Chapter 34
Nine Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
The helicopter is overkill for a specimen of Beast’s size, but according to the specialty-equipment-rental company, the dirt road is too soft for a backhoe.
“Oh God,” Ripley says as the load operator on the ground fusses with steel cables. If the crew didn’t have to stand safely out of the wash of the rotors, she’d dart forward and tell the pilot one more time to be careful, be gentle, please don’t break it.
They’ve done everything they can. They’ve pedestaled Beast so finely, a strong wind could blow him over. Plastered him into a gigantic, amorphous ball braced with lumber above and below.
Still, Ripley can’t unsee the videos of Borealopelta’s extraction. The bracing failed, the plaster broke, and the fossil shattered right out of the bottom of the field jacket. It took seven thousand hours to put it back together.
The camera operator caught a lot of grown-ass paleontologists crying that day.
Cara laces her fingers with Ripley’s and bends their clasped hands up to face level, like this is the grand finale of the Miss America competition. “I’m going to throw up,” she shouts over the thumping noise.
“We’re all going to throw up,” Ripley screams back.
James paces at the edge of the wash; Griff’s hammering a lid on the bucket of plaster he’ll use to seal the field jacket.
Jordin bailed out ten minutes ago with a pinched “I can’t watch.
” Matteo went with her, although not without a few glances over his shoulder.
“Those two seem fine.” Cara indicates Fiona and Finn, who’ve applied steampunk goggles over their Amelia Earhart aviator caps. They tap their travel mugs together, then take deep sips that suggest whatever’s inside is the opposite of coffee.
“At least they’ve forgiven each other,” Ripley yells, but it’s lost in the rising whine of the engine as the bird starts to lift.
At first, nothing happens. Slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, she mouths, hoping the pilot can read lips. All the rushing, all the weeks of deadline panic have come down to this. A hundred million years of waiting, and the next minute will literally make or break this fossil.
The ground jolts as the pedestal cracks, and Cara’s screaming, and Ripley is too. Cara swipes her face with their clasped fingers, wetting the back of Ripley’s hand.
Beast rises up like he’s riding a thermal. He floats gently on his steel leash, moving to hover over the crate Griffin made. “Almost there,” Ripley whispers into the wind as he sways back and forth, the load operator waiting to guide him down. “Stay on target.”
She’s not sure whether she feels the touchdown in her body or her heart, but the moment the cable goes slack, she feels like the weight of the world is safely contained in a homemade wooden box.
Ripley’s brain goes blank. Her head might float away, like a balloon that’s slipped its string.
Cara lifts her up in a rib-cracking hug and shakes her until she thinks her boots are going to fall off. “We did it, we did it, we fucking did it,” she’s screaming, her voice growing muffled and faint.
The world goes tingly, then dark. Ripley’s on the ground with her head between her knees.
James’s body is wrapped around her, one of his hands supporting her forehead.
The thunder of the helicopter has moved far enough away that she can hear James’s rough “Give her space” and Cara’s guilty “I only bounced her a little.”
“I’m okay,” she manages. She sends a searching hand in the direction of Cara’s voice, pawing at the air.
Cara grabs hold immediately, the iron-hard calluses under her fingers lining up along the edge of Ripley’s palm like buttons on a shirt. “Damn, Rip. You scared me.”
“Went down like a sack of laundry,” Griff says.
“Almost went down,” James corrects him with stern satisfaction.
“And it’s potatoes,” Cara adds. “Not laundry.”
“She didn’t look much like potatoes,” Griff says doubtfully. “She was limp, like wet sheets.” He demonstrates with rolled-back eyes and spaghetti limbs.
The load operator jogs up. “Anyone want to check the crate before we go?”
“Beast,” Ripley says urgently, remembering.
James’s knees tighten around her hips. “He’s fine. Don’t get up yet.”
“I’ll go check him, but he’s okay, Rip. We’re okay,” Cara says. Ripley’s never heard anything but steadiness or snark in her friend’s voice. Strangely enough, it’s the hint of tears under We’re okay that has hope rustling its feathers in her heart.
