Chapter 3
Neri
My stomach has been composing a formal complaint for the last hour.
The missing granola bars are haunting me like vengeful ghosts.
I can see them. Six of them, peanut butter and chocolate chips, stacked next to the fruit bowl in a neat little tower of foresight and betrayal.
I packed a backup laptop battery. I packed a backup of my backup of my talk. I packed a lint roller for my blazer.
I failed at packing the one item that would make this little trip actually agreeable.
The Belle thrums along through a light chop, engine vibrating up through the deck planks and into my bench and my teeth.
I’ve read the same sentence of my speaker notes eleven times.
Biosignature detection is not a promise, it is a probability.
Great sentence. Love that sentence. Would trade that sentence for a saltine.
I am acutely not aware of Dr. Rafael Vasquez, the resident Golden Retriever of this trip, who has been rummaging in his backpack for the past five minutes. I’m also not aware of how unfairly handsome the man is, tall and athletic, with just a touch of grey around the temples.
And I’m super, duper not aware of the frequent glances he shoots me, accompanied by wide, blindingly white smiles that fade after he realizes I’m not looking.
Because I’m not looking. Really. I have headphones on precisely so that nobody, no matter how tall, dark, handsome and nerdy, mistakes me for available conversation.
The headphones aren’t even playing anything. They’re just decoration.
I shake my head, then glue my eyes to my laptop screen and decide that I will not be paying attention to anything else for the rest of this boat ride.
Then the smell arrives.
Butter. Sugar. Some kind of berry situation, warmed over. It crosses the distance, waltzes straight through my defenses, and takes my stomach hostage in one move.
My stomach growls loudly enough to be heard over a marine diesel. I feel it more than hear it, a full seismic event, and I hunch over my laptop like it can muffle the sound of an earthquake. It doesn’t and it’s embarrassing.
“That was impressive.” A warm voice sounds just in front of me. Well, technically, just above me. “Was that you or did we hit a whale?”
I look up, perfectly aware of how ridiculous I am, hunched over my laptop with my headphones on my head and my stomach growling.
He’s standing there, tall and handsome and nerdy with his glasses, with a battered Tupperware in one hand.
I lift one headphone cup, pretending I didn’t hear him perfectly well before and do my best impression of an unenthusiastic customs officer.
“Can I help you?”
“Other way around, actually.”
His stupid snow-white smile stretches even more and he holds up the Tupperware and pops the lid.
The butter-sugar-berry situation escalates to weapons-grade and another loud-as-heck growl rises from my treacherous stomach.
Heat creeps up my face as his brows lift and I briefly contemplate the possibility of jumping into the ocean and swimming to shore. Briefly.
“Blueberry and brown butter,” he continues like nothing happened. “I made them yesterday. Boat rules say food tastes better when shared, and I’ve got more than any reasonable man needs.”
“No, thank you.”
“You’re sure?”
I’ll be double-damned if he doesn’t look as disappointed as a puppy whose owner refuses to toss a ball.
“I ate,” I say, with dignity.
My stomach, that Judas, growls for the third time. Louder. It echoes slightly off the wheelhouse.
He doesn’t laugh, which is somehow worse. The corners of his mouth do heroic load-bearing work while he stands there holding his container of delicious home-baked muffins like the world’s most patient bomb technician.
“Just take one muffin,” he says. “You’ll be doing me a favor. Storage space is limited at sea.”
And here is the thing about principles: they are load-rated.
Mine are rated for prejudiced faculty, condescending peers, and those who call me “the pretty mermaid.” They are not rated for brown butter at nautical midday on an empty stomach.
Every structure has a failure point. Mine happens to smell like blueberries.
It doesn’t hurt that there’s not a single bit of condescension in his entire demeanor.
“Fine, I’ll take one,” I say, like I’m agreeing to help him move apartments. “For storage reasons.”
God knows how, but the muffin is still faintly warm. Must be some galley alchemy or sexy-professor witchcraft. It’s dense in the way that means someone actually creamed the butter, and the top has crunchy sugar on it, and there are real berries in there that burst.
I take one bite, and my entire body produces a sound I’m not particularly proud of.
I want to be precise about this sound, because precision is my whole personality.
It is not a polite mmm. It is not an appreciative hum.
It is a full, throaty, from-the-diaphragm groan, the kind of sound a person makes in contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with baked goods, and it comes out of me before I can do one single thing about it.
The silence that follows has texture.
I open my eyes. When did I close my eyes?
Rafael Vasquez is watching me with the expression of a man witnessing a rare astronomical event, and then he laughs, bright and delighted and completely without malice, head tipped back, glasses flashing in the sun.
My entire face catches fire. I can feel the blush go down my neck, which means it’s visible, which means it’s feeding on itself, which means I am now a small teal-haired furnace sitting on a bench holding a half-eaten muffin like the murder weapon in a murder mystery game.
“I’m sorry,” he says, but he doesn’t look sorry at all.
He has both hands pressed to his chest and his grin is wide enough that it splits his entire face in half.
It’s an annoyingly endearing grin and it makes him somehow even more attractive.
“That’s the best review I’ve ever gotten.
