She was right that a hard copy of the Matter in Extreme Conditions blueprint would be easier to mark up than a digital one, but he closed their messages without replying. She knew she’d made a smart decision. She didn’t need him to tell her that.
What she did need, however, was, “…a material for the experimental optics that reflects well but won’t get hot near the lasers.” Seated across from him in the Sidewinder conference room with the sleeves of a taupe sweater pushed up over her wrists, Erin swiveled her blueprint on the table and poked a sticky note standing in for the proposed placement of their lasers in the hutch.
“Correct.” He dragged the Mylar paper over to his side of the table, until she caught its corner under her elbow. “Glass isn’t an option—”
“—since it insulates and retains too much heat.”
“Plastic will melt under laser exposure. Most things will. Which means that using lasers to cool the atoms might not work for repeat experiments.” He ripped off another sticky note from its pad with more force than necessary, then shuffled through a profusion of materials between them—reference texts, or drafted diagrams displaying clusters of cables, vacuum chamber layouts, and the placement of electromagnets and detectors for data readouts—while searching for Tuinstra’s list of research components and his own prior materials analysis for Dr. Kramer. “We’ll have to use a… a different method…”
Erin blinked. Her elbow slipped off the contested blueprint. Her eyebrows edged above her glasses. “Did you just admit to needing to course-correct for your research plans? After you’d already confessed to making an error with the project charter?”
“What?” Heat rose into his ears. “And you never have to edit your ideas?”
“All the time. I just didn’t think that you, thatDr. Ethan Meyer…” She pushed her lenses back up her nose, but sent them sliding down again almost immediately with a shake of her head. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth; if he’d meant to protest her emphatic use of his title, he didn’t. “Never mind. What about using liquid helium to chill the particles?”
“Check the price before you commit. Helium needs to be cooled to four kelvins before it liquifies.”
She rolled her eyes and released her lip—though the dents of her teeth remained. She moved her laptop into view, tabbing over from a forum site and closing out a JSTOR article to access their funding authorization from the Department of Energy. She highlighted a line of zeros. “I think we can afford it.”
She was right.
He returned to a problem that she hadn’t solved. “Dr. Tuinstra used crystalline optics, but noted the need for an improvement in reflectivity for future research iterations. We could try—”
“—an organic synthetic polymer?”
“Yes. How did you know what I was—”
“LIGO uses mirrors too. Anyhow,” she extracted the analysis document that he’d been searching for in the chaos, “here’s your rundown on using synthetic polymers for the holometer’s lenses, before you ended up with glass. You identified the polymer as a better overall material—greater experimental flexibility, heat resistant, extremely reflective, easy to clean—except that you needed to build the device inexpensively. Off-the-shelf glass was cheaper. Right?”
He meant to reply with something insightful about synthetic composites. Instead, he heard himself say, “You agree with my analysis?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“Uh. No, I…”
“Obviously, I agree with your analysis. You’re disturbingly good with data!Yourdata, at least. It’s just your field’s application that’s wrong.”
I agree with your analysis.
Did she?
Her gaze narrowed at his silence.Suspicion. So he uncapped a pen—safe—and wroteorganic synthetic polymeron his sticky note. He cleared his throat. “Because cost—it’s not a… not a barrier, now.”
“Right, but what did you just…” She squinted at his note, her braid falling forward over her shoulder. “Oh.Polymer. You have medical-grade handwriting. Chicken scratch. Give me the pen.”
His fingers clenched around it.
“Fine.” She reached for a drafting pencil that he’d tucked behind his ear.
He shied back on instinct.
Not far enough.
Her nails brushed his neck instead of closing around the graphite, the freckled underside of her wrist skimming his jaw so that a haze of iris and juniper flooded the airless conference room, and static zagged across his skin as if her touch were a naked wire—
Blistering arousal surged through his groin.
“Ah!”
