Chapter 18
Time slows down, becoming loose and elastic inside Ripley’s head.
Gas, brakes, or steering, Pip, her dad’s voice murmurs. She’s desperately glad he’s here. The Charger was born to grip the road and never let go, and her dad made sure she knew how to drive it in the worst weather Montana could spit at her.
Steering.
“Now or fucking never, Adams,” she mutters, cranking the wheel.
She swerves into the left lane, her right front bumper almost grazing the spinning sedan. The driver in the truck behind them lays on the horn. Fuck, he’s heading for the left lane too—big, heavy, and coming right at her.
Gas. They flash past the sedan. She downshifts, pulls into the right lane. She has maybe two hundred yards from here to the traffic crawling toward the construction zone.
Brakes.
She touches the pedal with every bit of finesse she can muster, adding pressure until the seatbelts lock. A hundred yards. Seventy. Fifty. Forty.
“Come on, baby,” she murmurs. “Come on. Come on, come on, come on—”
Inches from a red minivan, they come to a hard stop. Their bodies fall back into the bucket seats like they’ve been shoved.
Rain pummels the roof. Two people breathe hard and fast. In front of them, a flap of worn rubber dangles from the minivan’s rear wiper, bobbing with every swipe. There’s a black bumper sticker with a crease running through the tiny white letters where someone applied it not quite straight.
“ ‘If you can read this, you’re too close,’ ” Smithson recites in a blank, shocked voice.
With shaking hands, Ripley pulls off the road, tucks the Charger against the guardrail, and kills the engine.
“Well, that took a year off my fucking life. You okay?”
Before she can blink, he’s got his seatbelt off and is practically halfway across the center console, his eyes darting frantically up and down her body. His hands search her shoulders, flutter over her face, dig underneath her braid.
“Are you hurt? Don’t try to move. Can you speak? Christ, Ripley.” His mouth is pulled down into a rictus of panic. His eyes are blank, unfocused.
He’s not here, Ripley realizes. Part of him has gone back to some other time and place. Probably the one that made him need to carry a tin of Xanax when he travels. Which, fuck.
“Professor. Hey.” She tries to catch his wrists, but he’s fucking strong from all that rowing and cycling and horseback riding. She gives up trying to hold him back, instead applying her hands to his cheeks. “James. James!”
His gaze pulls back from the abyss a fraction.
“I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re okay,” she says.
“I was distracting you. Talking too much. It was my fault.” He strokes an almost imperceptible distance up the sides of her jaw, then back down, his fingers trembling.
“Uh, no, it wasn’t,” she says bluntly, mostly because it’s true, but also because his eyes have reached into her and locked onto something that’s erased most of her vocabulary.
She has to let go even if what she wants is to stare into his eyes until she feels better and then stare into them some more. Especially if that’s what she wants.
She slides her hands down to his shoulders and grips them hard. She’s had any number of close calls in the field. Rock slides, unstable cliffsides, other people’s dropped tools tumbling past her skull. Once, she and her dad got lost in the Hell Creek Badlands for ninety not-great minutes.
When bad things happen, don’t get stuck in the fear, Pip, he told her the next weekend, loading up the Charger. Find one step you can take, and take it.
To Ripley’s eye, it looks like James Smithson has both feet stuck in the tar pit of their near-miss.
“This was not your fault,” she says firmly. “This was bad luck and bad weather and someone who doesn’t have the right tires. And maybe not the right skills,” she adds, wrinkling her nose. “Okay? Not your fault.”
A knock comes from the driver’s-side window. A brown-skinned woman peers into the car, rain sluicing off her wide-brimmed hat.
“You all okay in there?” She’s got a trace of an accent in her western drawl. Spanish, maybe? Ripley’s not sure.
“Fine, thanks,” she replies, remembering that the Charger wasn’t the only vehicle involved. A rush of cold envelops her body. “Is everybody else all right?”
“No injuries, luckily. Don’t know about the axles on that one.” The woman jerks her chin toward the sedan. It rests crookedly on the median, one wheel in the air. A few people have pulled over to help.
“All right. Okay. That’s good,” Ripley says, aware that she’s a millisecond from becoming a babbling mess. “Thanks for checking in.”