And my mother once cried at my strawberry cheesecake, so the bar was high. ”
Shit. He bakes for his mother? This guy has to have some dark secret about him. Maybe he’s a serial killer or likes to litter on the highway? No one can be this freaking perfect.
“I was clearing my throat.”
“Sure.”
“The sea air,” I say, “it makes me hungry.”
“Absolutely.” He sits down on the bench across from me, uninvited, but at a respectful distance. It’s even more annoying because it’s so respectful. “For what it’s worth, my muffins get that reaction a lot. Department meetings run forty percent longer when I bring them. It’s become a real problem.”
I take another bite, because the damage is done and I’m not letting mortification win twice. Also, they are really fabulous.
“You bake for the whole department.” It’s not really a question. He has all the indications of a man who likes to bake just to please people.
Golden. Freaking. Retriever.
“Most Mondays.” He shrugs. “I like to bake when I think. This year involved a lot of thinking. There was a stretch in March, the commissioning reviews, when the third floor was basically a patisserie.”
And there it is, that little tone shift, the commissioning reviews, tossed off the way you’d mention weather.
The man spent ten years building the most ambitious ground telescope in the hemisphere and he narrates it like it was nothing more than baking a casserole.
Meanwhile I’ve spent five years and my entire blood supply getting to this postdoc and this paper, and if I tossed any of it off casually my molecules would disperse.
“That must be nice,” I say.
It comes out with edges. I hear myself and I regret it immediately. I have no right being curt with a man like that. Not when he’s so nice to me.
He tilts his head. “Which part?”
“Having a hobby.” I close my laptop, too hard. “Having spare capacity.”
“It’s cheaper than therapy, and you get muffins.
” He says it lightly, but his eyes have gone attentive behind the glasses, and being looked at attentively is my least favorite thing in the world.
“You’ve got the future-of-the-field slot Sunday, right?
I read your biosignature paper. It’s the best thing our building produced this year, and I’m counting the espresso machine. ”
And that.
That is exactly the kind of thing men like him say, generous and easy and costing him nothing.
Something in my chest goes hot and tight, because he means it, that’s the worst part, he means it and it’s still free for him.
Everything is free for him. The captain laughed for him in ninety seconds.
The department eats from his hands on Mondays. Literally.
He walks into rooms and the rooms are already his, and now he’ll walk onto that island and the telescope has his name all over the coverage, and if his talk goes badly today, if he stands up there and puns for twenty minutes, everyone will call it charming.
If mine goes badly, it confirms what half of them already think about girls who look like me. Mermaids aren’t meant for science. Mermaids are meant to look pretty and smile.
I hate how bitter I sound, even in my own thoughts.
“You read my paper,” I say. “That’s nice. Do you know what happens to me if the talk is as good as the paper?”
He blinks. “I’d assume a job offer.”
“Nothing happens. Nothing is what happens. Good is useless to me.” I’m keeping my voice down and it’s costing me.
The words come out fast, pressure-hosed.
I wish I could stop talking, but I can’t.
All this pressure comes out and my baking-golden-retriever companion is the unintended target of my ire.
“You can afford a hobby. You can afford a bad Tuesday and a dumb joke, and it all rounds to charming, because when you walk in, they see an astronomer.” I pinch my lips briefly, then I go on. “When I walk in, they see a pretty mermaid.”
He just looks at me, with his big brown eyes, his Tupperware full of muffins and for some reason, it spurs me on.
“When I get up there, they’ll spend the entire speech focusing on me and not the science.
Any slide, any sentence, any single thing that is less than perfect can cost me my entire future.
You can’t possibly understand what it’s like.
You’re a star astronomer with a telescope named after his own initials, practically, and you could not possibly, not on your best day, with a running start, grasp why I have to be perfect. ”
The engine thrums. A gull keeps pace off the rail for a second, checks our speed, banks away.
He doesn’t do any of the things men usually do when I tell them to get lost. He doesn’t put his hands up in fake surrender, doesn’t tell me to relax, doesn’t inform me that I’m being unfair to him personally, the great ally.
He just looks at me, and behind the glasses something has gone quiet and serious, and he says, “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Which is worse. Which is so much worse than arguing, because there’s nothing to push against, just a handsome, generous man agreeing with me, looking like he’s actually listening instead of waiting for his turn to talk.
The hot, tight thing in my chest cracks into something dangerously close to regret, and I do not have time for regret. I have the talk of my life to polish. I have a career with one exit left.
“Thank you for the muffin,” I say and I gather my laptop, my garment bag and my remaining dignity, all two ounces of it, and I walk to the stern.
He doesn’t follow.
I set up shop on a locker by the rail, back to the wheelhouse, face to the water because it’s the only direction on this boat without line of sight to Dr. Rafael Vasquez, and I eat the rest of the best muffin of my life, alone.
The wake unspools behind us, white on gray-blue, and the mainland is getting thin and low back there, and the ocean underneath all that churn is enormous and quiet and paying attention. I fix my eyes on my screen.
Biosignature detection is not a promise, it is a probability.
I read my opening slide twelve times. I do have to be perfect.
He could never understand it.
The muffin was excellent. I hope that ruins his day.