Chapter 7
Ren
Fossil prep is my favourite part of my job.
Just me, an air scribe, and sodium bicarbonate. Or maybe some dolomite depending on the fossil, my foot on the pedal underneath the desk and something old, preserved, and wonderful beneath my fingertips.
It’s my favourite feeling, to see dust and dirt and sediment fly away to reveal something beautiful.
But today, right when I’m setting the pressure—only 10 psi, I’m dealing with an eggshell after all—I hear the swing of the lab door, the slow creak of the hinges, followed by measured, assured footsteps that could only belong to one person.
“Are you going to avoid me forever?” His voice sounds the same as it always has. Oozing with a confidence that could only belong to a man who thinks he’s so above you in the stratosphere he couldn’t possibly be wrong.
It’s not helped by the fact that Scott—academically speaking, and strictly academically, seeing as he’s wrong almost always in real life—has never so much as misspelled Micropachycephalosaurus hongtuyanensis, and he’s certainly never mixed up a period of the Mesozoic Era on a multiple-choice exam in college.
“I’m busy,” I say, words clipped through clenched teeth as my fingers move through robotic movements, clicking the regulator dial on the compressor line clockwise towards ten.
I’m glad I know all of this like I know the back of my hand, because out of the corner of my eye I see Scott’s hands, folding down over the back of a haphazardly tucked-in lab chair.
And I know all about those hands even though I wish I didn’t.
“Renny. Come on.” The chair scrapes across the floor, and his words scrape across my skin.
“Not my name.” I scrunch my nose, trying not to think about the way those hands held an air scribe, not unlike this one, and how he used it to chip away at me for years and years until I was nothing but fragments you could barely see under a microscope.
“We have to talk eventually. We work together now.” He drags out the word together, all weighed down with honey, like it’s some sweet thing. But it’s a lie. We don’t work together. I work for him.
And even if it was some grand partnership, Scott doesn’t know how to collaborate.
He turns the chair backwards, swinging a leg around either side, his polished Oxfords resting against the tile floor, and he stares, assessing me from behind those stupid glasses until his brows snap together.
“Why are you using an air scribe? You should be using an air abrasive.”
“It’s a Micro Jack Mini Pulse, it works at 10 psi.
I’m not blasting it with a ZPT-BT at thirty-six and there’s a chunk of tuff—you know what?
” The metal ridges of the scribe start to bite into my palm when I tighten my grip to stop my hand from shaking.
Pressing my eyes closed, I take a steadying inhale and try to repeat one of the self-assurances my therapist has been drilling into my head for the better part of four years.
I turn, raising the scribe towards him. “I know what I’m doing, believe it or not. ”
The arch of his brow spells out not, and it presses down so heavy on all those calming mantras of whatever roof I’ve been building over myself that it collapses and leaves nothing but the unsteady, insecure version of me he hated so much buried in the rubble.
“You want to talk? Fine. We’ll talk.” I throw the scribe onto the bench, and it skitters across the metal until it careens off the edge, landing on the floor with a resounding thud. The corners of my eyes pinch with a wince—it might be a small tool, but it’s not cheap.
Scott’s gaze cuts to the tile floor, and his throat starts to work with a snort like I’m proving his point, but I flash my palm before bringing my hands together. “You’re a narcissist, Scott.”
His eyes drag back to me, amusement lifting a brow. “Did your therapist tell you that?”
“Yes, actually.” I nod, pointing my fingers towards him. “And she doesn’t like you very much.”
“Disliking someone doesn’t make them a narcissist.” His thumb taps out his disapproval against the back of the chair. “I’d suggest you double-check your—”
“You know what does make you a narcissist?” A shriek builds in my throat, and I do my best to keep it in, but a sort of high-pitched sound escapes with my words when I start ticking things off on my fingers.
“An exaggerated sense of self-importance—your dreams were always much bigger than mine, right? Even though they were practically the same! Your insane need to walk around like some sort of puffed-up penguin because you just need everyone to admire how great and wonderful and smart you are. Can you actually see through those glasses? They might as well be blinders to the feelings and wants and needs of other people.” I throw a hand towards the black frames sitting perfectly on his face.
“Don’t even get me started on the stupid pedestal you’ve crafted for yourself to sit on.
But you know what’s really the cherry on top, Scott? ”
He sits there, unimpressed, and unblinking, a parent waiting for a child to finish throwing their tantrum so they can lay down the punishment, somehow looking down at me even though I push to stand, sending my lab chair careening into the bench.
