Page 19 of Not in Love

Iarrived just in time to see Arjun, the man I desperately wished would take Matt’s place as my supervisor, step out of the conference room. He approached me with a smile, and bent his head to my ear to say in low tones, “I was nervous as shit to go in there, but they’re decent.”

“Who’s they?”

“I forgot their names, honestly. Two of the dudes?”

A sixty-six percent chance of Eli, then.

“They’re approachable,” Arjun continued. “I was sure they’d be looking for reasons to say that everyone’s position is redundant, but they seem genuinely interested in the science. Asked lots of questions.”

“About what?”

“The scale-up stuff I’ve been working on. I got to complain about the whole pH saga we had last quarter. The initial hydrolysis step. They got my pain.”

“They understand hydrolysis?” I knew how arrogant the question sounded, but I couldn’t picture a normie having a working knowledge of it. Then again, I barely spoke with non-Tisha humans, so what did I know?

“Oh yeah. I started giving them the crayon version, but they nipped that real fast. They must have some kind of chemistry background, because they know their shit. Maybe—”

“Are you Dr. Siebert?”

I glanced past Arjun’s shoulder, at the person idling stiffly by the conference room. “Yes, I am.”

“I’m Sul Jensen. Come on in.” He was a square, stocky man who looked like he’d last smiled in the early 2000s. Not quite rude, but stone faced and glaringly uninterested in exchanging pleasantries. My first impression of him was probably highly similar to others’ first impressions of me—with the caveat that serious, unsmiling men tended to be considered consummate professionals, while serious, unsmiling women were often written off as haughty shrews.

Oh well.

Sul Jensen’s frostiness suited my inability to perform extraversion just fine. He gestured me toward the room, his movements jerky, with a slight animatronic quality, and I followed, bracing myself for impact.

Finding Eli Killgore inside didn’t surprise me, not as much as the jolt of heat in my stomach. He wore black jeans and a buttondown shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the tops of his strong forearms, and now that I saw him up close, I just couldn’t reconcile it—the way he could be, at once, the man I’d met last night and someone completely divorced from that; the air of disheveled elegance as he riffled through a stack of papers, when a few hours earlier I’d thought him rough enough around the edges to cut deep and draw blood.

The glasses were certainly interesting. His face was already complex, a dissonant combination of rugged and refined, and with their frames added to the mix, there was suddenly one too many elements to parse. But there was something undisputably magnetic about him, something that could catch and trap. The fact that his attention was too focused on the papers for him to look at me felt like a small, temporary mercy.

“Sit?” Sul closed the door and pointed at the closest chair, like this was his house, instead of the conference room where Tisha and I held journal club and drank beer once a month. Resentment twitched in my belly.

“No, thank you,” I said, and Eli . . . he must have recognized my voice. His neck straightened and his eyes rocketed to mine, widening behind the glasses.

I was ready for him. I met his gaze, watched the shock play on his features, savored the disorientation in his parted lips.

Yup. That’s exactly what it felt like, seeing you up there.

Unhurriedly, I turned to Sul. “Florence mentioned that you wanted to see all team leaders, but I probably shouldn’t be included. My position is nontraditional. I spend twenty percent of my time—one full day per week—working for Matt Sanders on regulatory compliance.”

“Rue?” Eli said. Sul glanced at him in confusion, but I powered through.

“The rest of the time I lead my own project, unrelated to the biofuel tech.”

“Rue.”

“I do have a couple of lab technicians helping me, but aside from that I’m a team leader in name only—”

“Rue.” Eli’s voice cut through the room, snapping the thread of my speech, forcing me to turn. He was staring at me, equal parts disbelief and a million other things.

“Yes?” I asked. It came out almost sweetly, and Eli seemed just as taken aback as I felt. He didn’t spare a single glance for Sul. Instead he slowly took off his glasses, as though they might be the means through which he was conjuring me. The dull sound of them clicking against the conference table reverberated inside my bones, and so did Eli’s soft words. “Leave us, Sul.”

Sul looked between us, seemingly tempted to protest, but after a few beats, he left as rigidly as he’d come in—conspicuously leaving the door open behind him.

The room plunged into a long, unpleasant silence that ended only when Eli said, once again, “Rue.” Not What are you doing here? Not Why didn’t you tell me? Not Did you know about this? It was nice, since they would have been stupid questions, and I doubted either of us was a fan of those. “You seem less surprised to see me than I am to see you,” he said.

“I had the advantage of standing in a crowd,” I conceded.

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