Chapter 12
Charlie
“There you are!”
The sudden noise surprises me, and my ears meet my shoulders as I drop the pipette onto the bench. It bounces and slams against a microscope. Sofía bounds into the lab, searching the space before running to the back bay and falling into a rolling chair.
She plays with the preserved specimen on the benchtop in front of her, lining the jars of fish and invertebrates in a neat row.
“Uh…here I am?” I pause my music and rerack the pipette. “Did I miss a meeting or something?”
I’ve sequestered myself in the lab all morning, taking advantage of the quiet space to process samples and avoid Mateo.
So far, things have been going spectacularly . I’m halfway done with my protocol to extract DNA from water samples, and I haven’t seen him since breakfast, where he offered me an iced coffee and I nearly melted into a puddle on the floor.
I need space to unravel what’s going on with my mind, body, and spirit, and why each has decided Mateo is the object of its desire .
Frankly, it’s concerning, and I haven’t been able to disentangle each thread to discover where the foreign emotions originate.
“I’m hiding from Jett,” Sofía says, spinning in the lab chair, her long brown hair flying around.
“Why?”
“He keeps asking me random questions, and when I asked why, he said, ‘I’m trying to understand you,’ which freaked me out. Then he said he thought I was pretty, and running felt like the best plan of action.”
Right on.
I’m all for running when you don’t know what to do in a situation. I’ve never been a fighter, but I’m damn good at fleeing an uncomfortable situation.
“Oh, so he has a crush, ” I tease. “Fourth day on the boat and you’ve found yourself a fling.”
“There is no fling ,” she yells in a shrill voice. She pauses her spinning to glare at me. “It’s unprofessional to tell me I smell like candy.”
I take a sniff; her perfume is very sweet, like cotton candy. It’s fitting for her—an extension of her kind, welcoming personality.
“You do smell like candy. It’s sweet.” I giggle at my pun, but Sofía does not find it nearly as amusing. “He’s sweet on you.”
Damn, I’m on a roll.
This is much more fun than thinking about my own love life, or lack thereof. All I have is weird tingling when Mateo touches me, and I’d much rather tease Sofía than unpack that novelty.
I have a hypothesis, but it’s not one I’m ready to accept.
“He’s nice, I guess.” She hums as she stacks tube racks on top of each other, creating a small pyramid. “It’s just weird.”
“That he’s flirting with you?” I ask, the question laced with amusement.
She groans, then whispers, “That he’s flirting with me and I kinda like it. ”
Her hands fly to cover the blush on her cheeks, and my laughter echoes around the room.
“Flirt back.”
“I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“I-I don’t know.”
Her brow furrows, and she busies herself with random items on the bench.
It’s a contemplative silence as I resume my work, and my mind wanders to Mateo.
His mussed hair in the morning and how adorable he looks with his CPAP mask on, like he’s cosplaying as a fighter-jet pilot.
How he argues with his abuela about audiobooks but continues to listen to the one she picked out, even though he hates every second.
He’s grumbled about Elora and her lack of critical thinking skills since we’ve been on the boat. She’s had quite the impact on him.
I’ve learned more about him in the last four days than I have in the two years since we met, and it’s jarring because what I’ve learned doesn’t feel like enough. It’s an age of discovery where every stone turned leads to something new, something exciting.
It’s a peaceful half hour before she bulldozes into my happy bubble with a highly unprofessional question—ironic, given the reason she’s hiding from Jett.
“So are you and Mateo hate fucking? What’s going on there?” She doesn’t lift her head from opening and closing an Eppendorf tube. “ Lots of tension between you two.”
My first response is to choke on my saliva and hope it sends me to an early grave. When that doesn’t work, I pretend I didn’t hear her probing question and continue my work like she didn’t just send me into a state of disarray.
It doesn’t work, and she asks again.
Hearing it a second time is no less jarring than the first.
My pulse races and my hands sweat profusely beneath the nitrile gloves .
Why would she ask such an insane question? Mateo and I sleeping together is…when did it get so hot in here?
“No.”
My voice jumps an octave from shock.
Yes, that’s what this is—the insane thumping in my chest.
“But you want to,” she says smugly, like she’s caught me with my hand in the cookie jar.
“I never said that.”
“Oh, you didn’t need to.” She waves a hand around in a circle near my head. “Your face did all the talking. And it’s saying ‘I want to sleep with Mateo.’”
I huff, cleaning up my bench space and ignoring her laughter.
We are not hate fucking. We are barely even friends.
Even if I have thought about it—which I would not admit to Sofía—thinking about him is far different from actually seeing him naked, which based on the way my pits are sweating, I don’t know how I would handle myself if it actually happened.
Faint, maybe.
I saw a sliver of abdomen yesterday when he stretched, and I had to tear my gaze away before my jaw fell open.
This has to be some sort of sickness.
