Chapter 14
Sixty-Eight Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
The sun is very confusing.
It’s bright yellow, for one thing, instead of rosy gold. That, and it’s shining full on her back instead of peeking through the lowest part of her window. The vivid remnants of a dream swirl in her head, her skin shivering from almost having touched…Smithson?
She startles up in shock and horror. A bolt of red-hot pain behind her eyes puts her right back down.
“Ow, fuck!”
It’s not a sex dream if you don’t even kiss, she tells herself, holding her skull together with both hands. And yet she’s warm between her thighs, echoingly lonely in her chest, and more than a bit disgruntled.
And hungover. Fuck, she’s so hungover.
Ripley hates this feeling. Hates the physical misery, yes; but more than that, she loathes the lost time. Last night, gone. Today gone even before it happens, hour after wretched, half-dead hour to slog through.
A plastic tumbler lies sideways on the plywood floor, a wet mark outlining the water she was probably supposed to drink.
The pair of jeans she keeps for trips to town are accordioned in the middle of the room like she teleported out of them.
Her good white T-shirt is now a crop top with a jaggedly scissored hem. Her bra dangles from her reading lamp.
Last night had been fine at first. There was the usual Saturday-afternoon run to Herc: laundry, Albertson’s for personal snacks (which always get eaten by Thursday no matter how much the crew buys).
Then the hardware store for burlap and a bucket to replace the one Jordin forgot to rinse before the plaster hardened.
At the checkout, Matteo slung his arm around Jordin’s back the way Smithson had wrapped his around Ripley. “I’ve done that a million times, Jord.”
“Not lately.” Jordin sniffed, her lip wobbling harder.
For dinner, they went to the Golden Palace. Its foyer is ringed with dark wood pews salvaged from the Episcopalian church fire a few years ago. No matter how empty the place is, the owner always makes them sit in the pews and wait for a table.
The crew keeps coming back because even Finn and Fiona, who are from San Francisco, admit the egg rolls—savory and meaty, with perfect deep-fried crispness—are the best they’ve ever had.
Ripley usually ducks out of the trips to the bar they’ve dubbed Alphabet.
The place is actually called, as far as anyone can tell, Licensed by ABCD—the Alcoholic Beverage Control Division—of Montana, with the A and half the N cut off.
The decor is dingy, the service is ghastly, and it’s quite possibly a front for criminal activity.
One time, Griff tried to order from the menu.
This resulted in the bartender making a furtive phone call, walking out the front door, and coming back twenty minutes later with a takeout box from down the street.
Obviously, the crew loves everything about it.
When the one employee can be bothered to tend bar, he unhurriedly slings dusty-tasting rail drinks and cans of warm Budweiser from cases he keeps on the floor, clearly hoping they’ll get impatient and leave.
Ripley could have told him not to waste his time trying to discourage a pack of bone hounds.
As a rule, their species loves mysteries and takes delight in being persistent little fuckers.
Every Saturday night from now until September, they’re going to pop up in Alphabet like a mob of curious meerkats.
Last night, Cara bought the first round—a row of gasoline-smelling shots mixed from two unlabeled bottles. She dubbed them Fossil Fuel and insisted everyone had to do one. As one of the designated drivers, Cara conveniently didn’t have to down it herself.
Ripley had been about to refuse, but for some reason she’d looked down the bar.
At the end of the row of grinning people was Smithson, a serving of questionable liquid perched between fingers so elegantly jointed they might take flight.
He’d tipped his mouth in a small, secret smile, angling his not-quite-clean shot glass in a toast: Congratulations, Ripley Adams.
The awkwardness of the morning faded, and she couldn’t help but grin back, raising her glass.
When the coughing settled enough for Ripley to lift her head, Smithson had materialized at her end of the bar, looking like he couldn’t decide whether to give her a few solid thumps on her back or offer her a tissue from a wallet-size pack he’d produced from some mysterious location.
“All right there, Ripley?” he said mildly.
She nodded, her throat aflame, trying to breathe away the idea of his hand spread out between her shoulder blades.
It must’ve been the phantom feeling of his fingers against her neck that made Ripley pick up the second shot. And the warm beer chaser.
After that, things got loud and blurry.
At some point, Griff pulled the grimy, broken jukebox away from the wall, and the twins took off the back panel with disturbingly sharp multitools Ripley didn’t know they carried.
A short time later, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was blasting through the bar.
She remembers how Smithson’s neck took on a damp sheen from dancing, his hair curling at his nape in the rising humidity.
Ripley can summon snippets of the ride home.
She rested her head on a sleeping Griff at one point.
She also remembers sort of tumbling off Griff’s shoulder, and Smithson hauling her up against him.
Her brain is fuzzy on the details, but her body offers up sensations: the tense sinew of his arm, the wing of his hand across her hip bone, a river of vetiver waterfalling off his hot skin.
