Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(66)

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.





Chapter Six


Whiteout


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.”

I love grilled cheese. I love fries. “Which, that sounds awesome, and I was just thinking that I was starving, but I didn’t know you made house calls? Office calls?”

I am hoping he will explain himself before I give up and ask him if he wants to make out, because while I ask my question he starts shrugging out of his coat and I don’t think he must work today because he’s wearing an old breast-cancer-research 10K T-shirt, and it’s neon pink, which isn’t the problem, the problem is that this T-shirt is too small. And it rides up, away from his hips and then I’m seeing skin, and the only skin I usually see as a single person is my own, especially in the winter, when the whole world is bundled up against casual leering except for noses and cheeks.