Chapter 10 Gregory
Gregory
The storm is still pounding the windows when we venture outside to grab some of the meat we stored out there yesterday. Sorrel insists on coming with me even though I tell her to stay by the fire.
“I need to see how the food is holding up,” she says, already pulling on her field jacket. “Make sure nothing’s been disturbed.”
Stubborn woman.
With the wind and snow biting at the exposed parts of our faces, we trudge through knee-deep snow to the north side where we stacked everything yesterday.
The bins are exactly where we left them, perfectly organized according to her system.
The tarp is weighted down with firewood, undisturbed.
Everything is holding at subzero temperatures, a natural deep freeze that makes my useless luxury refrigerator look pathetic.
She checks each container methodically, her breath misting in the frigid air. “All good. Nothing’s been at it.”
Yet.
I grab two steaks from the top bin. Prime cuts that Vin left, probably a hundred dollars’ worth of beef. In my normal life, I wouldn’t think twice about the cost. Now I’m grateful we have them at all.
“Should last us another week at least,” she says, surveying our cache. “Maybe more if we’re careful.”
A week.
The words hang between us...
We head back inside and she takes over the kitchen without asking permission.
She grabs the matches from the drawer where I keep them and strikes one, holding the flame near the burner while turning the gas knob. The range ignites smoothly, a controlled bloom of blue flame that she adjusts with ease.
I watch her season the steaks with salt and pepper from Vin’s spice collection. Then she heats the cast iron pan on the gas range until it’s smoking hot. She knows exactly what she’s doing... no doubt the result of years of cooking on camp stoves and makeshift field setups.
The steaks hit the pan with a satisfying sizzle.
“Four minutes each side for medium rare,” she announces. “You want it more or less?”
“Medium rare is fine.”
“Medium rare is a sign of poor taste,” she quips. “True steak aficionados prefer their steaks rare.”
“Do they now?” I lean against the counter, watching her. “And are you a true steak aficionado?
“Me? Oh, no. God no.” She laughs. “I like mine medium rare too. I prefer that my food doesn’t bleed, if you know what I mean. Just wanted to see if you’d get all defensive about it. You know, try to prove you’re not some boring billionaire with boring taste in everything.”
I arch an eyebrow. “Boring.”
“Well, not boring exactly. Just... predictable maybe? I don’t know, I’m rambling.” Her cheeks flush slightly. “I was just teasing. Didn’t mean to insult you. Again. Sorry.”
The apology is so quintessentially her that I almost smile.
“For the record,” I tell her, “rare steak isn’t actually bloody. The red liquid is myoglobin, not blood. The blood gets drained during processing.”
She blinks at me. “You’re mansplaining steak biology to me right now? An environmental sciences doctoral student...”
I finally laugh. “I suppose I am. But hey, you started it with the aficionado thing.”
“Fair point.” She grins, and fuck if that smile doesn’t make something in my heart break. “Truce?”
I smile back. “Truce.”
She flips the steaks and the kitchen fills with the smell of searing meat and rendered fat. My stomach growls despite eating breakfast only a few hours ago.
When they’re done, she plates the steaks with some canned vegetables she warmed in a separate pan. Nothing fancy, but it’s the best meal I’ve had since Vin left.
We eat at the kitchen island in companionable silence. The hostility from yesterday has softened into something else. Not quite friendship, but not enemies either.
She’s still wearing my Columbia hoodie.
I should tell her to change into her own clothes. They dried long ago. But I don’t say anything because seeing her in my clothes does things to me that are completely inappropriate given our situation.
After lunch, she settles by the fireplace with a thick textbook. One of the few things that survived her equipment disaster, apparently. The cover is battered, the spine cracked from heavy use. “Fungal Ecology” in faded letters across the front.
At least it’s not that romance novel with the shirtless guy on the cover again.
Not that I’d care if it was, I remind myself.
I should retreat to my usual spot by the windows. Brood about the board situation, the lawsuits, Derek’s betrayal. All the shit I’ve been obsessing over since I got here.
Instead, I find myself drifting toward her corner of the room.
She’s curled on the sectional with her knees pulled to her chest, the book balanced on her thighs. She’s making notes in the margins with a pencil, occasionally muttering to herself. Then she laughs at something, a genuine delighted sound that makes me stop in my tracks.
