Chapter 12
Seventy Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
Four days ago, on Monday, Geraldine rode out to the dig, Hoodoo’s saddlebags stuffed with the purchases Smithson had considerately not had delivered directly there: bright spandex, wraparound sunglasses, and a teardrop-shaped helmet.
By Wednesday, he had two bikes, a mountain bike Geraldine dug out of her garage and a road bike he’s keeping at the ranch house.
Every morning, Ripley hears the door to his bunkhouse whisper open at dawn, while the day is as cool as it’s going to be. He walks softly, his bike shoes barely audible on the wooden stairs. Ripley has to strain to catch the ticking of his wheels as he walks the bike out of camp.
She can’t sleep through all the damn racket.
Two hours later, he comes back flushed and smiling, which Ripley guesses is how he earned those ridiculous thighs. Once, his bike shorts rode up a little, revealing a glimpse of bright color inked above his scar—blue and black, red and yellow.
She finds her mind looping back to his tattoo when she’s prowling the canyon, searching for the rest of Beauty.
What the hell does someone as repressed as Smithson ask for on the one day in his life he’s inebriated enough to walk into a tattoo shop?
Is it a dinosaur? A coat of arms? A skull with roses for eyes?
It itches her the way everything about him seems to do these days.
On Tuesday, he spent half a day at the big house, taking advantage of Geraldine’s superior Wi-Fi to give a lecture and hold virtual office hours for his visiting professorship at Berkeley.
Otherwise, when he’s not on his bike or at the site, he shuts himself away in his cabin.
Sometimes when Ripley’s walking by, she’ll catch an email notification sound, a mouse click, and, thirty seconds later, a deflated sigh.
Other times, she picks up snatches of conversation.
“Very modest investment with excellent potential returns.” And “No, she’s not at Oxford.” And “No, she’s a citizen scientist.” And “Of course. If you reconsider, do give me a ring.”
After the call ends, there is always a silence. She pictures him sitting unassailably upright in his Emeco Navy chair, eyes closed, hands pressed flat against the surface of his folding table. Or maybe he’s abandoned decorum, and his elbows are angled against the desk, his hands in his hair.
A minute later, there will be a burst of furious typing. The pop-clicking of his mechanical keyboard covers the sound of Ripley’s footsteps as she walks away.
She’s not eavesdropping, exactly. She just happens to be walking by his cabin often enough to have picked up the pattern.
Patterns like the one where you keep fucking walking by his cabin, Adams.
Or patterns like how he shows up dressed for dinner every night. On his eighth night here, two of Ripley’s crew changed their clothes before dinner too. On the ninth, it was four. On the tenth, even Matteo had brushed his hair.
Twice, he’s sat beside her at meals. She could hardly taste Renzo’s divine capicola pizza last Friday because of the occasional nudge of Smithson’s elbow against her upper arm.
She held a slice right next to her face to drown out the grassy, pencil-y smell of him, wanting the hyperaware, keyed-up feeling to stop immediately and also never to go away.
Last night, Ripley caught herself staring at him during the Calvin and Hobbes–rules Scrabble tournament, then caught Fiona staring at her when she looked away.
His bone structure is poetry, curved and graceful underneath his golden skin.
Every time she sees a sliver of his wrists, she remembers the snap of his thumbs into his cuffs as he rolled up his sleeves, and she feels hot and empty-headed.
In short, she’s an idiot.
Fucking dig fever. People need ways to release the pressure of intense, single-minded work—wildly competitive games, hyper-accelerated friendships, and, yes, love at first dig site.
But things that feel good on the dig can hurt you in real life.
You might waste years on a shitty guy. You might not speak carefully enough the day you can’t find your favorite hat, and when he impatiently snaps, “You’re looking in the wrong place,” you might blurt, “Oh my God, that’s it! Will, you’re a genius!”
With fossil dust still in your eyes, you’d put him in the acknowledgments on the paper you hoped would make your career, and this would ruin everything.
Ripley might have dig fever for Smithson, but at least this time she knows not to feed it.
She wipes her forehead and settles her hat back on.
It’s almost time to mix another round of electrolyte drinks.
The summer is getting hotter, and the less experienced crew members don’t yet realize how much water they need.
Jordin in particular will work for hours without a break, sweat glistening on her dark brown shoulders.
Water is what Ripley needs too. A good solid rain, followed by dry days where she can find the fossils the weather has uncovered.
