Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(53)

Even my toes, through the vulcanized trekking material of my snow boots, are warm because Evan pushed this magical button that redirected the blasting hot air from my head to my feet right at the moment my face was starting to feel roasted.

I love Evan’s van and its ass brazier and convection heat.

He turns a corner, disturbing a garland of sleigh bells he’s hung from the rearview, and I smile. I could almost pretend I was in a horse-drawn sleigh, huddled under deerskins with hot bricks at my feet.

Or something.

“You good?”

His voice seems like it’s coming from far away, and I realize that I’m drifting. Not sleeping, exactly, but after my long, hard cry and the granola bar and orange juice Evan made me eat from the lobby vending machine, and the quiet minutes in his van, warm all the way through for the first time in days, my brain has just powered down.

Gone a little half-lit and soft.

Maybe that’s why I say, “So good,” and smile at him.

“Yeah?” He turns away to shift. I have no idea how to drive a manual transmission. When you’re from Seattle, a city built on stair-step hills building from the sound, the idea of stalling out in the middle of one of those hills in traffic is enough to actively avoid developing the skill set.

I like watching him drive the van, though.

The gearshift thing is mounted right in the floor between us and he worries the fake-wood knob on it with his thumb when he drives. This van is the first thing I’ve seen him next to that seems scaled to him.

Except me, maybe. I always feel normal-sized around him, too.

“Yeah.” My voice sounds all dim and foggy, too. “Warm.”

“Too warm?” He glances over again.

I like how he hooks his wrist over the top of the steering wheel. “I miss driving.”

“You still could,” he answers.

“It scares me now.” Being warm is apparently my personal truth serum.

“I know, but that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. Helping you do things that scare you. Things like getting a daylight license and your car outfitted with extra mirrors. Negotiating reading and writing if your vision changes more. Not everyone”—he looks over and meets my eyes at a red light—“gets assigned someone whose only job it is to help them get through the things that scare them.”

“No,” I say. “Just the ones going blind.”

He makes a frustrated noise in his throat and shifts into gear with a jerk. I feel bad that it seems like, bit by bit, I’m getting to him.

He’s probably everybody else’s number one, guardian angel, superhero occupational therapist.

To me he’s the guy that reminds me, every week, that my life is only going to get worse.

Though he’s more than just that.

We’ve known each other for more than three months and while I just keep introducing myself to him, over and over, as someone angry with her diagnosis, he keeps introducing me to Jenny Wright, Fiercely Intelligent.

Which means he keeps introducing himself to me as a man willing to fail and try again.

“Where should I park?”

We had pulled into the administrative loop around the science campus. He had asked me to take him to my lab.

I had finally sniffed up the last of my tears on the sofa, and after he waited for me to get myself together with a tissue and pointed lack of eye contact, he’d said, “Let’s get out of here.”

“You have to park in the garage. You won’t have to pay; I have my badge with me.”

He pulls into the parking garage, where I show him we can enter the tunnel that will take us to the lab. It’s underground, so the lab’s atmosphere can be controlled with separate HVAC systems, and because some of the equipment is heavy and requires its own power grid.

I’m explaining this to him as we travel along the tunnel, following the green tiles along the floor that lead to my lab.

“So you’ll be working with the environmental scanner in this lab? I’ll be able to see it?”

“Environmental scanning electron microscope, and yeah, of course.” I slide my badge through the key lock and put in my code.

I’d explained to him over my vending-machine snack about the work I was doing with E. coli and how Lakefield State was my dream lab because it had the ESEM, which would allow me to look at live, wet-mount specimens and the kind of changes they went through when stressed. ESEMs don’t require that the specimen be mounted in a vacuum, which means live and juicy specimens and possibly better data than anyone’s ever collected before.

He was shockingly interested.

When I’d started to draw on a napkin how the ESEM worked, he’d scooted closer on the sofa and leaned over my arm to ask questions. He’d had a pretty intuitive understanding of equipment mechanics, which makes sense, because he works with a lot of tech, himself.

It’d made me feel sort of guilty—his enthusiasm for my work in the face of my resistance to his.

Then I’d wondered if he was doing it on purpose as another kind of object lesson.

But watching his face light up as the air rushes by us in the air lock, his sudden grin at me that makes me feel a blush all over my neck, I think he he’s just having regular fun.

I probably owe him.

“So we have to stop here before we go in.” I open the door to the locker room that juts away from the air lock. “I have lab clogs to change into, basically just shoes that I don’t wear anywhere else, but there are disposable booties to put over your tennis shoes on that bench. You’ll have to take off your sweater, so you have short sleeves under the lab coat, for safety. Then wash your hands. That’s it. You can wear one of the lab coats on that hook, those are all for visitors and students and stuff.”