The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(8)

“Professor Guyer?”

Melanie raised her eyebrows, trying to indicate something close to annoyance with Bark. His real name was something complicated and Ukrainian, so everybody, including Melanie, called him Bark. Despite his obvious brilliance, he drove Melanie batshit crazy. It was some sort of strange skill he possessed that all the other graduate students did not. It was as though he spent his free time thinking of ways to annoy her. For instance, this: “Professor Guyer?” Just the fact that he called her Professor Guyer when everybody else in the lab called her Melanie made her want to smack him. She had asked him, told him, ordered him to call her Melanie, but not only did he continue to call her Professor Guyer, he said it in such a way that it was always a question, his voice rising at the end as if he was not entirely sure it was her name, like maybe it was something other than Melanie, even after three years of being in her lab.

Plus, since February, she’d been sleeping with him.

And that was what drove her the most crazy. He wasn’t just annoying; he was also her lover. No, Melanie thought. Not her lover. She hated that term. Though f*ck buddy wasn’t something she liked either. Sex partner? Something. Whatever it was, sleeping with him had not been among her best decisions. The problem, as Melanie saw it, was that even though she wanted to smash a beaker and use the broken glass to slit his throat every time he opened his mouth, when he kept his lips shut—or better yet, glued to her body—he was all she could think about. She’d never thought of herself as shallow, but after the divorce, she’d wanted a little fun. And despite all the ways in which Bark made her barking mad, he wasn’t a little fun in bed—he was a lot of fun in bed. Manny had made her feel all warm and secure when they had sex, but in the wake of her marriage’s dissolution, Bark’s hot and bothered was a nice change of pace.

So if it hadn’t been the best decision to sleep with him in the first place, in her defense, it was a decision that had been helped by several glasses of something the graduate students had cooked up at the Valentine’s Day party they talked her into going to. They’d called the drink “venom,” and it had packed a punch. When she’d woken up the next morning with Bark in bed beside her, it took her a couple of minutes to figure out who she was, let alone where she was, what she was doing in Bark’s bed with him, and why neither of them was wearing any clothes. She slipped into the bathroom without waking him. By the time she was swishing some of his mouthwash and smoothing her hair in the mirror, she realized she’d already made the sort of practical decision that had worked so poorly in her marriage to Manny: she’d made her bed by sleeping with Bark, so she might as well lie in it. Again and again.

The Valentine’s Day party was still a blur to her, but she could remember the morning after with stunning clarity. Bark was brilliant, but he was nobody’s idea of what a scientist should look like. He dressed nicely, but even if he’d been rocking a pocket protector and a slide rule, he still would have turned heads. He’d come to American University straight from Cal Tech, one coast to the other, and maybe out in California he fit in, but in Melanie’s lab, in the whole entomology building, he stood out. He was a different species entirely. Melanie was close to six feet tall, and despite being nearly two decades removed from her undergraduate playing days at Yale, she still played basketball at least three times a week and swam four mornings a week. But Bark had another six inches on her and his nickname fit him, because he was as solid as a tree. She knew he didn’t lift weights, and as far as she’d been able to tell, he’d never even set foot in a gym or played a sport, but even with his clothes on he looked as if he were sculpted. If he hadn’t wanted to get his PhD, he could have made a living as an underwear model.

When she came back from the bathroom, ignoring her clothes, which were crumpled on the floor, she slid into the bed and waited. And waited. And waited. Bark slept like the dead, but when he finally began stirring, when they picked up from where they had evidently left off the night before, it was worth it. Even after two months of hooking up with him three or four times a week, she still couldn’t get over the way he looked without a shirt. Melanie couldn’t stop herself from touching his chest, his arms, the muscles on the back of his shoulders. So different from her ex-husband. Manny wasn’t short, but he was shorter than her, and though he could be incredibly intimidating, he wasn’t exactly a slab of muscle. No, Manny was hard on the inside, mean and petty when he thought somebody was f*cking him over with work or politics—which, because he was the White House chief of staff, were the same thing for him—and as vicious as a Sydney funnel-web spider when he was being attacked. As aggressive as he was in his professional life, however, Manny was a little too deferential in bed. A beefcake he was not.

The beefcake in question, Bark, was staring at her. “Professor Guyer?” he tried again.

“Bark.” She glanced at the other two students. Julie Yoo, who was far too rich to be spending her time studying spiders, and Patrick Mordy, who was in his first year in the graduate program and not anywhere near as smart as his transcript and application materials had indicated, and was, Melanie suspected, profoundly unlikely to finish his degree. “What?” she said. “What’s so important that you guys couldn’t wait for me to get back to the lab?”

Both Bark and Patrick stared at Julie, who looked down at her shoes. Melanie sighed and tried to keep her temper. She liked Julie, she really did, but for a girl who had everything going for her, Julie could have used a dose of confidence. Her parents had a lot of money. A ton of money. Private jet money. A building on the American University campus named after them money. What the hell was Julie doing in a lab studying spiders money. And Julie was pretty, and not just in the way girls in the sciences could be pretty because there wasn’t a lot of competition. Julie would have been pretty in business school or law school, Melanie thought. Now that’s pretty. She smiled to herself as she thought this. She could think like that because she knew she looked the same way. She looked her age, but she looked good for it, the kind of forty-year-old woman who made men stare at their wives and wonder why they hadn’t made better decisions. She caught Patrick looking at her and starting to smile back and she jerked her mouth into a scowl. They weren’t as careful with their lab work if she wasn’t hard on them.