Chapter Twenty-Three
twenty-three
Ridley
Sting and the Police sang from the small Bluetooth speaker that sat on the corner of Ridley’s large desk as he sat hunched over, elbows on the surface, cradling his chin in one hand while scrolling a finger down his iPad screen with the other.
“Hey! Got a minute?” The words were accompanied by a knock on the door frame of his London office. The face of Ridley’s oldest friend as well as his study coordinator extraordinaire, Dashiell MacGeraghty, followed.
Ridley nodded.
“Theo says that his calibration guy will be here for the freezer first thing in the morning,” Dash informed him.
“And did you tell him that we’re getting different readings from the controllers than from the data logger?”
“Yup.” Dash stepped fully into the doorway, sticking a hand into the pocket of his twill chinos and leaning against the jamb. “Hence, they’re coming tomorrow morning...first thing.”
“Sorry, I’m just worried that if it wasn’t time for our recertification in New York, we might’ve missed that little malfunction here in London too.”
Dash took a deep breath, his blue eyes narrowing on Ridley. He rubbed the robust brown beard along his jawline with his knuckles.
“We wouldn’t have.” Dash came further into the room. “Because I don’t need an accreditation assessment to tell me whether my lab is up to snuff,” he said, his Irish brogue getting thicker, as it did when he was getting excited or feeling aggrieved. “Particularly when it’s completely voluntary anyway. Only an eejit sets themselves up for failure.”
Ridley groaned, taking off his glasses to massage the bridge of his nose. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything. I know that you’re on top of it.”
“And on the sides and the bottom of it too.”
This was undeniably true. If there was anything Ridley could say about his friend and longtime colleague, it was that minutiae, no matter how minuscule, did not get past Dash. When Ridley said to people that he was a scientist, without fail, visions of Ridley as a tall, dark Bunsen Honeydew in a laboratory surrounded by microscopes, centrifuges and bubbling glass beakers, wearing a starchy white lab coat, appeared. But the lab coat was probably the most accurate part.
As the principal investigator of a clinical trial, a good portion of his job involved taking meetings, approving trial participants and overseeing compliance with governmental guidelines, among various other tasks on any given day. It was actually Dash as his coordinator who, generally speaking, dealt with the obvious stuff, keeping all the trains running on time while Ridley was elsewhere buried neck-deep in paperwork. And Ridley loved that division of labor. Normally, he didn’t micromanage or stray outside their prescribed realms of responsibility. He just liked to know things were under control.
“You know I’m just paranoid about spoilage,” Ridley explained apologetically.
Luckily, Dash never took things personally. It was the bedrock of his relationship with a prickly man like Ridley and as one might expect, Ridley appreciated that more than he ever admitted. “Relax, Granda’. Your cold chain will stay intact, I promise,” Dash said, referring to the part their temperature-sensitive cold storage freezers played in ensuring the safe storage and transport of their medicine vials.
Ridley rolled his eyes. Dash only called him “Granddad” when he was being particularly ornery. Which was especially jarring since Dash was six years older than him. Ridley ran a hand over his head, feeling the fuzz on the sides by his ears and the nape of his neck. His low-fade Caesar was well overdue for a shape-up. Just another way in which he wasn’t handling business at his usual high level.
I probably look like a hobo to Lanie , he chided himself, then wondered why he was thinking of her again. He was thinking about her a lot lately.
“You know it’s probably nothing, right?” Dash rounded the chair in front of the desk and sat in it. “I bet when the tech comes, he’ll say that we can account for the difference of degrees with the calibration itself.”
Ridley sighed then nodded. He also knew that Dash was experienced enough to be entrusted with whatever the issue turned out to be. Unlike the coordinator in New York—one of Dash’s grad school friends, whose mounting incompetence necessitated Ridley’s frequent visits to the States to oversee everything and who was on the razor’s edge of being demoted—Dash was competence personified.
“Alright, alright. I’ll relax.”
It was all under control; they both knew it.
“Quarter to six.” Dash made a show of checking his watch. He looked at the darkened sky outside the paneled windows behind Ridley’s desk. “Time to pack it up, Dr. Aronsen.”
