Chapter 78
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
MICAH
I got my lab back without much trouble. My office and my class, too.
I’d be teaching again starting spring semester.
It seemed like they’d temporarily given both Unit Ops sections to the other person who taught it, but with me back, the sections could be split again.
I was grateful they hadn’t finalized anything with hiring a new professor.
I used to think I wouldn’t need this job once I had other things in my life.
Chemical engineering had been nothing but a distraction from the pain of losing Mason, and eventually a vessel through which I was lucky enough to meet Dakota.
It was supposed to be an objective I could have to fill my endless amount of time.
But now, even with Dakota and Mason back in my life, I still wanted to be here at Blackpine. Teaching. Researching. Being caught up in all of it.
The mathematics had become so much more beautiful and the science so much more profound now that it’d brought me to Dakota—now that I could witness all of it through her eyes.
Her blue pen strokes, her soft voice, her beautiful brain.
I loved teaching her more than I ever enjoyed learning it myself. It actually felt meaningful this way.
For years, engineering had worked fine as a distraction, as a shallow purpose for my life, but it became something else once I met her.
At first, it was a way I could categorically improve her life, by giving her more lab experience for her resume, and by helping increase her confidence in herself.
But then it became more. A passion I had because I lived through her.
She’d encouraged me to continue the research I’d been doing all the way back when I got my doctorate, the process I’d written about for my dissertation.
Kinetics and Mechanisms of Neon Isotope Separation in Low-Temperature Catalytic Systems. My main focus had to remain on sustainability—that’s what my funding was actually for—but I spent my spare time working on my personal research.
With very little effort, I’d been able to convince the university to give Dakota a permanent role with me in the lab.
A role which did pay quite a bit more than minimum wage.
My grad student, Nick, had graduated at the same time Dakota did, and he wasn’t at Blackpine at all anymore.
I wished I’d been able to see his graduation, too.
Dakota and I been working our way through any other research we could find on similar neon separation processes—not much—going back through my own research, and of course fucking around with equipment in the lab.
Against the far wall, to the side of the stainless-steel distillation column I’d spent years refining as part of my main research, another network of polished tubing wound between insulated vessels.
The vessels were now coated with a thin layer of frost. Weeks of redesigning my dissertation work had ended in something far less elegant than I’d imagined in graduate school—a compact enrichment system meant for no one but us.
It separated, concentrated, and stored trace atmospheric neon in its reservoir, which was no bigger than a scuba tank.
The reservoir was most of the way full now, but it’d taken several weeks to get there.
It was absurdly inefficient. Entirely impractical. Perfect.
A passion project.
Because I had passions now, apparently.
I was also irrevocably in love with two people.
None of us were entirely healed, but we had time for all that. There was too much pain in our past to erase it so simply. I knew the hard times would be back, knew we’d be tested, knew things might even fall apart again. But the difference this time was that we’d never let them stay that way.
That was because of Dakota.
I took no credit for this, and neither did Mason.
She was the sole reason we’d been reunited, and the sole reason we were able to love again now. This brave, broken girl, showing both of us how to breathe again, despite her own pain. She was a miracle.
I often found her sleeping in my office, waiting for me to finish lecture.
Seeing her like that still took my breath away.
Like I’d somehow gotten lucky enough to be entrusted with protecting the most precious thing in the universe, and she wanted me to.
She trusted me. She loved me. She felt cared for and safe enough to seek me out for comfort.
I couldn’t even really describe the way that made me feel.
Or sometimes she stood outside the building with Mason, waiting for me to emerge after lecturing, and I loved that too.
Never in a million years had I expected to be given this second chance to love him, and I refused to waste it.
Fifty-two years was only a small dent in the amount of time I wanted to spend with him.
I was standing in the lab now, waiting for Dakota and Mason to arrive. He’d been down here a few times, usually just when he dropped Dakota off, or brought food—he found the rule about no food in the lab quite irritating. But I liked watching him and Dakota eating at the table in the hallway.
