Page 28 of Not in Love

I couldn’t remember why I’d chosen to message him of all people. To avoid dick pics, name-calling, and requests to smell my used panties in lieu of hello, I only used apps that required women to make the first move—as at ease as I felt in sex-forward spaces, I liked to consent before seeing someone’s junk. But my selection criteria were sparse: men who were local, who’d been marked as safe by other users, who were willing to accept my limits. Their looks had always been little more than an afterthought, and I’d had perfectly satisfying sex with guys who were objectively not handsome and with guys whose particular brand of attractiveness did little for me.

Eli, however. He defied categorization. There was something all-encompassing about his presence, something physical and visceral and simmering that had a near chemical effect on me. He crossed his arms, too, and the bands of muscles under his thin shirt made me picture reaching out. Tracing. Touching.

“That was heavy handed,” I said without inflection.

“It was,” he agreed. Then something occurred to him. “Do you feel unsafe? Being alone with me?”

I thought about it. Considered lying and dismissed the idea. “No.”

“Then I won’t call him back.” His shoulders relaxed. “At what intervals do you measure?”

I cocked my head to study him, reassessing his role here at Kline. Remembering Euler’s number. You know this man’s phone’s passcode, his opinions on anal sex, and his interest in negotiated kinks, but you have no idea where his knowledge of food engineering comes from. Nice work, Rue. “Why don’t you guess?”

His mouth twitched, indulgent. “I’m not your dancing bear, Rue. I don’t perform on command.”

“No. You like the element of surprise.” His silence read like assent. He stared at my mouth until I asked, “What’s your educational background?”

“Is it relevant to what we’re doing here?”

I licked the backs of my teeth. Was it? Did I need to know? Or was I simply unjustifiably, uncharacteristically curious about this man I should be ejecting out of my life and mind? “I’m harvesting microbial growth every thirty minutes, and logging chamber conditions every fifteen, just to be safe.” I tore my eyes from his complicated face and put on my lab coat, facing away from him. When I turned around, he was staring with hungry eyes, as though I were something to be eaten, as though I were peeling off layers instead of the opposite.

Jay’s lab coat was larger than mine but turned out not to be big enough for Eli. He put on rubber gloves with the ease that only someone who visited a lab every day—or a serial killer—should have. I stared at his hands stretching the latex and thought, This is dangerous. We shouldn’t be together, he and I.

“When I was eighteen or nineteen,” he said, “I was working in a lab as an undergraduate RA, and I accidentally messed with the settings of the liquid nitrogen tank. My lab lost several important cell lines that were stored in it. It was a dumb mistake that set their research back by weeks.” He bit the inside of his cheek. “Everyone assumed that it was machine malfunction, and even though I felt guilty as shit, I never corrected them. The following semester, I moved to another lab.”

I blinked at him. “Why are you telling me this?”

His mouth quirked. “Just confessing something terrible to you. I thought it might be our thing.”

I remembered the car. My admission that I’d wished Vincent would just disappear. How jealous of his sister he’d been. Then, inexplicably, I heard myself say, “I once accidentally crushed a mouse’s skull while putting him in ear bars.” I swallowed. “The postdoc who was supervising me said that it wasn’t a big deal, and I pretended I didn’t care, but I couldn’t handle it. I haven’t worked with lab animals since.”

He didn’t say anything, like he hadn’t in the car, nor did he react in any other way. We just stared at each other with no disappointment and no recrimination, two terrible people with horrible stories, two terrible people who maybe were more interested in judging themselves than each other, until I couldn’t bear it anymore. I quickly grabbed an apple, and didn’t protest when he followed me to the humidity chamber. “Hot in here,” he commented. “Is the seal broken? I can take a look.”

“It’s just a small space. And a constantly running motor. You ready?” I started my timer before he could respond.

Admittedly, he was a good assistant. He knew how, and where, and what to log, did not ask me to repeat myself, and never once looked bored while I took my measurements. He asked questions about my research, about the company culture, about the work I’d done before coming to Kline, but he seemed to know instinctively not to bother me when I was harvesting samples or diluting them with buffers.

For the most part, I answered. I was certain that his intentions were sketchy, but couldn’t figure how sharing any of this information was going to harm Florence. The work we did was important. Florence was a fantastic leader. Maybe it was perverse of me, but I wanted Eli to know how much Kline had accomplished. Whatever Harkness was trying to achieve may have been legal, but it wasn’t moral, and I wanted him to feel like a villain for it.

But he didn’t seem upset, only happy to listen and ask questions. Above all, he seemed fully in his element. Like a lab was where he belonged.

“How long has it been?” I asked, grabbing a fresh pipette tip.

“Less than five minutes—”

“I mean, since you were last in a lab.”

He looked up from the clipboard, his face so blank, it had to be deliberate. “I haven’t kept track.”

“No?” He had. To the day. I was certain. “Why did you stop?”

“Don’t remember.” There were only two or three feet between us. His eyes were a light, predatory blue. Close enough that I could touch the lie.

“You don’t remember why you decided that you’d rather be a hedge fund manager than a scientist?”

“You really don’t know much about private equities, do you?”

My hand tightened on the pipette. “You know a lot about food engineering, though.”

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