As if responding to Dash’s pronouncement, Ridley’s cell went off, rattling loudly on the blotter covering his desk. Reflexively, he snatched it up, checking it, then smiled.
It was Lanie.
“That Buzz?”
“No.”
Silence.
Ridley looked down at his iPad and reread the same sentence about some patients being treated with competing pharmacological interventions to the ones he was studying. For the fourth time . But he’d be good and goddamned before Dashiell MacGeraghty outwaited him. He skipped forward, stroking a finger along the screen, pretending to be engrossed.
Dash sat in the chair opposite him, outstretched legs crossed over each other casually, twiddling his fingers.
“So...” he said, catching Ridley’s eye before he could resume pretending to read.
“So?” Ridley fought slight amusement as Dash fished.
It was ironic. Dash nicknamed Bea “Buzz” when he was the one who incessantly circled a thing before landing on it.
After another minute or two, his friend’s patience had grown gossamer thin. Dash rubbed his furry jaw again. Dash never looked more like an oversized Tolkien-movie dwarf than when he got focused and intractable, frowning furiously with an expression carved of stone.
“Oh, is that who I think it is?” Dash pointed one of his thick fingers at the phone back on Ridley’s desk. “The girl?”
Ridley flipped the phone face down as if Dash could see something, checking the iPad again. But it had gone to sleep. “No.”
He said it as easily and as devoid of emotion as he could manage. Still, Dash was like a dog with a bone now.
“Liar.” Dash’s Irish tongue rolled dramatically.
Ridley groaned, wishing he hadn’t let Dash in on anything involving Lanie. But that had become impossible after an evening when he and Dash were supposed to be having a “lad’s night,” hanging out watching football. Instead, Lanie had texted him all evening. And in that flurry of messages, Lanie had proven herself to be an important new wrinkle in Ridley’s life. Just by virtue of the fact that each and every time she reached out, Ridley responded, clueing Dash into something without saying a single word.
“Fine, it was her.” Ridley fought a rising at the corners of his mouth.
“Oh Jaysus! You like her!”
He supposed there was no point in denying he did. “So?”
Dash’s round and ruddy stone dwarf face lit up. “You? The captain of the HMS Celibacy ?”
Ridley rolled his eyes.
Before Thyra’s passing, Dash used to call him the “captain of the HMS Relation-ship ,” so Dash thought this new moniker was some clever wordplay. But looking over Dash’s shoulder, Ridley just wished his office door was closed.
Dash clapped his large palms together loudly. Ridley jumped.
“So?”
“So, it means you’re ready to dust the cobwebs off the ole bollocks and stop being such a dryshite!” Dash rubbed his hands together with relish. “At bloody last!”
“Get out.” Ridley pointed at the door.
“What?” Dash held his hands up defensively but chuckled with puckish amusement. “Have you mentioned her to Buzz?”
Ridley’s mild amusement was cut short. “No. Of course not.”
“Don’t get testy,” Dash said. “The amount of time you spend on that phone, I just thought maybe—”
“It’s not that. She’s just...” Ridley shrugged. “Just...”
“Just what? Spit it out, man!”
“Interesting.”
“Can I finally know Just Interesting’s given name? I mean, you see her every time you’re in the States, for feck’s sake. You’re not just texting anymore, clearly.”
Ridley took a moment, imagining her laughing face before giving his friend’s question his attention. “Melanie.”
“Melanie? Melanie sounds like a felony. How old is she?”
Ridley used his middle finger to shift his glasses slightly on his face. Dash grinned.
“Old enough.” Ridley realized then he didn’t actually know. He guessed not much past her mid-to-late twenties.
That would make her ten years his junior . God, am I robbing the cradle? Ridley kept the doubt in his mind off his face, then shook his head. Why the hell am I even thinking that?
“But it’s not like that between us anyway,” he asserted, oddly confused about whether that was true.
“Okay.” Dash nodded, amused, finally beginning to rise. “Well, I’m happy you’ve finally met someone ‘interesting,’ regardless. It’s been too long, brother.”
Ridley nodded, but still wondered—had it been long enough?