Chapter 21
Fifty-Four Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
If Ripley opens the red-and-white-checked curtains in her childhood bedroom, she’ll see the same view from the small sliding window she saw every summer morning as far back as she can remember: the fir trees ringing the Golden Acres Cemetery and the low chain-link fence she’s vaulted a hundred times on a hundred dares to touch a tombstone.
But that might be the only thing that’s the same around here.
Her dad seems determined to get up to risky shit in her absence—secret assignations, boozy get-togethers.
Yesterday, Ripley barely had time to make up the beds, pour a drowsy James into the lower bunk, and explain that this very large, very impaired man was a colleague before Steve left for his weekly poker game.
His buddy Ronnie dropped him off late enough last night that she didn’t hear him sneak in.
It makes her feel old before her time, like she’s the parent and he’s the truculent teenager.
She turns back the faded, generously pilled dinosaur-print comforter—a tenth-birthday gift she refuses to let her dad replace—and climbs down from the top bunk. Though she tries not to look at the lower bunk, it’s kind of impossible to watch where she’s putting her feet and not see James.
He’s thrown off the blanket and, at some point, the shirt she gave him to sleep in. His limbs sprawl at wild angles, his bare back rhythmically rising and falling. In the humid air after the storm, his hair pops up in short, glossy curls against the tan that ends abruptly at the base of his neck.
He’s so soft when he’s asleep. So different from the rigidly controlled, slightly tragic Brit he is when he’s conscious.
Ripley imagines a world where he isn’t James Smithson, renowned paleontologist, but just James.
Just a man overflowing the bed she’s slept in countless times.
A man who could have gone back to his nice Berkeley apartment anytime in the past month but instead kept showing up for her, over and over again.
A man who doesn’t seem to want anything from her that he doesn’t give back twice over.
Who kissed her like he’d die if he didn’t.
Her rules are no match for a man like that.
But James Smithson has rules of his own.
She grabs a pair of socks to ward off the floor’s permanent chill and heads for the living room, closing the bedroom door behind her as soundlessly as she used to when she thought her dad didn’t know she was sneaking out. Or in.
On her way through the living room, she looks away from the long beige couch.
Ripley doesn’t want a vision of Sally Gunderson’s freckled cleavage to overwrite the memories of her and her dad lying at opposite ends of that couch and throwing popcorn at the TV when the Jurassic Park movies strayed too far from reality.
In the kitchen, the cupboard doors gleam with fresh off-white enamel.
A month ago, Steve was crowing to her about a batch of flooring ends he scored from a buddy at the hardware store; now the kitchen floor sports a pale gray pickled-wood look.
Aside from the scorch mark Ripley put in it with a pot of macaroni, the beige counter is clean and empty, her dad’s lonely plate and mug the only dishes in the drying rack.
On the far side of the kitchen, the door to her dad’s bedroom is closed, but Ripley can picture his tidy bed and wonky sliding closet doors.
He quit trying to fix them because “sliding doors are an inherently bad design and will always break,” but he won’t replace them because “do you know how much mirrored doors cost these days?”
Determined not to think about ways her dad might be enjoying his bedroom mirrors, Ripley reaches into the cabinet where Steve keeps the coffee.
Her fingers find a stack of dinner plates.
“The hell?” she mutters, frowning. She was here three weeks ago, and everything was normal.
She opens cabinet after cabinet. There are cans where there used to be glassware, neatly labeled canisters in place of rerolled bags, and new shelf liners everywhere.
She finds the coffee above the coffee machine along with a tidy ceramic creamer set and a few boxes of tea, the herbal stuff. It’s supposedly healthy, but Ripley doubts it cancels out the cigars, booze, and whatever else her dad’s been doing.
Steve Adams pads into the kitchen and grins when he spies his daughter.
He’s still heart-piercingly handsome, like a craggy Cary Elwes with the confidence not to play comb-over games with his slightly receding hairline.
His old plaid pajama pants sag around his newly thin waist, and he no longer plays for the softball team whose name is emblazoned on his black-and-white raglan shirt.
His oxygen tank and humidifier follow him in a hands-free wagon he built himself after declaring the standard-issue cart “a pain in my cancerous ass.”
He grabs two mugs, sets them next to the burbling drip machine. “You like the new layout? Smart, right?”
“You have to give advance notice before rearranging someone’s childhood home, Dad. Technically, I could sue you for emotional damage. Coffee? Or are you drinking tea these days?”
“Tea!” He clutches his chest. “My own daughter asks me if I want tea.”
“Well, there’s all these…oh. I see.”
After Sally’s kids left home, she sometimes hired a teenage Ripley to weed her garden, then roped her into a cup of tea afterward so she could ambush her with good-hearted but mortifying questions: Have you gotten your period yet, sweetie?
Let me know if you need birth control, okay?
If you have womanly questions, you know you can come to me, right?
Ripley would burn her mouth trying to get through the tea, then sprint home, call her best friend, and roll around in agonized giggles over “womanly questions.”
Steve raises an eyebrow. “Something you want to say about me and Sal?”
Ripley shakes her head, handing him a steaming mug—black, no sugar, the way he’s always taken it. “I love Sally. You know that. But…what are you doing, Dad?”
“Pretty sure you know what we were doing, Pip.” To her shock, he stirs a generous teaspoonful of sugar into his coffee, tastes it, then adds another.
Ripley lets out a frustrated breath. “Incidentally, I’m willing to bet that’s why you’re messing with your flow rates. That and Ronnie, who lights up right next to your oxygen tank. I mean”—she gestures helplessly—“sugar in your coffee? It’s like you’re not even trying to take care of yourself.”
