Page 24 of Undercover
I opened my mouth to tell him where to stuff the end of his discussion, and then my brain caught up to what I’d heard but not really processed. My hands went still on the corkscrew.
“Which Dr. Wilson? Dr. Steven Wilson?” My heart gave a little lurch.
“Oh, yes, you’re probably familiar with him,” Dave said, sounding disgruntled. He hated it when I wasn’t completely out of the loop, since he loved lording it over me so much when I was. “He’s still on the university’s board of governors.”
The very same board of governors I’d need to petition if I wanted to be reinstated into my doctoral program, in fact.
The lurch solidified into a too-aggressive pounding rhythm. Oh, God. Could I do this? Before I could think it over, I said, “When is it again?”
Dave snorted. “Like it matters to you. What, do you need to clear your busy schedule of getting day-drunk?”
I put the bottle down carefully and backed away, afraid he’d hear the cork pop if I pulled it out the rest of the way while I still had him on speaker. Dammit. Broken clocks were apparently right at two in the afternoon.
“When is it, Dave? You know I wasn’t listening the first time, and I can’t show up if I don’t know when it is.”
Dave’s long, gusty sigh whooshed through my phone’s speakers like a burst of irritable, patronizing static. “Friday night. Don’t make a dramatic entrance, just show up at seven like everyone else. At the factory. And your date better not be some freak. Black tie, Gabe,” he added in a growl.
“Look, you should be grateful I’m even coming!” Too late. The phone’s screen lit up, showing me the call had ended. “Dammit,” I muttered to myself, eyed the wine bottle, and then snatched up my phone and stalked out of the kitchen in disgust.
I wasnotgoing to give Dave the satisfaction of getting drunk, even if he wouldn’t know about it.
The temptation to text Alec hit me hard, but I resisted. I’d seen him every day during the week since our lunch date and walk in the park, and it’d been at my instigation every time.
To be fair, I’d texted him when I woke up every day and hadn’t really given him time to try to get in touch with me first. To be even more fair, I’d probably been annoying him, even though he hadn’t said so. Maybe I’d been texting him early every day so that I wouldn’t have to be upset when he didn’t bother to get in touch himself. And maybe I needed to stop being self-aware. That only led to misery.
But I had to do something to distract myself from my annoyance with my brother and my fluttery feelings toward Alec, so I booted up my laptop and flopped down on the couch. I’d watch some Netflix, maybe. Or just scroll Facebook.
I ended up on the Burlington University chemistry department’s website, without my fingers receiving any conscious input. Looking at the stock photos of test tubes and serious-faced scientists having staring contests with lab equipment just made me sad. God, I missed that so much. Not the seriously-staring-at-experiments thing, since no one actually did that outside of nervous undergraduates doing their first titrations. The not-being-a-loser thing.
Honestly, I missed my research and my lab with a deep, miserable ache that I couldn’t soothe no matter how I tried to distract myself.
And Alec had made me think about it again, damn him, with his questions about why I’d ‘dropped out’ of my program and his comments about how I had to be smart to be in it in the first place. He’d made me wish I could’ve proudly told him all about the smart shit I did every day, and the much smarter shit I wanted to do. How I had goals, and was working to achieve them.
More subtly, the interest he’d stirred up in me, the passion, reminded me how it felt to actuallywantsomething. Spending time with Alec reminded me of spending time in the lab. I felt alive, and interested, and interesting, and I wanted to feel like that all the time—and for myself, not just because of a guy.
Although Alec had something else in common with tricky, often painstaking and pointless scientific research: he frustrated me like nothing else.
The day before yesterday, I’d lured him home with me and gotten him on my couch—and he’d put his arm around my shoulders while we watched a movie.
Yes, that was how far I’d fallen. I’d asked a guy I wanted to fuck to watch a movie with me, and thenwatched a movie with him. Everyone knew that was code for ‘Let’s ignore a movie while we screw around.’ Literally, everyone. My mother knew that, for fuck’s sake.
Except Alec, who left after the movie, with one quick peck on the lips and a few words about having to call in to the temp agency first thing in the morning.
To torture myself further, I clicked over to the page on the department’s website listing the grad students, and scrolled down. Jennifer Markham, Andrew Meng, Kaden Mueller.
No Gabriel Middleton. My gut clenched. Ofcoursethey’d removed me from the website. Of course they had, because I didn’t go there anymore. It hurt like a bitch, and I slammed the laptop shut and tipped my head against the back of the couch, squeezing my eyes shut. I missed my NMR spectrometer like some people missed their friends.
I mean, Marvin the spectrometerwasmy friend. Even after I’d spilled coffee on him that one time, he still worked. I certainly liked Marvin better than I liked Andrew Meng or Jennifer Markham, or God forbid Kaden Mueller, who heated up fish in the lab microwave.
I didn’t miss Kaden.
But I had to get my life on track. If my one bright spot consisted of a guy I’d only known existed for a few weeks, simply because he made my heart pound and he seemed to like spending time with me as a person and not just with my legs spread, then something had to give.
My phone dinged, and I picked it up half-heartedly, expecting a follow-up text from Dave with some kind of irritating reminder or other.
It was Alec.
Thinking about you. Want to get a late lunch?
