7 - Jess
Jess
The scent of vinegar and decomposing cellulose always greeted me the moment I crossed the threshold of the conservation lab. To the uninitiated, it smelled like a flooded basement fighting a chemical spill, but to me, it was the comforting aroma of a fresh puzzle.
On Monday morning, the sterile, fluorescent-lit underbelly of the museum was a sanctuary.
Down here, behind secure keycard access doors, no towering, arrogant men flashed their abs in communal locker room showers, and no champagne-colored bridesmaids' dresses existed to clog my thoughts.
There was only the quiet, rhythmic drone of the HVAC system regulating the humidity, and the physical remains of the past.
I stood over the stainless-steel examination table, completely armored for the shift in a heavy canvas apron, snug nitrile gloves, and a surgical mask that muffled my breathing.
Resting on the metal surface were three battered, water-damaged cardboard boxes that had arrived via courier from an estate sale in upstate New York.
This was my latest assignment: the unedited, uncataloged personal papers of Constance Hastings, a prominent but largely obscured mid-Atlantic suffragette from the early 1920s.
"Let's see what you’ve left behind, Constance," I murmured, my voice echoing slightly behind the paper mask.
I lifted the lid of the first container, releasing a faint cloud of ancient dust that was instantly sucked upward by the ventilation hood.
The contents were in a state of advanced decay.
Having survived decades in a leaky attic, the documents had borne the brunt of East Coast summers.
A thick, powdery coating of black mold crept along the edges of the top folders, and the paper itself was incredibly brittle, warped into rigid waves from old moisture exposure.
"Jess, tell me you’ve found something we can display by next month."
The sharp rap of knuckles against the doorframe made me jump. I adjusted my magnifying visor, looking up to find Marcus leaning into the lab. My supervisor was a man permanently harried by museum board deadlines, his tie perpetually askew and a tablet somehow always clutched to his ribs.
"Marcus," I said, my voice muffled through the mask. "I just cracked the first box. It’s a total biohazard down here. The mold is active, and the paper is flaking if I even look at it sideways."
He let out a stressed sigh, tapping his stylus against the tablet screen.
"I know, I know. But the donors who funded the acquisition are breathing down the director's neck.
They want a curated preview of the Hastings collection ready for the upcoming gala, which means you have about three weeks to stabilize, sort, and draft a preliminary finding aid. Can you fast-track it?"
I frowned, looking back down at the delicate, decaying history before me. "You can't rush red rot and vinegar syndrome, Marcus. If my hands slip because I'm sprinting through the preservation stage, we lose the ink entirely."
"Just do what you can to make the top layer presentable for the glass cases," he urged, giving me a pleading look. "The board needs a win, Jess. No pressure, but the spotlight is officially on this table."
With a parting nod, he ducked back out, his hurried footsteps fading down the hall.
I let out a long breath, the sudden weight of the deadline settling onto my shoulders. The museum was supposed to be my escape from stress, not another source of it. Still, the urgency only meant I needed to root myself deeper into the work.
Using a pair of fine silver tweezers and a camel-hair brush, I returned to the meticulous choreography of stabilization.
I worked with tiny micro-movements, gently sweeping away the loose spores from a handwritten manifesto dated August 1919.
The immense focus required for the task gradually emptied my brain, forcing the lingering image of Dane’s bare chest to dissolve.
By lunch time, I had successfully pried a thick stack of tightly bound documents from the bottom of the second box. The twine holding them together had long since rotted, but the pages were fused from chemical breakdown.
I slid a thin micro-spatula beneath the edge of the top sheet, slowly coaxing the fragile fibers apart. As the page finally separated, the elegant, looping calligraphy didn't look like a political speech or a meeting log.
I pulled my magnifying visor down, leaning closer to the purple script.
My dearest Constance, the ink read, charting a passionate, desperate rhythm across the yellowed parchment. They tell us the world is changing, that the vote will give us a voice, but my voice is only yours in the dark. Let them march in the streets. I am only waiting for the train back to you.
My breath caught. These weren't political papers. They were love letters. Secret declarations from a period when a woman holding onto a hidden passion could ruin her life in an instant.