There was a soft knock at the door, then it opened.
“Hey, Masters,” I said as Dakota went into my arms, her face pressed to my chest. I stroked my palm over the back of her head, feeling her soft hair. Mason shut the door behind himself, then stood at Dakota’s back, his eyes finding mine.
I slipped one of my hands onto his forearm, tapping my index finger three times.
I. Love. You.
He grinned and did the same thing back to me.
“I’m so excited,” Dakota said as she pulled away, her voice full of joy.
I was excited, too. Probably even more than she was.
“Do you want to do the honors?” I asked her.
She shook her head vigorously. “No. It should be you. I want it to be you.”
“If I do it, I might end up convincing myself we should wait another two weeks until the reservoir is entirely full,” I warned, not meaning it at all.
“You would not do that,” Dakota insisted, crossing her arms. “It’s almost full already, and it’s my birthday week.”
“I know. I’m messing with you.”
“Alright,” Mason cut in. “One of you, please. I am dying to see what keeps you two holed up in here until the middle of the night all the fucking time.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “You’re always welcome to join.”
“I think I’d find it difficult not to want to fuck either of you.”
“Oh, we do fuck. Usually upstairs in my office, though. Don’t want to mess up the expensive equipment.”
Mason’s gaze dropped lower, to Dakota. “Baby, is this true?” His voice was full of faux concern, which made her grin. “Are you fucking your professor in his office late at night without me?”
“No.” She rolled her lips together. “I’m fucking my boss.”
“Okay, that is so much better. Thank you, baby.” He gently held her throat as he kissed her on the lips, her hands grabbing his wrist as she leaned into him. After a few seconds, he straightened up and looked at me. “I would also like to fuck your boss.”
“It can be arranged,” Dakota promised, her eyes darting between both of us. “As long as I get to watch.”
A real smile pulled on Mason’s mouth then, and he kissed me. I held the back of his neck, feeling all his warmth, his strength, the familiarity of his body against mine.
“Alright, Kill,” he mumbled, pulling away, the corners of his eyes still crinkled with amusement. “Please flip whatever switch you need to flip. I’m impatient.”
“I know you are, Ash.”
But I didn’t want to keep waiting, either.
I approached the tubing against the wall and turned the first valve, frost creeping along silver metal pipes, compressors humming, pressure gauges rising.
Then, the second valve. My fingers twitched at the soft, metallic noise.
There was a faint hiss of compressed gas leaving the storage vessel.
Nothing dramatic happened visually; there wasn’t enough neon to change the color of the air or make the room feel different to a human. The instruments were the only proof. My heart beat harder. The digital analyzer climbed steadily, tracing numbers impossible anywhere else on Earth.
But I felt it before the monitor finished climbing.
That drip of life into my veins.
It’d worked.
My lungs expanded with a real breath of air, neon soaking my veins, loosening the knot in my chest for the first time in so many decades.
Dakota did the same. So did Mason.
I’d already adjusted the flow to be steady enough as not to cause akrasia.
I looked between both of them, more grateful than I had words for.
This was a life I’d never dared to imagine for myself.
A future so good I still felt unworthy of it.
But it was here, and I was living in it.
I’d been lucky enough to be granted the love of two people.
Mason had half of my soul and Dakota had the other half.
I didn’t need any of it to belong to me anymore. They could hold it in its entirety.
The walls to my labyrinth hadn’t vanished. The maze of my brain remained as vast as ever. I hadn’t magically decided to unlock every door and shed light on every corner.
But I no longer viewed it as a place I wanted to stay within forever.
The exit had never been hidden, only feared.
I was learning to face my fear of it now.
With them.
We breathed and breathed, feeling the abundance of neon slowly building in our system. I reached for the light switch and flipped it, bathing the room in darkness.
And all three of us were glowing.
Ultraneon.