She lets her eyes go unfocused above the canyon wall, then drifts them down. She tries to think like a creek that would carry a bird’s body downstream. She looks upward and thinks watery thoughts.
But today, like every day this week, it’s been nothing but wide, hard, oppressively blue Montana sky.
In the past seven days, she’s spent every available minute walking the canyon, looking for the rest of Beauty.
Cara and Griff are focused on getting Beauty’s wing out of the ground between helping the other crew members cap and turn everything they can.
If the dig shuts down, Ripley and Cara will spend the summer prepping the bones, which will improve their sale price, and trying to scrape together a few thousand bucks for a scanner appointment.
It’s far from what she’d hoped for, but it’s what she’s got.
In eighteen hours, Smithson’s two-week deadline to find the money expires. It’s nearly lunchtime, which means it’s already after five Greenwich Mean Time. How likely is he to find money when the workweek is over and the London crowd is rolling three gin and tonics deep on a Friday night?
Not very. She goes back to relaxing her eyes, slipping her body around rocks like she’s a primordial forest stream.
Willing fate to throw her a bone.
Lunch is build-your-own sandwiches again. It gets tired by August, but in June it’s still fun to choose toppings from the selection Renzo keeps in the propane-powered refrigerator.
Ripley wanders in from prospecting after most of the crew has already eaten.
Matteo has coaxed Jordin into a patch of shade under some aspen trees, while Finn and Fiona are sunbathing on a rocky outcropping.
It’s a bad idea with their ghostly pale skin, but Ripley guesses it’s time for some experiential learning.
Where Griff and Cara are, Ripley has no idea.
Where she’ll sit, she also has no idea. A big chunk of plastered bone takes up half the table space. Smaller capped specimens fill up three of the four benches.
Smithson sits on the one available bench.
His hair is mostly hidden under the wide brim of a dark blue hat, but what she can see of it is mashed across his forehead, suggesting he spent the morning running his fingers through it, disturbing his careful Clark Kent combing.
She unceremoniously plunks her plate down next to his. She will not make a big deal of this.
He twitches as she steps over the bench, his eyes quickly jumping from her shorts-clad legs to her face. “Club sandwich?” he asks, indicating the tower of feelings she’s about to eat. “Rather an old-fashioned choice.”
“I always have a club sandwich on Fridays.”
“Really,” he says in that terribly British way that might mean anything from That’s dreadful to Do go on.
That Do go on vibe of his should be a controlled substance.
“Really. When I was a kid, my dad would take me out to the diner on Friday nights. You know those cute diners you see in movies—the little silver trailers?”
“Oh, yes. There’s one I adore in East London. Fat Boy’s. Great milkshakes.”
Now she’s imagining him on a red-vinyl barstool, the dimple in his lower lip wrapped around a thick straw. “Chocolate or vanilla?” she asks so she can stop thinking about his mouth and ice cream and what it might taste like on his lips.
“Strawberry.”
“Really?” she says in the American way that always means Really.
“Controversial, I know. Bit of a lightning-rod flavor in the ice cream world.”
“Filing that away for blackmail later. Anyway, we’d split a sandwich and fries and talk. He’d ask about school. Tell me what was happening down at the garage. We’d pick something fun to do that weekend, mostly fossil hunting in summer, movies or pickup hockey in winter.”
Ripley takes a bite of her sandwich, hoping Smithson hasn’t seen her eyes mist over. The bread’s stale and untoasted. The lettuce is a little frozen after getting shoved too close to the cooling element in the fridge. It still tastes like home.
Smithson angles his body in her direction, bringing his leg to rest along the weathered wooden bench. Under the stretch of his pants across his thigh, she imagines his scar, the tan line from his bike shorts, the hint of pale skin where his tattoo hides.
“Your mum didn’t come along?” he asks.
The urge to spin up a lie whispers along the back of her neck, chased by familiar shame.
It never goes away, even though she sticks to palatable half-truths these days.
“Mom was away a lot. For work. What about your family? Did you and your roving pack of siblings bond over weekend chemistry experiments?”
“Why, Ripley Adams,” Smithson drawls. “Did you google me?”
“Some,” she says, not embarrassed. “Enough to know your dad’s supposed to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry any minute now. Enough to decide whether I wanted to keep you on my dig.”
“And? Will I be staying?” He takes a bite of his veggie-and-cheese sandwich, then dabs crumbs from his lips with a paper towel that he smooths back across his lap afterward.