. About my breakthrough. I talk about how what I should get for Christmas is a small car with big side mirrors and indoor timers for all my lamps and a really good microphone for my computer.

I tell her about Bob and Lisa and Melissa.

“I’m going to do this, Mom,” is what I say. “It’s like a research question, just for me. I’m good at research. I’m a scientist. I’m going to use my scientist powers on this
problem, and I’m going to work out if it even really is a problem, and I’m going to let people help me.”

“Is Evan single?” she asks, but I can tell she is laughing, too.

I’ll probably get some huge care package in the mail this week.

Then, I find myself thinking about C again, and how last night, the best part about it was that we had started to be friends.

After all the parts where he thought of me, taking himself in hand.

After I thought of him, putting my hand between my legs.

It made me wonder, though, who I was thinking of? I was thinking of C, but who was C in my brain?

Fingers? Words?

Had I gotten so isolated that I could make love to an idea?

More than pictures of close-up things and games where we pretended to be someone else or verses of pornography, I liked the C that worried about me getting out of the house to see an Andy Warhol exhibit.

Who wanted to meet and eat mashed potatoes.

So I logged on and went to his blog and opened the message box.

You’re certain you want to meet?
Is the first thing he asks.

Yes. I’ve turned over this new leaf, this new snowflake, I guess. Where I say YES all the time
.

It takes a long time, but he finally answers,

I’m a little surprised to see you here, it’s later, and I thought maybe we were … taking a break? Until we met. Not that we have to, I just wasn’t certain
.

I think about that. Maybe he’s feeling the same kind of sea change I am. That we need to be friends, start there, after we’d gone so far as strangers and words.

What’s more, Evan. There’s a sea change there, too.

It won’t be easy to meet C, I don’t think, because we have all these disconnected pieces of deep intimacy between us, but no normal introduction, no basic friendliness. I look at my blinking cursor, then I open my hard drive.

I choose a corny picture my mom took of me when I moved into this place, a kind of “kid on the first day of school” picture.

I’m wearing cargo shorts with hiking sandals and have on a black tank top and my hair is in two braids like a little kid—it was so hot that day. Coming from Seattle, Mom
and I had been unprepared for the heat and it took us forever to bring my stuff in from the little trailer we’d rented.

I look sweaty and kind of red-faced, and normally I’d be a little shy about a picture where I’m wearing shorts and have cleavage and upper arms on display, but I’m standing in front of a stoop he knows and has walked up and down a million times, so that’s the one I upload into the message box.

I take a huge breath when I hit SEND.

So really meet me, or be introduced. Jenny Wright. Postdoc in microbiology, in the Blasdel Lab. I’ll be there, at Potato Mountain. Christmas Eve’s Eve
.

I hold my breath.

You’re beautiful. So beautiful. I don’t even feel like I have the right to say that because you don’t even know who I really am, but I can’t help it. I think you’re so beautiful
.

I don’t know why I expected that, but I do. I’m not surprised he thinks that I’m beautiful, it doesn’t scare me that this sort of stranger believes that I am and would tell me.

Even if all those times we typed things to each other in the dark he might have been thinking of some other image, I still don’t doubt that this man believes I am lovely.

I am. I look at my picture. I look happy in it.

If he would show me who he is, I think I would think he was beautiful, too.

Will you?