“What’s so funny?” The question comes out before I can stop it.
She looks up, surprised to find me standing there. “Oh. Just this study design. It’s brilliant but also kind of absurd.”
I settle into the chair across from her. Close enough to see her face in the firelight but far enough to maintain distance. “How so?”
“So... okay... these researchers... they wanted to test whether fungal networks could recognize kin versus non-kin connections.” Her eyes are already lighting up, that passion resurfacing.
“They set up this experiment with Douglas fir seedlings, some related, some not. And they discovered that the fungi actually preferentially allocated carbon to related trees. Like they could tell family from strangers underground.”
“Trees have family loyalties?” I’m genuinely surprised.
“Apparently.” She grins at my expression. “The fungi recognize genetic markers somehow. It’s like underground nepotism. The forest playing favorites based on DNA.”
Underground nepotism.
Family preference systems.
Resource allocation based on connection.
Fuck, that hits closer to home than she realizes. My father’s entire business philosophy was nepotism and extraction. Take what’s yours, fuck everyone else. The Falk family legacy built on exactly that principle.
“What’s the practical application?” I ask, steering away from thoughts of my father.
“Well, it suggests that reforestation efforts should consider genetic diversity differently than we have been.” She’s animated now, gesturing with her hands.
“If you plant all related seedlings together, they might support each other better initially. But you lose resilience. No genetic diversity means vulnerability to disease, climate change, whatever. But if you plant all strangers, they might not cooperate as well. So there’s a balance of sorts needed. ”
“Between cooperation and diversity.”
“Exactly.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. It immediately falls back across her face. “It’s one of those things that seems simple but gets really complex when you dig into the mechanisms.”
I watch her push the hair back again. It falls forward again. She doesn’t seem to notice the pattern, but I’m cataloging every repetition. Every small gesture that reveals her thinking process.
“You want to hear more?” she asks suddenly. “I mean, if you’re actually interested. I can read some sections out loud. But I don’t want to bore you.”
Bore me.
This woman thinks her obvious brilliance could bore anyone.
“I’m interested,” I tell her. And it’s the truth.
She blinks, like she wasn’t expecting that answer. Then she shifts on the sectional, making room for me, so I sit next to her. Not too close. But not too far.
“Okay,” she continues. “So this next chapter is about carbon trading through mycorrhizal networks. It’s actually fascinating how they regulate the exchange.”
For the next hour, she reads to me.
Her voice transforms the dry scientific text into something compelling.
She explains concepts as she goes, stopping to clarify terms or elaborate on particularly interesting findings.
She talks about hyphal networks spanning acres underground, about nutrient exchange rates, about signaling molecules that trees use to communicate stress or danger.
I’m fucking captivated.
Not just by the information, although that’s genuinely interesting. But by watching her. The way her whole face changes when she’s explaining something she loves. How her eyes light up at particularly elegant data. The gestures she makes to illustrate concepts in three dimensions.
She’s beautiful like this.
Not magazine beautiful or Instagram beautiful. Something deeper. The kind of beauty that comes from passion and intelligence and giving a damn about something larger than yourself.
My cock stirs.
Inappropriate.
Completely fucking inappropriate.
She’s here because she had nowhere else to go. She hates what I represent. And I’m sitting here getting hard listening to her explain fungal carbon allocation like some kind of pervert.
Get it together, man.
“This part is my favorite,” she’s saying, flipping to a marked page.
“They did these experiments where they stressed one tree by cutting its leaves, and within twenty-four hours, the connected trees started sending it extra carbon and nutrients through the fungal network. Like they sensed their neighbor was in trouble and rallied to help. I told you about that this morning, remember?”
I nod. “Altruism underground.”
“Sort of. Although some researchers argue it’s not true altruism since the trees are maintaining their network. If one dies, it weakens the whole system. So helping the stressed tree is actually self-interest at the community level. So it’s more symbiotic.”
Self-interest disguised as altruism.
Supporting the system because you’re part of it.
Resource extraction justified by mutual benefit and symbiosis.
Fuck.
Every metaphor keeps circling back to my own situation.
I’ve been telling myself that we’re part of the ecosystem, that our minerals enable the green technology the world needs, that we provide jobs and economic growth.