Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(56)

“Right. Different densities of material will take the stain differently. What else?”

“There’s more than one kind of thing. I think a couple of strings from the swab. Then little dots, pieces of things. I can tell what the cells are, though. I can see the walls, and the nuclei?”

I kind of laugh, because it’s just so awesome, the way his voice is serious but his mouth is smiling.

He looks away then, and he’s just inches away.

His eyes find mine.

“Thank you for showing me this,” he says.

“Yeah, of course.” Now I’m looking at him, not just at his brain.

He straightens up, but I sit up with him, and we’re still looking at each other and I don’t know what’s going to happen or what he’s going to say and suddenly, I am looking at his mouth.

I can’t believe I’m doing that, so I look back into his eyes.

But his eyes don’t seem surprised at all.

Then he reaches up and he curls that big hand around the nape of my neck and I swear to God, all the breath in my body rushes to the surface of my skin in this insane flash of heat that makes it so I can’t breathe back in, not ever, it feels like.

His face is so serious, and my brain is totally scrambled against working out what will happen next, even though I must know because he pulls me to him, without any hesitance at all, without any of the reluctance I would think he would have given how dedicated he is to his professional life.

He pulls me right to him, and then, his mouth is against my forehead, pursed in a kiss, but not exactly, because I can feel him breathing, and his hand on my nape has tightened, to hold me right there.

I can’t even process this, and I close my eyes, and as soon as I do, everything in the entire world is his hand on my neck, his mouth on my forehead.

“Jenny,” he whispers along my hair.

He says it again, without even his voice, just his breath. Holds me to him, right there.

I keep my eyes closed.

I need the entire world to stay just like this.

*

He’s standing at the bus stop with me until my bus comes because I wouldn’t let him give me a ride home.

The snow is coming down again; during the last week it had reliably started up in the afternoons and snowed all night. I liked to snuggle in my bed and listen to the plows in my neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning, their bright lights whooshing by my windows.

Every morning had a new unspoiled blanket, with only a few little alley-cat prints in it.

Even a full two and a half weeks from Christmas, they are predicting a white one.

I smile and look up at the fat flakes coming down.

“Does it snow in Seattle?”

He’s wearing a striped, wool ski cap with a sporting-goods logo and one of those heavy canvas coats with the big cargo pockets all over. He’d be warm for a crisp fall stroll, but standing still in the ankle-deep slush at the bus stop, the snow coming faster and faster, and the occasional blasts of below-freezing wind, he is obviously miserable.

He looks at me with his eyebrows raised, his arms crossed and his hands stuffed in his armpits.

“It does snow, but not a lot, and it tends to shut everything down. Of course, there’s lots and lots of snow in the Olympics and the Cascades.”

I watch him clench his jaw against chattering. “It’s pretty, coming down so fast and heavy like this.”

“Dude, go inside, you’re freezing, and I wait for this bus all the time. I’m wearing ten times more coat than you.”

He grins and pulls his hat down lower. “I’m good. Lusting after your coat, but good.”

Evan saying the word lusting makes something unfair happen in my underpants.

I take a deep breath and look right at him. There’s snow on his collar, his shoulders, his hat. “Do you …”

“I get it,” he says. “I always did, actually, in a lot of other ways, but I want you to understand that I get that I’m not going to be able to adapt the entire field of microbiology so that it feels good to you, in the same way, whatever the progression of your changes are.”

“I could stay just like this, forever. Be able to do everything but drive at night and avoid people’s sneaking up on me.”

“You could.”

“Or I could end up with a dog for the first time in my life.”

“Yeah. Though you’d work with a cane for a long time, first.”

A laugh kind of forced out of me in a cloud of cold breath. “How I am supposed to live with that kind of uncertainty?”

“You tell me, I guess.”

I look at him then, and he laughs at whatever look is on my face. “Help me out, sensei.”

“You’re a postdoc, a researcher, in science.”

“Right.”

“So, you know, better than anyone, that you could plan and work for something and at any time it could go sideways.”

“Sure.”

He just looks at me.

“But,” I say, “I’m always doing everything all along the way to adjust for change and screwups and ways the data come out that weren’t anticipated. I mean, a five-year project will be as much about discovery as it is about hypothesis. So, we basically expect it to all go sideways. It probably means we’re doing something right if it goes all sideways.”