Chapter 10
Seventy-Nine Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
In Ripley’s experience, there aren’t many problems in life that don’t improve with intense effort. She hates that her occasional bouts of insomnia are the exception to this rule.
She’s been sitting at the edge of the canyon for maybe twenty minutes, inhaling the summer air as if a stray scent might lead her to what she’s seeking.
“Where are you, Beauty?” she whispers, filled with big, painful wanting.
A scraping footfall brings her scrambling to her feet, fumbling for her bear spray. That’s not sixteen ounces of prairie dog tumbling a stray pebble; that’s a couple hundred pounds of confident animal. Fuck. She should have moved more slowly. She shouldn’t have—
“Ripley?” comes a raspier-than-usual voice.
She skitters sideways, muffling an undignified shriek, then pitches into the dark, foot firmly planted on the shoelace she was too tired to tie.
A firm chest materializes against her face, her oof matched by a deeper version of the same sound. Long, sinewy arms come around her shoulders, pinning her to his torso. This prevents her from rebounding onto her ass, although that might be the less embarrassing option, given who’s caught her.
“All right there?” Smithson whispers.
He smells like a sunny meadow. His all-weather nylon pants rustle as he adjusts his stance to support her weight, the cool zipper of his riding jacket pressing into her cheek.
Underneath the smooth fabric, the topography of his body might as well be a raised map of the Rockies, ridge after uncompromising ridge rippling under the hands she raised to break her fall.
Being this near his skin, feeling his muscles jump when her fingers unthinkingly investigate a contour—it makes something stir inside her.
Not desire, exactly, though if he weren’t James Smithson, she’d be memorizing the feel of his chest against her face.
It’s more a sense of dislocation, like she’s both terribly alone and achingly close to another person. A wing without its body.
“I thought you were a bear,” she says, pulling away until he has to let her go. “You damn near gave me a heart attack.”
He runs his hands down his riding jacket and over the places she touched.
“The bears weren’t interested in conversation tonight,” he says easily. “Unlike you and your dinosaur.”
“It’s only a conversation if the other person answers.”
“Ah. It’s unrequited, then.” His voice is giving BBC World Service Overnight, yet there’s an undercurrent she hasn’t heard before, as if he’s deliberately being clever to conceal something a proper Smithson scion wouldn’t lay bare.
“I guess it is,” she says, sitting back down on the edge of the drop, hoping he doesn’t catch the quick, looping knot she puts in her shoelace once her feet are out of sight. She wonders what he’s doing out here. What thoughts are layering that discordant low note underneath his words.
Why he can’t sleep either.
She looks over her shoulder, and the disjointed sensation rises again. Sleeplessness is the first uncomplicated thing they’ve had in common. And yet it’s not uncomplicated at all to see him weary, rumpled, softened by shadows.
Maybe that’s why she sounds so bluntly expectant when she pats the ground beside her and says, “Well?”
Over the crickets, the peepers, and the sigh of the breeze through the treetops, she can hear him thinking for the space of a long exhale.
He lowers himself to the ground a few feet from the lip of the canyon. Not a foot dangler, then.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks.
“Not tonight,” he says, and it sounds like No, never.
“I hope you carry bear spray.”
“If you’re challenging me to a duel, I believe I select the weapon,” he says dryly.
She pulls her can out of her pocket. “Actually, the bear gets to choose.”
He turns toward her, startled. “Good Lord. There aren’t actual bears?”
“Ohhhh-kayyyy,” she breathes. She will not ask him how long he’s been prowling around without bear spray—and apparently without a clue. “We’ll get you some tomorrow.”
“Much obliged,” he says, sounding faint.
The conversation lapses. She imagines they’re both absorbed in bear-related thoughts.
“I’m not talking to my dinosaur. I’m trying to feel her,” she says eventually.
“You prospect for fossils by feeling them?”
As a woman in STEM, she normally wouldn’t answer a question like that. Smithson sounds genuine, though. Curious. Non-asshole-ish.
“Maybe I want to believe I can. Maybe I’m willing to believe in a lot of things right now.” Which makes it a dangerous time for her. She has a history of believing all the wrong things. And all the wrong people.
He makes a considering sound she likes a lot: deep, encouraging, very Do go on.
She wants to go on. Wants it in the desperate, will-I-or-won’t-I way you want something you know is really stupid. She swipes at a lone mosquito and pretends she didn’t hear the unspoken question. He leans back on his hands and pretends he didn’t ask it.
To her surprise, the silence grows easier the longer it stretches.
Smithson idly scoops up handfuls of pebbly sand, lets it run through his fingers.
Ripley spies a few shadows swooping by—bats, or maybe a nighthawk.
When sitting feels too effortful, she stretches out on her back, watching the international space station sail across the star-choked sky.
It’s easy to forget everything other than how nice it is not to be the only one awake.
“Why birds, Ripley Adams?” Smithson sounds calm and a little dreamy, like he’s ascended to a philosophical level of exhaustion. “Why not T. rexes or velociraptors?”
“Hmm,” she says on a breathy huff. “Birds are just…fun to think about. Like how eagles and condors and hummingbirds all descended from a single dinosaur with beautiful iridescent feathers. Or how the Neornithes subgroup survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction when every other dinosaur died. They’re so graceful and pretty and so damn tough.
You kind of have to love that about them. ”
He looks over at her. “You do, yes.” The undercurrent in his voice has deepened to a riptide. She can almost feel it tug at her ankles, dangerous like only a bad idea can be.
“And why taxonomy, Professor Smithson?” she asks, with a lightness she doesn’t feel in this moment. “What was it about gathering other people’s data and making it into pretty pictures that appealed to you?”
He makes a soft, wry sound. “You’ve encapsulated it rather well.
I like taking raw material and helping it realize its maximum potential.
The art…well, taxonomy is a lot like drawing.
How can it be done in as few lines as possible, how can the design support its validity?
The pictures are merely to sell the science.
” He tacks a little yawn onto the end of his sentence, the rhythm of his speech noticeably slowing.
She yawns too, turning her face into her shoulder. “Cute. You rescue stray data and give it a cup of hot chocolate and a little scarf and a whole bunch of new friends.”
“You’re so odd, Ripley.” His voice curls around odd with a delighted almost-laugh that feels like a quick caress.
“The way you say odd is odd, Smithson.” She’s getting punchy and repetitive and too wrapped up in what she imagines he’s not saying. It’s the darkness, the soft air, the vulnerability of being awake together. It’s not real.
She rolls to her feet, prompting him to do the same. He’s probably constitutionally incapable of staying down when a lady stands, but the way he’s watching her makes the gesture of respect feel personal somehow. Like it’s specifically for her.
“I’m heading in. Take this,” she says, holding out the spray. “If you see a grizzly, stand your ground and try to look big.” She has to tip her head back a fair way to meet his eyes. “Well, bigger, anyway.”
She means to press the can into his hand and leave, but he catches her wrist. His fingers are warm despite the cool night air, his grip firm without being unbreakable. She falls still, watching his shadowed eyes, waiting for something she can’t name.
“Thank you. I…thank you,” he says. “And, Ripley?”
“Yeah?”
“Next time, use the damn shoelace clips.”