Sofía spins in her chair again, and I’m nearly done cleaning when the door bursts open and she drops to the floor like there’s a fire.
“Who is it?” she whispers, crawling under the bench, knees to her chest.
“You’re insane,” I whisper back, but also crouch, peeking my head around to identify our visitor.
My heartbeat thrashes when a very manly arm comes into view.
“It’s a man.”
“Which one? There are so many.”
“I don’t know.” I try for another angle, and my stomach drops when Shaun appears .
I ignore the mild disappointment and wave at him from our hiding spot. I have no idea why I’m still down here or why we hid in the first place, but I’m following Sofía’s lead, so if she says hide, I’m not going to question her.
“There you are,” Shaun, an ROV technician, says, glancing around the rolling chair I placed to block us. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Why is everyone but Mateo looking for me today?
“Yup. That’s me. Right here.”
I give him a thumbs-up, and Sofía hides a laugh with a cough. My hand darts out to whack her.
Shaun stares at me oddly, probably because I’m crouched beneath a lab bench beside Sofía, who is giggling like she’s drunk.
“I wanted to check what collection equipment you needed deployed with the next ROV dive.”
“Just a Niskin for the water samples and a grab for the soil.”
He nods and gives me another peculiar look, one I can’t decipher, when I make no move to get up from the floor. “Will I see you at dinner tonight?”
His voice is low, his attention focused entirely on me, and I have to suppress the urge to squirm.
“Uh, yes? I mean, probably. Will there be food?”
Sofía cackles again, which morphs into a grunt when my fist connects with her stomach.
“I’ll see you tonight, then.”
My brow furrows at the bizarre tone, but before I can think about it any more, he disappears and we fall into a fit of giggles.
“Boys are so weird,” she says between breaths.
“I don’t understand how their brains work. Freaks me out,” I admit.
I never know what Mateo is thinking or how he’s feeling. He teases me, but does he like me? Do I annoy him? Does he find me abrasive or hypercompetitive ?
We’ve spent the last few days on top of each other—metaphorically speaking. The room is small, the bed isn’t much bigger, and most of our day-to-day tasks are the same. It’s the most time I’ve ever spent with someone besides Amy, and I haven’t spontaneously combusted yet.
I don’t know what to do with the knowledge.
“My last boyfriend was really into drinking chlorophyll water,” Sofía says.
“That seems like a scam.”
“It was! Made his pee green. Maybe it makes me a bad person, but it freaked me out and I broke up with him.”
My stomach cramps from laughter, tears beading on my lower lash as she giggles along. We’re still on the floor, and I want this moment to last. It’s been so long since I’ve had this much fun with anyone other than Amy.
“I haven’t been on a date in a long time.”
The confession falls from my tongue, and I immediately want to shove it back into my mouth.
It’s difficult to explain that I no longer go on dates because I grew exhausted of how they made me feel: inadequate, undesirable, unfulfilled.
Very few made it past a first date, and I only slept with a handful and never spoke to them again after. None of them were fond of getting kicked out immediately after they came, but I have rules, and I wasn’t breaking them.
I don’t need to add the anxiety of a relationship to the shit show that is my mind, so I deleted the dating apps.
“They’re overrated,” she says, missing my obvious surprise at her lack of probing.
The urge to word vomit an explanation strikes like a lightning bolt, but before I can embarrass myself, a deep voice booms through the lab.
“Charlie? ”
I scramble off the floor, smooth away the dust on my pants, and readjust my top.
Mateo leans against the bench, one leg folded over the other, thinly veiled amusement on his face. My heartbeat skips when a full smile blooms.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” he responds, and the air grows thick.
Sofía kills the tension, popping her head from our hiding spot. “Hi, Mateo!” His head jerks, startled as she crawls out. “I’ve got…work. Yes. Things to do!”
She scurries away, pausing at the door to waggle her eyebrows behind his back. Before I can make a face, she’s gone, and it’s just him and me, standing in the lab.
What do I do with my hands?
They flail before landing on the bench with a thud.
“How are you doing?” he asks, his attention roaming my body like he’s checking for injuries.
“I’m…good.”
Often, I’m far from “okay” or “fine,” but I follow the societal obligation of answering the question with one of those two answers when, usually, I’m neither of those things.
But today, I am good.
And there’s something thrilling in that.
I’m wearing an outfit I typically wouldn’t—my arms on full display—and I admitted something uncomfortable to Sofía and didn’t allow it to eat me up inside.
“Good,” he confirms. “I came to get you for lunch.”
“You did?”
Why in Neptune’s big blue sea does that make my chest explode with warmth?
He nods, his cheeks flushing a soft pink. “You hate soggy french fries, so I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss the fresh ones. ”
“There are french fries for lunch?” My voice rises as I scramble to collect my things, and Mateo’s laughter follows me as I rush out the door.
I’m halfway down the hall when it hits me he knows I hate soggy fries, even though I’ve never told him.