“The fact that of all the jobs in all the world—you had to take mine.” My hands clench into fists at my sides, a sob catching on the last word.
Because it was supposed to be mine.
One of the first things I reached for and did for myself after years of being told my dreams weren’t worth anything.
After years of starting to believe it, because what were my dreams, really, in comparison to his?
The only thing I thought I wanted my entire life was to be chosen by someone—and then an eighteen-year-old Scott Saunders sat beside me on a lab bench not unlike this one and smiled at me.
It didn’t matter to eighteen-year-old me that that smile didn’t meet his eyes, and something unfriendly lived somewhere behind them, lurking just around the corner.
It didn’t matter to twenty-year-old me or twenty-three-year-old me or even twenty-five-year-old me.
Not when he looked at me for so many years like he loved me.
But it did start to matter to twenty-six-year-old me, twenty-seven-year-old me, and twenty-eight-year-old me when she finally woke up and realized being chosen didn’t mean being loved and she was never, ever going to get to come first.
Scott swallows, clearing his throat with measured patience.
“Are you going to sit so we can have a civilized conversation?” He glances pointedly towards the lab chair, but I dig my heels into the tile.
His eyes roll skyward when he pinches the bridge of his nose before continuing. “You weren’t qualified, Ren.”
Inhaling, I start to rhyme off the education section of the job posting. “‘Though a PhD is increasingly preferred and expected, extensive experience and specialized skills—’”
I wilt when he interrupts, all the confident petals of me I’ve worked so hard to grow furling inward. “‘Increasingly preferred and expected.’ A completed doctoral degree. Not a double master’s and however many years of experience.”
Ren ten minutes ago might have stood up, straight and proud, responding with the lift of a singular brow and a cutting “And whose fault is that, that I was never allowed to reach for more?” But Ren now, shoulders slumped under all her inadequacies sniffs, whispering, “Yes, but I have unique skills that Graham thought—”
“Renny,” he says, the old nickname laced with condescension disguised as sympathy.
“Please just go,” I whisper, stretching my fingers out in space, tugging on them as some sort of distraction to try and stop the tears from spilling over. “I need to finish prepping the titanosaur egg.”
Scott shifts in the chair, taking a measured exhale before two exasperated fingers find his forehead. “At least switch to an air abrasive.”
I say nothing as he stands, blinking down at the tile floor, waiting for the admonishment and Scott-shaped sermon—that an air abrasive is better because he, fossil finder and preparer extraordinaire, prefers them, and what he says goes.
Or maybe it’ll take a different shape now that our power dynamic has shifted. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been the collections manager for the better part of four years. Even though they feel so much more like my fossils than his, he’s the curator. It’s his job.
The one he took from me. Just because he could.
But it’s not what he says.
Scott pauses at the door, head angled to the side, words sharp like the edges of his jaw. “I saw you with him, you know.”
I glance up, frowning. “Who?”
“At the café. Last weekend.” The corners of his mouth curl up, each word coming out clipped and cold. “Miller Colson-Burke. Your shortstop. Your knight in shining armor.” He grins, but there’s nothing friendly about it. “You always did like those.”
“He was just being nice,” I mumble, wrapping my arms around my stomach.
The way I tried to be nice to him when I thought he could use saving, too.
“You’re beautiful, and you always have been,” he states, like it’s a clinical fact, not meant to be a compliment, and with an errant shrug, he adds, “And Miller Colson-Burke likes pretty girls.”
“As is his right.” I shake my head, exasperated.
My petals are shriveled and in desperate need of light, and they’re only going to get it when the dust and debris of Scott aren’t blanketing my earth and blocking the sun.
Scott gives me a flat look. “I’m trying to help you, Ren.”
“Stop. I didn’t ask for your help.” The conviction in my words drops into nothing. Because we both know, once upon a time, the only thing I wanted more than to be loved was Scott’s help.
He gives a slow, disappointed shake of his head.
“Be careful. Miller Colson-Burke is only good at three things.” He starts ticking them off on his fingers, a cruel imitation of me earlier.
“Fielding ground balls, dating women, and if the press is to be believed, getting his cousin killed.” Scott brings the three fingers closer to his eyes, inspecting them like he might a particularly difficult-to-unearth specimen buried under layers of shale and silt.
Flipping them around, he holds the inside of his hand up to me.
“And none of those three things are you. See you both at the gala on Saturday.”