Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(54)

He sits on the bench to pull booties over his tennis shoes. I get my coat and hat off, stuff them in my locker.

I realize I’ll have to take off my sweater in front of Evan.

Which, I’m wearing a T-shirt under, but it feels—intimate. We aren’t talking, joking around, like I do with my colleagues in this room.

I can hear him pull his sweater over his head, the shush of clothes being removed in close proximity.

It gives me chills that the cool lab air can’t explain when I hold my breath and pull my own sweater over, and of course it catches the bottom hem of my T-shirt and a large surface area of the skin of my belly and back hits the air and maybe his gaze, I don’t know.

I don’t look.

I just stuff my sweater in my locker and grab an elastic to pull my hair back.

It’s when my arms are over my head, wrapping the elastic around my ponytail, that I realize I’m wearing a purple bra under a thin, white, men’s T-shirt.

I don’t even normally wear purple bras, it’s just that I normally wear this kind of bra, in regular colors like white and black, but apparently Nordstrom Rack had my bra in ten different nonstandard colors because that’s what was in the latest care package from my mom—a rainbow of bras and a freezer bag full of peanut butter cookies.

After the thing with my coat and the bra maybe I should talk to my mom about dressing her grown daughter.

Except, I think she shops for me to feel close to me and to try not to worry so much and I wouldn’t want to take that away from her. Plus, you know. Free bras and coats.

“Jenny?”

“Huh?” I am holding my lab coat, but for some reason not putting it on, even though it would solve my purple-bra problem.

“Where’d you go?”

When I turn around, Evan is sitting on the bench, his booties on, also stripped down to a T-shirt. His plaid shirt must have had long sleeves.

The way he’s sitting, something about it, maybe it’s that he’s wearing that rumpled-looking T-shirt and it fits kind of tight, how he’s leaning forward, he doesn’t seem like Evan.

He seems like a guy, and this impression isn’t helped by the look on his face, which is basically the same as usual, his eyebrows all steepled up, with that kind of near smile, but his eyes seem more direct somehow, and like he’s looking at all of me, not just my brain.

If that makes sense.

“I don’t know,” I answer, because I’ve forgotten his question.

“Sometimes I watch you just go somewhere else, and I just wonder where that is.”

“I was thinking about my mom.” I sit on the bench next to him so I can unlace my boots. The feeling that he’s looking at me doesn’t go away.

“Those are some socks.” He’s grinning at me, and I follow his gaze to my socks, which are pink with mustaches printed all over them.

“That’s why I was thinking about her.”

“Your socks?”

“Well, no. But that could be the reason. She got these for me. I was thinking about how she got me my coat, and this bra.” We both look at my boobs at the same time and the second he snaps his gaze away with another grin he’s trying to fight, I want to smack my forehead.

I have a serious filter problem.

I can’t believe I made Evan look at my boobs.

I clear my throat. “Anyway, so I was thinking it’s probably kind of dumb that my mother still buys socks and bras and coats and whatever else for her grown daughter but I could never tell her to stop because it’s the only way she knows how to take care of me, right now. She’s my mom and it’s her job to keep bad things from happening to me, and she can’t stop this thing from happening so she sends me boxes full of socks and cookies and T-shirts with funny things on them and rolls of quarters for the laundry and maybe, for a few seconds when she’s packing her boxes up she feels like she’s stopping a little bit of the bad stuff that’s happening to me. So that means I’m happy to wear purple bras and mustache socks. That’s where I went. What I was thinking of.”

Evan looks down at his feet. “I like the purple bra,” then he looks right at me, but not at the bra, for which I am grateful. “And your socks.”

“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.”