Page 11 of Deep In Love
“What are you doing?” I ask, innocence and faux confusion lacing my voice as I pause my audiobook.
Charlie sputters for a response, red creeping up her cheeks all the way to the tips of her ears. Her hands fly around before she glues them to her side.
“I was…” She trails off, searching the lab, looking anywhere but at the pipette. I lean back in my chair, pulling off my gloves to watch her flounder for an excuse like a fish out of water.
The skin beneath her right eye twitches, pulling on her scar, as she continues to scramble before her focus lands on a shelf of preserved specimens. She sticks out a finger, swiping it against the glass jar housing a juvenile giant Pacific octopus.
“Dust,” she declares. “I’m checking for dust. And this place is riddled with it.”
Her nose wrinkles before wiping her hand on her overalls.
“You came into my lab to check for dust?”
Dios, she ispretty.
Her legs stretch beneath her jean overalls, which are covered in a mosaic of quirky patches stitched into the fabric. She tugs at the frayed edges of her navy URI sweatshirt, covering the abundance of bracelets on her wrists, each a different color of the rainbow.Piercings filled with colorful stones line her earlobes, framed by wild honey-blond hair.
But it’s her eyes, the brightest shade of Caribbean blue, that captivate.
We engage in an epic stare down, like if we’re locked in some weird tension, I won’t notice her hand wiggling behind her back, blindly searching for her target. She draws her lower lip between her teeth, and my attention dips. Right as I shake the urge to pull her lip betweenmyteeth, the pipette disappears.
“You know what,” she says airily, “you’reright. It’s not my place to check the dust in your lab. If you want to keep an unclean space full of points of contamination, it’s not on my conscience to stop you.”
She crab walks toward the door, glowering at me like I’m an error her coding software spit out. Her steps are methodical and slow-moving to prevent her stolen goods from falling out of her back pocket, allowing me time to block the exit.
Charlie glares, crossing her arms over her chest, and my dick twitches.
I’ve been pining over Charlie Bowen since the day we met, and all she accomplishes with her razor-sharp looks is giving me a raging hard-on that I have to banish by reciting mundane lab protocols.
“Where are you going?” I force away a smile and press against the door. Her hand snakes behind her back and jiggles the doorknob.
She sniffles and fakes a sneeze. “Away from all the dust particles.” Another sniffle. “Let me go.”
“And if I were to ask you to…empty your pockets, would you be able to do that?”
Her face pales, but she doubles down.
“Absolutely not.” She peels my hand away from the door, and my skin tingles as she shoves it to my side. Her touch lingers for a second too long, and then she rips her hand away like I’ve burned her. Clearing her throat, she says, “Now, if you’re finished holding me hostage, I have tubes I need to fill and no undergrad to pawn the task off on.”
Instead of letting her sneak past with her stolen treasure, I block the exit again and drop my voice to nothing more than a whisper.
“I’ve always had a thing for thieves,” I tease, tugging at a loose strand of hair, which rewards me with one of her iconic glares—sharp, but intoxicatingly sexy.
“Good thing I follow the letter of the law,” she says, her pitch an octave higher than normal.
Liar.
“Does that law condone the theft of lab equipment?”
I raise a brow, and Charlie sighs in defeat. “Six. Hundred. Tubes,” she groans. “Some noob broke ours, which means I would have to pipette ethanolsix hundred times.” She raises the tool into the air like a scepter. “This bad boy will save me hours of work.”
My chest aches as I suppress the urge to laugh, not because she’s attempting to be humorous, but because she’s naturally funny. Though maybe finding her hilarious is a by-product of a two-year-long crush, which grows daily. Regardless, when Charlie’s around, it’s difficult to do anything but smile.
She often frowns in response.
Charlie may be my favorite person, but I am not hers. I don’t even crack the top ten, let alone get close to Sir Charles Darwin. Trying to bump him from the top spot is futile, but I’ve been aiming for a close second since we met.
I reach out a hand to bracket the doorframe, and Charlie slips below my outstretched arm, whooping in victory as she runs down the hall to her lab space, three doors away.