David’s voice pushed into my head yet again. He seemed to think I needed to let my hair down a little more. Not question every last sliver of temptation I was met with.
But apparently women had been facing damning consequences for their choices in love for eons. I held the evidence in my hands, and it made me more determined to keep my dick in my pants, as it were.
This newfound resolve brought my focus back without even trying. Hours passed without me noticing, and only once, when Walter tapped on the doorframe, did I realize a whole day had passed.
“You planning on closing up?” His wire-rimmed glasses were taped in the middle and one side dipped lower than the other. That, and his perpetually untucked shirt made him always look like he’d just dragged himself from a barroom brawl.
The crick in my neck protested as I stretched my back to sit up straight. Poring over these love letters had totally derailed me. Marcus wouldn’t be too happy about that, but the pronounced, poetic yearning over time and space had unspooled something in me.
“New project,” I said, rubbing my eyes. It was always a shock to my system, looking up from the pinpoint lighting illuminating the past and seeing the world as it actually was. “Got a little sidetracked.”
“As one does,” Walter said, flicking his bangs out of his face. “Anything good?”
Only the greatest love story in the history of ever.
“The usual.” I shrugged out of my lab coat and discarded the gloves. The process usually severed the thread between myself and history. Clean. Absolute. Until the next time I walked into this basement.
But today was different. Today I suspected Constance and her beloved ‘R’ would be following me home.
Leaving the museum always felt the same. After breathing recycled air and the sour tang of decomposition for hours on end, breaching the doors was like crossing an invisible atmospheric border.
“Need a lift?” I squinted into the sunlight, my skin prickling through the change in climate. Controlled to chaotic. Just like that.
Walter flashed a sheepish half-smile. “Actually, I’m not going straight home today, but thanks.”
That was all he gave me, but the look on his face was far less mysterious than his words. He had a date. And if he wasn’t even going to freshen up and change, that meant he’d found a woman who matched his particular air of disheveled nerditis.
The spring in his step as he walked off is what finally changed my mind. A suffragette from the early 1900s and a lanky tech geek a millennium later seemingly had no problem finding love. And here I was, still salty over a cheating ex from college.
“Well, guess what, Walter,” I muttered to his ghost as my Civic coughed to life, “I’m not going straight home either. I have plans. I happen to have a life. Interests that don’t involve harsh fluorescent lighting.”
Less than twenty minutes later, the harsh fluorescent lights of Capitol Fitness greeted me. Far more impersonal than the greeting I got from Hunter, who all but launched himself from behind the front desk.
“Jess!” A genuine brightness took over his features, doing wonders for my bruised ego. “You’re back. And on a Monday. I’d say I’m surprised, but I prefer to think our facility possesses a magnetic pull.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said, though the tension in my shoulder gave way a fraction.
My work pants and slightly wrinkled button-down felt totally out of place amidst the sea of Lycra milling about the juice bar, and I clutched my gym bag a little tighter.
“I had a day. A very long, microscopic day under a fume hood.
If I don't expel the residual fumes of the centuries-old dead, I might actually lose my mind.”
“Say no more.” The digital reader beeped as he cleared my entry, his eyes dancing with curious amusement. “What’s the prescription today? More aggressive pacing on the elliptical to shut out the noise?”
“No ellipticals,” I said, the memory of Dane’s smug face threatening to surface before I forcefully jammed it down. “I need actual exertion. Something heavy enough to derail my brain train.”
Hunter’s voice dropped to a pitch that shrank the distance between us, and a shrewd look flashed across his face. “If you want to truly annihilate a bad day, you need the iron.”
“Iron?”
“Go hit the weights in the back chamber,” he said, motioning to the muscle mansion with a marked jerk of his chin. “There’s nothing better for burning off a historic amount of stress than forcing your body to lift something that fights back.”
“Iron. Got it.” I walked toward the locker room, then stopped.
“By the way…” My gaze raked over his lean, muscular form from head to toe when he turned back.
This time his reaction was better than the smile I got when I’d walked in.
I could’ve sworn he blushed. “...it’s not the facility that has a magnetic pull. ”
His eyes flashed a sharper blue but I didn’t stick around to see the rest of it, smiling to myself as I pushed into the locker room.