Maybe she’s really okay this time. Maybe they all are.
By sundown, Clever Girl has been transformed into a sparkling piece of magic in the middle of the prairie.
Geraldine rumbles into camp with a flatbed full of red-and-white Coleman coolers.
She’s wearing her sunset-orange skirt with the black, gold, and green ribbons, which she only wears on important occasions.
Though she’s plenty strong enough to set up the steel tubs, she amuses herself making James and Griffin fill them with ice and drinks.
Cara gets to work with the barbecue, piling bratwursts and vegan hot dogs onto the grill.
Jordin and Matteo string battery-powered fairy lights into a crisscrossing canopy, while Finn and Fiona sync everyone’s portable speakers into a surprisingly excellent sound system for their playlist of Alphabet classics.
James denies having anything to do with the town car that arrives bearing a case of French champagne.
“You’re a rotten liar, Professor,” Ripley says, shaking her head as he presses the first bottle into her hands.
She pops the cork without spilling a drop, but Cara reaches over, grabs the bottle, and shakes it until everyone’s covered with sparkling amber drops.
“To Ripley and her excellent eye,” James says, wiping champagne off his brow and raising his mug.
Flushed with joy and embarrassment, Ripley counters, “To Clever Girl,” but it’s lost in the howl of “Ripley” from the crew. The twins crank up the music, and everyone whoop-screams to Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration.”
They need this. They need the release of a party, the luxury of a guilt-free-hangover day.
They need to hold this moment in their hands and drink it down together.
After two glasses’ worth of champagne toasts, Ripley dedicates herself to trying every single flavor of the old-fashioned soft drinks Geraldine brought. She’s finished off a stubby bottle of cherry soda and half a lime cordial when she catches James’s eye across the clearing.
He’s pink-cheeked with champagne, trying not to show how much he likes it when Cara and Griff subject him to American-style shoulder punches and hair tousling.
It’s terribly cute in a way that simultaneously warms her heart and lances it with something thin and splintered.
She winks at him to hide her stinging eyes and decides it’s time for another one of the rainbow-hued bottles of pop.
Ripley’s selected a pretty pink cream soda when an arm slides around her waist. James grins lopsidedly down at her, his glasses more askew than usual. He’s going to have to get those fixed.
“Oh, look who’s tipsy,” she says.
“Not so tipsy,” he protests, looking at her like she’s the rising sun. “Just happy.”
“You should be,” she replies. “And you should have given yourself credit for Beast too.”
He gives her a strange look. “It was your find, Ripley. I don’t deserve acknowledgment simply because I was standing in the right place at the right time. If someone ever accepted recognition for your work under those circumstances, he’s an arsehole.”
An odd feeling washes through her, like summer rain wearing away the last vestiges of something tight and sticky that’s clung to her for a long time.
“How tipsy are you, exactly?” she asks.
“We shouldn’t leave the party, Ripley. People will notice.” He says this, but his hand drifts to her braid.
“Who’s going to notice?” She waves her hand at the dance floor.
Geraldine’s long gone. Finn, Fiona, and Jordin are dancing like twenty-somethings who don’t yet know they’ve passed the last stage of exhaustion into rebound jitteriness.
A few yards away, Matteo is vibing by himself, eyes closed, his homing beacon no doubt about to go off.
Sometime when Ripley was hunting through the sodas, Griff and Cara must have sneaked away.
“I think I’ll take a shower,” she says, watching his eyes, thinking about tree lines and broken pencils.
His expression goes tight. His darkening eyes fall to her collarbones, then lift back up to her face with what looks like great effort. “Ripley,” he grits out warningly.
Ripley, Showering, she mouths, and she knows she’s got him.
They don’t go back to the cabin for shampoo or soap or even a towel.
She’s hardly got her clothes off and the water on before he has her pressed against the wall, her butt perched on the shallow, inadequate toiletry shelf.
The cool shock of the night air against her heated skin is almost as electric as the quick touch of his teeth around her nipples.
“I’ll fall,” she whispers, gasping when his mouth drops to the wet, wanting place between her legs.
