Chapter 24
“Tell me you aren’t going to steal food.”
Standing in the middle of the small cafeteria, James looks at Ripley like she’s a velociraptor stalking innocent children.
“It’s not stealing if you pay for it,” Ripley explains patiently. She pulls her wallet from her bag, extracts a twenty, and lays it on the register.
He stares at the money. “Won’t they know we were here?”
“They’ll know someone was here. You think a grad student has never been working late and wanted an ice cream bar?”
“I can’t believe you carry actual cash.”
She sends him a look. His family probably never touches anything so plebeian as bills and coins.
“Having fuck-you money was my dad’s rule.
I always had to carry enough to be able to say ‘Fuck you’ and get myself home.
” She spies one of those little chest freezers with pictures of frozen treats on it. Bingo.
“Money means safety in your family,” James says.
She can practically hear the lines of consternation popping up between his eyebrows.
She glances over her shoulder. Yup, there they are, shadowed in the dim light.
She wishes she didn’t get that ache in her throat from the curious, troubled angle of his eyes.
“Yes. Money means independence. Freedom. Health. Among other things.” She tests the sliding glass lid on the freezer unit. The lock feels like it won’t put up too much of a fight. “Why, what does it mean in your family?”
“Control.” He makes a surprised, disquieted sound, as if the word popped out without official permission. “I meant—no, I meant control,” he says heavily.
She stops jiggling the lock to look at him. “Your family is seventeen flavors of fucked up, aren’t they?”
One side of his mouth flicks upward. “Well, when you put it like that,” he says. “They’re difficult and demanding, yes, but they’re my only family.”
“I’m not judging. My family isn’t exactly Hallmark-movie material. But you have your trust fund, so you’re free.”
He shakes his head. “Not exactly. We each receive a very modest annuity starting at age thirty. The capital matures when we’re forty.
Until then, it’s a discretionary trust. My father can cut me off at any time if he feels I don’t meet certain criteria.
Gainful employment, no dishonorable pursuits, et cetera, et cetera. ”
“That’s a real thing?”
“It is. I have my salary, but it’s fairly low, and London is expensive. I need the income from the trust if I’m going to…fulfill certain obligations,” he says obliquely.
“Saving the world again, Superman?” She gives the freezer unit a jiggle and a shove, and it pops open. Ripley lets out a whoop.
“I can’t believe breaking and entering is in your skill set.” He’s trying to scowl, but Ripley’s ninety-nine percent sure he’s attempting to suppress an undertone of admiration.
“Life finds a way, James.” She hands him a chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream bar, then rips open a caramel one and bites into it. “Oh my fucking God.”
She has a weakness for this kind, with the bittersweet dark chocolate and the generous swirl of caramel. With no freezer on the dig site, she rarely gets to have them during the hot weather. She’s definitely going to eat another.
“Did you notice any napkin dispensers?” she mumbles, licking a chunk of chocolate from the crook of her thumb. “James? Can you see—”
She looks up. James is staring at her, his face drawn, his eyes dark pools above rock-cut cheekbones. He’s taken one neat bite out of his bar, but he’s not chewing. Ice cream drips toward the dip in his stupidly classical lower lip. She can still feel the give of it under her thumb.
She pulls her hand away from her mouth, a shiver flashing up the back of her neck. “Sorry—did you want a caramel one too?”
He closes his eyes for a moment that’s a little too long to be a blink. “I’m fine with vanilla.”
“I figured Clark Kent was a vanilla guy.”
His mouth hardens. “I’m no superhero, Ripley. And I like flavors other than vanilla. I meant—I didn’t mean—bloody hell.”
His eyes drop to the smear of chocolate on her hand, then bounce away fast.
Even that brief touch of his gaze makes Ripley feel rain in her hair, his hands on her back, his lips crushing into hers. Heat blooms in her belly.
She’s never let herself consider what he might like in that way. She’s never imagined him asking for something that isn’t strictly vanilla in the stripped-down fever of a voice she heard on the side of the road.
But she’s imagining it now, and it has to stop.
Because if there’s one thing he didn’t say to her yesterday or today, it’s that he’s in love with her.
He felt something when he first saw her, but there’s no such thing as love at first sight.
Love is deeper than that. It takes time to uncover the shape of such things.
And he’s leaving in barely eight weeks, never to darken her dig site again.