His body felt loose and giving under hers instead of tight like he usually was in a car.
She might have—she clamps both hands across her eyes—snuggled into the push of his heartbeat against her cheek.
She can’t seem to stop nonessentially touching him.
Luckily, it doesn’t matter now. His two weeks are up, and soon he’ll be gone.
Standing up sucks a great deal, but Ripley needs a shower and the beigest possible breakfast before she talks to Smithson. They can hammer out the details of the investigation this morning.
Then there’ll be nothing standing in his way when it’s time for him to leave.
Hair loose and dripping, Ripley shambles back across the commons to hang her towel on the communal clothesline.
Cara’s sitting alone at the long table, eating a bowl of oatmeal with cranberries and pecans.
From the dust on her clothes, Ripley guesses she’s been down at the dig, making the most of last night’s sobriety and this morning’s disgusting good health.
With great effort, Ripley manages, “Think it’s gonna rain?”
“She stirs,” Cara says. “How you feeling?”
“Real good, Cara. So good. Thanks for that, by the way. Is there any more oatmeal?”
“Take as much as you want. You’ll need it after all that dancing.”
A hazy image of shaking her ass while clapping along to General Public’s “Tenderness” rises in Ripley’s mind, thick and sludgy like raw crude. The jukebox didn’t have any songs more recent than the mid-eighties, but there were some bangers good enough to get even the boss out on the dance floor.
And Smithson. Ripley isn’t sure if he actually has decent dance moves or if that was the Fossil Fuel. “On second thought, kill me,” Ripley says, scooping oatmeal into a bowl, then immediately putting half of it back. “Wait, what’s that look for?”
“What look?”
“That look,” Ripley says, mirroring Cara’s raised eyebrows, wide eyes, and cocked head.
“You and James seemed pretty cozy last night.”
Ripley sets her oatmeal on the table and carefully sits down. “I was floppy-drunk and he was holding me up. Besides, I was nonspecifically cozy with Griff too.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t spend the night looking like you wanted to sink your teeth into Griff’s traps.”
“Definitely kill me,” Ripley says.
Cara undoes her ponytail and shakes out her hair.
“God. I should have guessed the one time you acted like a normal twenty-eight-year-old, you’d immediately want to walk it back.
He’s nice, Rip. It seems like you dig him.
Pun intended. He isn’t your boss, your employee, or your ex.
So what if you two started a summer thing?
” She pulls her hair through the gap in her bubblegum-pink hat and starts braiding.
Ripley tries to imagine Smithson feeding her bites of his breakfast like Matteo does with Jordin. Or eliminating an entire word from his vocabulary like Griff’s done since promising Cara he’d never tell her no.
Maybe it’s the hangover, but she can’t picture it. All she sees is Smithson walking up the white marble stairs of the Valley Life Sciences Building at UC Berkeley, a building she’s never even seen in real life.
“I don’t know. The powerful famous guy, the struggling woman. People willfully misinterpret those kinds of relationships,” she says gloomily.
“Some might,” Cara concedes. “But not good people. Not the people here.”
“Nothing’s going to happen with Smithson for a lot of reasons.
Also, he probably won’t be here tomorrow.
” She gingerly eases her legs over the bench.
“I should lock down some details before his car gets here.” She sticks a spoonful of oatmeal in her mouth to help her swallow the loneliness that’s trying to block her throat. It goes down all right.
“Ripley. Hey!” Cara calls, hair elastic between her teeth. “Don’t send him away, okay?”
Ripley turns back, pulling the spoon from her mouth. “I’m not sending him away. He was always leaving.”
“I meant don’t sweep him out of here like Bye, see you never. You know, the way you do to people who get too close to you. Clever Girl could use friends like him.”
“I don’t push people away.”
Cara raises an immaculate black-brown brow. “Oh, really? Then what’s my favorite color?”
“That’s easy. It’s…” Ripley blinks. “Pink?”
“Blue,” Cara says flatly. “I just look good in pink. Who was my first boyfriend?”
“Um—”
“Danny Lefavre, sophomore year. What nickname do I hate?”
“Carrie?”
“Lucky guess,” Cara scoffs. “I’ve known you for almost three years, Ripley. We work on a fucking dinosaur dig, where there’s nothing to do all day but talk, and you’re a great mentor. But you hold yourself apart that last little bit.”
“I’m leaving, Cara. I don’t want that to be hard on you.”
“I know you’re leaving. It’s stupid, and I’m not going to stop trying to talk you out of it. I’m also not going to treat you like you’re already gone. You’re not banished after your lease is up, Ripley. Yes, our relationship is commercial, but it can also be more than that.”
Cara steps over the bench, picks up her bowl, and shoots Ripley a burning glance. “Don’t. Push. James. Away. Because you might not be here next year—and not for lack of me inviting you—but I will.”