Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(62)

“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.