“Oh, Pip.” He fixes her with a loving look, his blue eyes twinkling above his romantically crooked nose and full Sam Elliott mustache.
“Don’t you ‘Oh, Pip’ me. You’re acting like a teenager.”
“I wasn’t much older than a teenager when you were born. Seems I was mature enough.”
“Dad.” Ripley plasters a hand over her eyes. How is she supposed to argue with I gave up my youth for you?
His mug clinks softly against the counter.
“I made a lot of mistakes as a parent, Ripley. For example, hiding my love life when you were little. Oh, yes, I dated,” he says, smirking at her shock.
“I didn’t tell you because the parenting books said not to put that on you.
That, and I sometimes went out with your classmates’ moms.”
“Please don’t tell me you dated Brittney Hatch’s mom.”
“Okay.”
“Dad.”
“You asked,” he says, spreading his hands in a Don’t blame me gesture. “Looking back, I wonder if you assumed you were the only important person in my life. You thought you had to be everything to me. Do everything for me.”
“Yes,” Ripley says urgently. “You need someone to take care of you.”
“You gonna chaperone me and Sal?” Steve asks cheekily. “Make sure nobody puts too much sugar in my coffee?”
“Someone should. You can’t afford anything that could—” Ripley cuts herself off hard.
“Shorten my life?” he asks calmly.
She can’t stop the tremble in her lower lip. His arms come around her again; against her cheek, she feels his wry chuckle.
“Aw, Pip. I love you for wanting to take care of me,” he says, letting her go. “Believe me, I want to be around for as long as possible. But it’s damn joyless to look in the fridge and wonder if a salad will buy me five more minutes on this earth or if maybe nothing can do that.
“I’m doing better. Down to one liter a minute,” he brags, gesturing to his tank.
“I’d rather eat bacon and eggs and rearrange my cupboards and act like there’s something good waiting for me.
Life’s too long, and too short, not to let yourself have something sweet.
” He brings his sugary coffee to his mouth for an emphatic sip.
“Fine,” Ripley says grumpily. “You win, teenager. You can go out with your friends. Be home by midnight or you’re grounded for a week.”
Her dad laughs delightedly. “Now, this, I like. I may get grandchildren from you yet.”
There’s a soft, pointed, and very British throat-clearing.
James stands in the living room, looking rumpled and morning-soft.
She didn’t trust herself to go through his bag last night, so she gave him a pair of never-worn gray gym shorts her dad bought not long before his diagnosis.
On top, he’s wearing her old T. rex sleep shirt that proclaims Let’s Eat Kids and below that, in a smaller font, Commas Save Lives.
She thought the shirt would be roomier, but a pale strip of belly flirts with daylight above the waistband of his shorts.
She’s never seen him without his glasses when he’s conscious.
It’s oddly intimate and makes his face look a little naked—not unlike the rest of him.
His bare feet are as poetically elegant as his hands, although his toes are scrunched in what she immediately knows is embarrassment at overhearing other people’s conversation.
There’s a humming tension between them, a constant awareness of all the rules they broke yesterday. All the rules they’re breaking right now. She’s taken him home. They slept in the same room. He’s meeting her dad.
If he even looks at her lips, she’ll break into pieces like a fossil in the rain.
Bright color on his thigh catches her eye. A tiny, vengeful blue-and-black dragon flaming a path along his leg where his scar runs. She can tell the design is his—the sweep of wing, arched neck, and jeweled eyes are each distinctive, but together they’re unmistakable.
Something beautiful; something painful. On anyone else, it might read as defiance, but on James, it looks uncomfortably like penance.
“Good morning.” James clears his throat again. “I apologize for sleeping so late. I’m not usually this rude a guest, Mr. Adams.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ripley replies, wanting to spare him from having to explain anything about yesterday.
“Absolutely don’t worry about it,” her dad agrees, looking at him with narrowed eyes. “Worry more about your intentions toward my daughter. And call me Steve.”
“Dad. I told you James and I work together. We’re friends.” Ripley shoots him the death stare she perfected in adolescence. He laughs.
James looks at the floor, then back up at Steve, his finger reaching to push up the glasses that aren’t there. Ripley thought she was immune to that move. Maybe she didn’t get enough sleep last night, and that’s why her stomach is flipping now.
“My intentions are to be as helpful to Ripley as I can for as long as I can in any way I can.” His diction is exceptional.
“Excellent,” Steve says. “I’ll get the shotgun.”
“Dad,” Ripley growls, prompting a laugh from her father. “We haven’t—” Her face heats. When it comes to roughly half the bases, they have.
Steve chortles with undisguised glee. “How do you feel about kids, James? You want a few? Not right now, of course,” Steve clarifies. “But not too long from now either. Right?”
James’s cheeks take on that barely pink shade that means he’s wishing for a proper British death, but his eye contact with her dad never wavers. Ripley feels her heart swelling dangerously.
“Please stop tormenting our guest,” she says. “Are you hungry, James?”
His sunrise eyes flash in the dim, windowless living room. For a moment, he looks so achingly ravenous that her nipples pull tight under her shirt, but the look is gone in the time it takes her to cross her arms over the evidence.
“If you’re eating, I’d love to join you.”
“I’m making bacon and eggs,” Steve says cheerfully. “Coffee?”
“That would be lovely. Although, if you have tea?”
Steve raises a brow at Ripley. “Tea, huh? You betcha.” Arms filled with eggs, butter, and highly processed meat products, her dad leans over to whisper in her ear.
“I like this one, Pip. He’s sweet.”