“Eat your food, Lex Luthor,” she says. “We have eight hours in one of the world’s best paleontology museums. We’re going to see some damn dinosaurs.”
James frets as Ripley investigates how to turn on the lights inside the display cases.
She’s pleased by how the halls look like beachside pathways lined with lanterns.
She figures out the sound system in the Late Cretaceous diorama and threatens to ride one of the roaring tyrannosaur models just to see his scandalized expression.
It takes her two and a half exhibits to realize that what she hoped was him having fun in a reserved British way is actually him having an intensely average time in a reserved British way for reasons she cannot figure out.
For the next few galleries, she doubles down. She makes a gigantic deal of stepping over the red lines that mark each of the five mass-extinction events. She slithers over a vertiginously transparent ocean floor filled with bright orange sea bugs.
He smiles at her antics, but he hardly glances at the exhibits, even the world-famous Borealopelta and its mummified coral-pink skin.
Ripley finally cracks in Dinosaur Hall among the reproductions posed in lifelike arrangements. The joy she was hoping for is hard for her to grasp when he’s so obviously unmoved.
“Are you worried we’re going to get caught?”
He looks at her like she’s unhinged. “Erm, yes?”
“You can relax. We won’t.”
“You sound lamentably confident.” He stares longingly at a pair of maroon doors marked Emergency Exit Only. Opening Door Sounds Alarm.
“J.D. will check his messages as soon as he opens his eyes, because his phone habits are as unhealthy as everyone else’s.
He’ll haul ass to sneak us out. If he doesn’t make it, we’ll stand on the toilets in the family bathroom until opening, then blend in with the crowd.
This is Canada,” she emphasizes. “Nothing bad is going to happen to us. Here, I’ll take a picture of you next to the Camarasaurus tibia.
If it looks familiar, it’s because it’s roughly the size of the stick up your ass.
” She gestures for him to stand next to the six-foot-tall shinbone.
“No, thank you. I can take your photo if you’d like.” His face is politely implacable. She wants to punch him right in the manners.
Ripley bounces up the stairs for the photo. She waits until he’s about to tap the button, then makes the least serious face possible.
Joy, damn it.
She takes the phone from James’s unenthusiastic grip. “I look great! I didn’t know I could do that with my tongue. Oh! Ornitholestes,” she crows, running over to one of her favorite bird ancestors.
At last, the start of a smile plays at the edge of his mouth. “You’re very hard to resist when you get going, Ripley Adams. Did you know that?”
“I don’t get going,” she says, side-eyeing him.
“You do.” He strolls over to the stump of a tree-size cycadeoid with a suggestively bitten-off shape, as if the nearby Camarasaurus took a big bite. “You love museums a great deal, obviously.”
“I love them a normal amount,” she says, a little defensively. “And you were the one hyping London’s Natural History Museum. You probably go there every week.”
There’s a brief, unreadable flash in his eyes. “I don’t find the time to go very often, no.”
Ripley gapes at him. “I’m sorry, but the Natural History Museum might be paleontology’s holiest site. Their collections survived the London Blitz. Some of the specimen cards have Charles Darwin’s actual handwriting on them. To walk through those doors is to have ascended, James.”
For the briefest moment, his shoulders roll forward as if his stomach hurts. Just as quickly, some unseen hand finds the vulnerable curve of his back and pushes it straight. “It’s different for you.”
“How?”
James gestures around him. “Ripley. You literally got down on the floor with the marellomorphs. I am constantly bracing myself for the moment you step over the ropes and examine the tyrannosaur skulls for evidence of juvenile face biting. I’ve never been this enthused about dinosaurs. At any age.”
“But…isn’t that why your parents encouraged you to pursue paleontology?”
“I liked dinosaurs. Most children do. But I loved fantasy novels and the Lord of the Rings movies and organizing my pencils by hardness. If I was interested in fossils, it was only insofar as they inspired mythical lore. Dragons. Griffins. Sea serpents.”
He turns away from Dinosaur Hall and heads back to a cluster of blown-glass invertebrates mounted on the ceiling. The museum’s art installations seem to catch his interest, now that she thinks about it.
“So why didn’t you pursue art? You must know your drawings are amazing, James.”
He fixes his eyes on the stream of bright fish, sea urchins, and anemones. “My mum loved chemistry. Thirty-odd years ago, a professorship was a long shot for women, especially if they were married and had children. She might have managed it yet, but she joined my dad’s lab.