“Do you see my hair elastic anywhere?”
Having coerced her unsteady legs back into her jeans, bungled the buttons and zippers closed again, and retrieved her discarded sweater, Erin scanned the carpet while raking the disaster of her hair off her neck. Her glasses were smudged, and she squinted at scattered sudoku pages and minimalist ink sketches of fractal lines on notepaper. A copy ofThis Is How You Lose the Time Warwith a canine-chewed corner peeked out from Ethan’s messenger bag behind the door. Dog hair on fleece—that vest—sudoku, ink sketches, sci-fi novels:Bannister.God, the truth was so obvious! Almost as obvious as the three years of data explaining her behavior around him, data that she’d so willfully mis-analyzed. If she’d walked one step farther into his office after his talk for the Department of Energy, she would’ve seen…
“Here.” Ethan handed her a cleaning wipe.
She couldn’t help laughing. “Not a hair tie.”
He shrugged while he tucked his shirt back into his belt. “Sorry.”
He wasn’t, and neither was she.
“A comb?” She polished her lenses, then dragged her fingers along her snarled nape again.
“In my car. For Bunsen.”
“Helpful.”
He whisked up a stray strand framing her ear. “How about a rubber band?”
She scanned the floor a second time. Nothing. Martina would kill her for the damage she was about to inflict on her hair. Probably for other things, too. As soon as she finished screaming in—vindicated?—shock.
“It’ll be better than nothing. I can’t walk out of here like…” She gestured at herself with her free hand, accepting his rubber band and bundling the tangles into a ponytail. “Especially since we’re meeting with Dr. Kramer. I wouldn’t want to pollute your reputation this way, either.”
He’d been grinning crookedly at her a moment before, watching her clean her glasses and tidy her hair while he straightened up the chaos on his desk, replacing a monitor on its stand, re-stacking sticky notes, aligning documents and blueprints, plugging the lamp back into its wall socket. Now, Dr. Ethan Meyer dropped an uncapped pen. The fingers that he’d stroked over her skin, across her lips, into her and through her pleasure, abruptly clenched so hard into his palms that his knuckles blanched. A dot of ink leaked onto the carpet.
“Ethan? What’s…”
“The status report is due in one hour and forty-seven minutes.”
His sentence was blank, inflectionless. Correct and sterile. His fists uncurled as quickly as they’d formed, populating meta-information into the header of a status report template on his laptop. But deep marks from his nails pitted his palms. His eyes darted to the time display on his monitor. 3:13 p.m. blinked to 3:14 p.m. His shoulders were high and taut. Was he even breathing?
She loudly unzipped her backpack and plonked her own laptop onto his desk. He didn’t startle, just went on staring at his screen.
“I know we have our report due soon.” Now she swiveled her computer into his line of sight. “You probably would’ve finished it last night, if you hadn’t been busy.”
No laughter, no smile.
She pushed on, “But we’re not going to be late. I started drafting notes for it earlier, and while nothing’s been completed in your template, we have a solid start. See?”
He looked at his clock again. 3:15 p.m.
“We can’t perfect the report if we haven’t written it.” She retrieved his dropped pen, capped it and slid it behind his ear, then nudged his elbow aside to perch on the armrest of his chair. “Come on, critique my notes.”
Maybe it was three years of habit that finally dragged his gaze to her screen. But as she talked through her transcription of their reference materials and research methods with ultracold atoms, electromagnets, and liquid helium, watching him rather than the lines of text and calculations, the tension eased fractionally from his forearms. Numbers and data were safe…
“Stop.” He tapped her trackpad. “You’ve attributed the material analysis on organic synthetic polymers for the holometer’s lenses to me.”
“Didn’t you run that study?”
“Under Dr. Kramer’s direction.” He replaced his name with his supervisor’s.
“His department, his lab, his research?”
“Yes—and this reference to the paper on the electromagnetic manipulation of atoms?” He emphasized a paragraph that outlined aspects of the project’s experimental methodologies and their proposed application.
“From your second publication inNature Physics?”
“Dr. Kramer was the first author. His credit should come before mine. It was his idea to use ultracold atoms when manipulating their shape and motion to assess new quantum behaviors. I just executed his vision in the experimental halls.” He jumped her cursor along the text. “Also, the design of the holometer wasn’t my original idea.”
