Chapter 12 #2
Ripley puts down her half-eaten triangle of sandwich. “No, Professor,” she says softly, so the team won’t overhear. “None of us will be staying.”
He crumples his makeshift napkin into a ball. “Don’t give up, Ripley. I couldn’t bear it if you did.” His voice at a whisper is devastating—low and smoky, like he’s been drinking single-malt for breakfast.
“I’m fine. It’s just…hard.” Hard to imagine Clever Girl breaking up piece by piece, people and fossils scattering.
Hard to lose Cara and Geraldine, even if she’s never quite let herself get close.
Or maybe especially because of that. If Ripley’s mom’s absence taught her anything, it’s that losing something you never quite had still hurts.
She covers her mouth so Smithson won’t see it twist with her effort not to cry.
His thigh is suddenly next to hers, firm and warm. “Ripley.”
“Yeah.” She looks up, expecting pity. Instead, she finds something a little inscrutable and a lot Smithson. It feels like the steel of his growled Let them and the exhaustion-drunk curl of Why birds, Ripley Adams?
“It’s going to be all right. Trust me on this.
” He brings his arm around her back, letting her see how he’s watching her, ready to stop if she gives the slightest sign.
She might be imagining the brief, almost imperceptible flutter of his fingers as he tucks his hand around her waist and gathers her to his side.
“I know you said no nonessential touch. But this is essential. And I never see you do this, Ripley. Never see you take comfort from the people around you. Your friends would gladly offer it, if you let them see you needed it,” he murmurs, his tone so dry she could mistake it for pained.
A near-tranquilizing wave of ease washes down her spine. “You’re good at this,” she says unthinkingly.
“Does that not fit your British stereotype?” He’s amused, obviously.
“Not really.”
His laugh feels amazing against her chest. “One of my younger sisters calls this ‘bolstering.’ She’s insisted on it since she was a baby.” He adjusts his body so her head drops into the cradle between the muscles of his shoulder and his chest.
Her dig fever spikes in a dizzying rush. She feels anything but sisterly right now.
Don’t go too far, Adams, she tells herself, but he’s so close. His body is firm and sun-warmed, the pressure of his fingers at her waist the only thing holding her bones together. All she wants to do is breathe him in, grass and sweat and earth.
No, that’s a lie. She wants so much more than that.
She wants to tip her head up and stare into his fractal eyes, simultaneously sure and not sure that something is happening.
She wants him to lean in slowly, then all at once.
She wants him to kiss her with that precise control she’s imagined, and she wants to kiss him back until she shatters that control.
She shouldn’t do any of those things. But no one is watching, and he’ll be gone on Monday, and she’ll probably never see him again. The thought makes her close her eyes, turn her face into his shirt, and take a breath.
“Ripley,” he says, his voice tightening. “Are you—”
Her internal voice goes off like a klaxon: Too far.
She stands up so fast, she scrapes her bare thighs against the rough wooden tabletop. The hot sting brings her back to earth—a place where huffing Smithson’s shirt and imagining unlocking the beast inside him are not approved workplace activities.
“I should get back to prospecting.” Her nerves jangle under her skin, desire and fear sparking dangerously off each other. She came way too close to forgetting her rules. Forgetting herself.
Smithson comes to his feet, stepping out of the picnic bench. She forgot he never sits when she’s standing. “I’m sorry. I crossed the line.”
“No, you’re fine. You were just…being kind.”
“Kind. Precisely,” he says. He sounds peculiar. Unsettled. They face each other for a long moment, a light breeze clattering through the aspen leaves. If he thinks she liked his touch more than she should have, it’s not obvious from here.
Finally, he says, “I wish you could take money from a university, Ripley. I could get you five offers in five minutes.”
“Yeah. I wish…” she says, not knowing where this is going. There’s a painful, fraying feeling of want in her chest. “I don’t know.”
“A colleague of mine in theoretical physics claims every wish is actually a wish for a time machine,” Smithson says.
“If you had a time machine, where would you go, Ripley Adams?” He’s walking them back to safer emotional ground, she realizes.
Giving her a dignified exit from her mini-freakout.
And yet the mix of melancholy, curiosity, and affection in his words makes her shiver with a feeling she can’t name. “How many trips do I have?”
“One.”
“You have to kill Hitler if you have just one trip. I don’t make the rules.”
His lips twitch. “All right, two trips.”
Her dad, then. “There’s someone I’d go back and save. I wouldn’t miss the signs this time.”
He hums in agreement. “There’s someone I’d save too. Then, since you took care of Hitler, I’d go back to the day we spoke at the APS. I’d do that day differently if I could.”
“Me too.”
An odd expression flashes across his face, quick as lightning. “You’d prevent our meeting.”
“I’d prevent everything about that day. It was expensive and horrible and made not one bit of difference in my life.”
“It made a difference to me,” he says quietly. “You left science, Ripley. When a brilliant mind leaves the field, it’s a loss to us all. I blame myself for a good part of that.”
Right. For a second, she forgot he was all about science, and thought he might have…Forget it, Adams. “It wasn’t on you, Smithson. I got myself kicked out of UEM. On purpose.”
His brows draw down. “What?”
“Another day I should have prevented. But you know me. Never met a hill I didn’t want to die on.
” She tries for a smile. Judging by his ferocious expression, she’s not doing a great job.
“My prof wanted a meeting—to discuss my next paper, I thought. But Will had convinced him that the original idea for my Nature paper was his. Dr. Ballard told me to amend the authorship—add Will and put his name first—or he’d pull the paper.
I pulled it myself rather than let Will take it. And you know the rest.”
She’d been so tired the day of that meeting. She’d lain awake for hours the night before, heart pounding, waiting for Will to come home. They’d never fought like that before, much less over something so pointless. He knew she couldn’t add his name to her Nature paper even if she’d wanted to.
It was a shock to find him in Ballard’s office.
Even more of a shock when he claimed she’d stolen his idea.
“You literally admitted it in the acknowledgments, Ripley. ‘Special thanks to William Stone for telling me I was looking in the wrong place.’ ” He’d sounded so firm that reality felt suddenly soft by comparison, bending like cheap plastic held too close to a gaslight.
For a millisecond, Ripley had believed him herself.
Believed Ballard when he said she had no choice but to sign the amended author page.
But Steve Adams had not raised his daughter to think she had no choices. Steve Adams had sat in the passenger seat of the Charger on Ripley’s sixteenth birthday and said, “You can’t always prevent a crash, but you can always do something. Gas, brakes, or steering, Pip. Pick one.”
Gas, she thought then, reaching for the signature page. “I’ll take care of it.”
Will followed her out. “Don’t make this into a big deal, Ripley. I mean, we’re over, obviously, but you still get second author.”
Something snapped in her chest. Her mom had left when Ripley wouldn’t give her career a boost. Unbelievably, Will had found a way to top that—stealing her work and leaving her anyway.
“Fuck you, you fucking thief.”
His eyes narrowed the way a man’s eyes do right before he’s about to use the word bitch. She turned away before he could say it to her face.
Smithson nods slowly when she’s finished telling the story. The wind picks up, toying with the brim of his hat. He scans the plains, the mountains, the dig. Everything but her. “I promise I will get you that money, Ripley. Come hell or high water.”
She shakes her head. “I appreciate everything you’ve done, but we’re out of time. I’ll tell the kids tomorrow morning.”