“I won’t let you,” he says, a shoulder under each thigh, a hand spanning each cheek. The water doesn’t give them much cover, sound-wise; when Ripley comes, she dimly hopes her muffled cries will be mistaken for a cougar’s.
“Let me down,” she mumbles. On still-shaking legs, she turns to face the wood-planked wall. She leans forward, breathing in steam and cedar and James, then looks over her shoulder at his harsh sound.
He’s slumped against the opposite wall, a hand gripping his wet, shining length, his face wrenched between desire and restraint. “How much have you had to drink?” he says, his teeth clenched.
“Two small glasses of Veuve Clicquot, two hours ago.” She drops a hand between her legs, letting him see what she’s doing. He groans like she’s killing him. “We can skip the condom, James. Unless there’s something you need to protect me from.”
“No,” he whispers, and then he’s pressed against her, his fingers wrapped around the crests of her hip bones, his head bowed so his temple rests against hers. “No, there’s nothing I would ever do to hurt you. This way, or any way.”
The angle changes everything. The stretch and slide of him, the touch of his knees against the backs of her thighs—it’s so good she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She’s jumping out of her skin with it; she has to move, she has to push back, she needs everything.
“Patience, Ripley,” he says, his voice laced with a lethal dose of agony and bliss.
“Did I mention I’ve never gone without before?
Oh, Christ, be still, I’m too—” He gives up on words, threading one iron arm around her hips and the other across her chest and up to her throat, pinning her between himself and the wall.
Something in her recognizes him and goes motionless, like she’s waiting for the touch of his teeth at her neck, for whatever life comes after this one.
He releases a string of muffled profanity against her cheek. “Fuck if that’s not worse. God, I’ve never, never, never…”
He pulls back, then pushes in again, slowly, trembling, and she feels herself spasm around him. He barks out a sharp, disbelieving laugh. “You are—Christ, you test me, Ripley. Hold on, my darling. Let’s see if we can give you one more before you wreck me forever.”
He adjusts the angle of her body until his slow, ever-deepening thrusts hit something that makes her clench and see stars. At her choked cry, he gives a low sound of satisfaction and hits it again.
“James,” she says, wild and high.
“That’s it, love,” he rumbles, wrapping her hair around one fist and giving a tug. Not hard, but enough to send shivers through her skin at the same time he’s hitting the spot that makes her feel so hot and tight and impatient and—
“James,” she says urgently, and she’s there, she’s lost, she’s coming like she might black out and biting her own fist to keep from screaming.
She’s barely returned to herself enough to feel the patter of water on her skin when she feels him slide out and away. “Oh,” she says, disappointed. She hadn’t wanted to miss that, but it’s entirely possible she would have missed a meteor strike.
“No,” he says tightly, shutting off the water with one quick twist. “Come on. We’re going home.” He pulls his own shirt over her head, curses as he eases his pants back on, and they race through camp on flimsy legs, miraculously meeting no one.
Inside, he has the shirt up and his pants down and her back on the bed in what feels like a blink. They’re both still wet, their skin cool at first, then warming where they touch. He hovers over her, brushing against her everywhere, letting himself come back to full hardness.
“I wanted it to be here,” he murmurs, dropping kisses on her eyes, her temples, the corners of her mouth.
“I wanted to look at you. I wanted to stay inside you afterward, instead of having to—” He rolls his eyes to indicate the ridiculousness they just went through.
“All right there?” He nudges her, hot and eager again.
God, he’s so…so everything. She reaches up to kiss him, and he pushes in, his eyes closing in relief.
“Oh, it’s…oh, Ripley, it’s—” His body jolts into her helplessly, his head hanging low from his straining shoulders.
“I know,” she whispers, and she could come again, but she needs to see this happen. She needs every moment, every broken gasp and shuddering breath, every time he tries to keep his eyes locked on hers and a surge of feeling has them slamming shut.
When he can’t hold his slow pace anymore, there are three hard, quick thrusts with a harsh sound at the deepest part of every one, and he’s saying her name, and he’s never been more hers than he is at this moment.
This one moment.