“I can check on your husband if you’re still a bit shaken up.” Her eyes crinkle with friendly sympathy.
Ripley frowns. “He’s not my—oh!”
His seat is empty. His door is open.
James Smithson is walking away.
It takes a minute for Ripley to catch him.
She grabs her boots and raincoat from the back seat—convenient—then vaults over the guardrail and scrambles down the embankment. With his long legs, he can step easily through the scrubby evergreens and tangled grass, but she gets caught.
“Stop! Wait for—fuck.” Her shorts are covered in spiky brown burrs from a burdock bush she didn’t even see.
It’s raining so hard, the water feels like an endless bucket being dumped over her head.
A puddle comes up over her boot and into her sock, but now is not the time to be a princess about dry feet.
She catches up to him at a post-and-wire fence encircling a field of some grassy crop, the spiky green heads trembling under the onslaught. He’s absolutely ruined, hair plastered to his face, shirt transparent in places. She must look the same.
“Hey, big guy,” she says, horse-whisperer-style. “Everything okay?”
He spins, eyes wild. “Everything is not okay, Ripley. We were almost killed. You were almost killed.” He grips his thigh convulsively, looking at her like sparks are flying from her skin.
He closes his eyes and reaches out; his hands unerringly find her waist. She must be in shock, because she lets him draw her in, tuck her against his chest, and rest his face against her soaking hair.
Suddenly she’s exhausted and trembling. She wants nothing but to stand here, let the breath eddy in and out of her lungs, and not have to manage anything or worry about anyone or keep one eye on the ticking clock of Beauty and Will and the dig.
“Are you sure it wasn’t my fault? You would tell me, wouldn’t you?” He sounds lost, desperate, and somehow very young.
“James, I am more than capable of driving a car while having a conversation with someone I happen to be attracted to. People do it every day.”
He sucks in a breath, his chest rising against hers.
Oh, Jesus, Adams. “I didn’t mean—”
He unwinds his arms from around her body and takes a half step back.
God, it’s cold without his warmth. “Please disregard my…just disregard,” she finishes weakly.
He reaches out, picks up one of her braids, and rubs the end between his fingertips as if he can’t help himself.
“When I saw you in Atlanta, Ripley, I reacted in a way that was…very unscientific. I’d read your paper, and when I saw you—took your hand—you simply fell into place for me, like a missing link.
I’m not given to that kind of thing, you understand.
I’d always thought myself safe from that appalling cliché of the supervisor and his graduate student. Potential student, in your case.
“In my surprise, I failed to give your situation due consideration. Which is not an excuse, I know. I reasoned that if you’d had a good explanation for your dismissal, you’d have shared it. Or you’d get a position elsewhere. That it didn’t matter if I personally did not help you.
“And then, when I saw Will Stone’s abstract, I suspected my lack of action had mattered.
Had mattered quite a bit, actually. I believed the wrong story, and you paid the price.
I told myself that if I helped you now, the thing that happened to me then—the very unscientific thing that made my heart beat right out of my bloody chest—wouldn’t happen again.
“But it has, Ripley. Everything I’ve learned about you, every moment I’ve spent with you has only made it worse. And life feels so bloody short right now. This chance may never come again for you and me. So if you feel it too—if you feel even half of what you make me feel…”
He steps closer, takes her face in his hands, lowers his mouth until it’s a breath from hers.
“Tell me to stop, Ripley. Tell me you want me to stop, and I will.”
She knows she should, but with his hand sliding down between her shoulder blades, she can’t quite remember why.
She registers the raindrops falling from his jaw to her neck, the gold-flecked darkness of his eyes, her breath sliding past her open lips.
A thousand rare events swing into alignment, one after the other, to make a moment that’s been waiting years for her to find it. Years, in this short life.
She should tell him to stop. But they’re alone, and his hands are all over her body, and he’s looking at her like he’s ravenous for joy. Starving for touch. And what if she let him take a bite?
“Don’t…don’t do something you’ll regret later. You’re not yourself right now, James,” she croaks, grasping for a strand of reality.
“You have it backwards, darling,” he says, and the endearment sounds every bit as velvet-gloved as she imagined it would. “At the moment, unfortunately, I’m incapable of being anyone but myself. And I very much enjoy it when you call me James.”
His lips crash into hers.