Georgie, All Along (42)

And I listen, pretending that part of me isn’t still in that frying pan. Pretending I’m not still thinking of Levi out on that back patio, making me pizza and telling me to keep going. Pretending I’m not wondering about him waiting for me to wake up this morning.

And most of all—worst of all—pretending I’m not wondering whether he’s been thinking of me, too.





Chapter 10


Levi


“Levi!”

I jerk on my stool, nearly dropping the flask I’d been distractedly holding up to the light while I waited for Hedi to sort and file the samples I’ve brought her. By the way she’s said my name, she’s done with the sorting and filing part, or at least she’s been trying to talk to me while she’s doing it. Well, she can get in line. I haven’t paid close attention to anything anyone’s said to me in hours and hours, not since I felt Georgie Mulcahy’s body against mine.

Not since I froze in shock. In desperate, confused longing.

Not since I chased her away with my indecision.

I set the flask down gently, because I know better than to fidget with equipment in Hedi’s lab. If I’d broken that, she would’ve had my ass.

I clear my throat. “Sorry, I missed that.”

She huffs a sigh, shutting the fridge and turning to face me. “I said you brought more than I expected.”

“Right. I wasn’t building today, just checking on some sites my guys have in progress. Thought I’d take up some extra samples while I was out.”

She nods, moving to scribble notes on a clipboard she has on the table where I’ve been sitting. I’ve been working with Hedi for a while, collecting water and plant samples from the river, all of them from close to or beneath the docks I’ve built or repaired. Hedi’s research area is underwater grasses in the bay and how they’re being affected by algal blooms, which crop up a lot in areas of high development, or wherever there’s big recreational marinas. The bay, shallow as it is, can handle this shit even less than the deeper ocean waters that also get more polluted every year, and Hedi’s on a mission to get those grasses back in shape. At first I thought it was a pretty specific area, but I’ve learned over time that most academic shit is real specific. Hedi’s got a guy in the office next to her that works on one specific kind of oyster, which he thinks can save the whole bay if there were only enough of them.

I know her eyes are on me, sharp and incisive. She doesn’t miss a thing.

“What’s the situation with your house?”

“Still a mess,” I say, eyeing that flask again. Dang, I want to fidget. I regret leaving Hank in Hedi’s office with one of her grad students; he’s always a formidable distraction. But no dogs in the lab, that’s the rule. “Contractor says a few more days, at least.”

Maybe Thursday next week, he’d said this morning when I’d called him from my truck, defeated by Georgie’s clear avoidance of me. I’d tried not to groan audibly, thinking about the next six days of staying in the house with her, wanting her the way I do and knowing it’d probably do her no good to know it.

“But you are staying at your friend’s house, right?”

I pick up the flask again.

“Levi,” she scolds, and I set it down. “If you and Hank are sleeping in a truck or a tent, I swear, I’ll—”

“We’re not.”

“Are you staying in a house?” she asks, pointedly, because she’s like this. Bossy. Unrelenting. Attentive to every detail. I look up at her and she’s got her eyes narrowed at me. The back of my neck heats up, remembering the time Hedi caught me sleeping in my truck right here on this campus, because I was too tired to drive the hour back to Darentville after a night class that’d followed a full day of dock surveying work in the rain. I never got yelled at like that in my life, and that’s saying something. I’d been twenty-seven years old at the time, well out of the range where I thought I’d ever get another earful from a teacher.

“Yeah, I promise.”

Her gaze softens, and she pulls out a stool, sitting across from me at the lab table. It’s been five years since that time she caught me out in my truck, and since then Hedi—Professor Farzad to me at the time—and I have become something like friends, or at least something that’s more than teacher–student. Once I finished up her class, Hedi asked if I’d be willing to keep working with her sometimes, collaborating on how dock builds can best accommodate those grasses she’s trying to save. I’m one of a few watermen in the region she works with on collecting samples, though I get the sense that my having been her student, even if it was for only one class, means she’s always treated me different than she does them. In the years I’ve known her, I’ve seen how she is with students, and it’s not like any kind of thing I ever saw from the teachers I had as a kid. She’s always on about “intersections,” about how your life outside the classroom or the lab has an impact on what happens in it. That’s how she got me seeing that building docks had a lot more to do with marine science than I would’ve thought initially.

That’s also how I can tell she knows something’s wrong with me.

“I’m not alone there, though,” I say, because I might as well get ahead of it. And Hedi isn’t the same as Carlos or Laz or Micah, or anyone I know from town. Hedi is separate from all that, and it’s always made it easier to talk to her.