Chapter Two
He was just so big. Ernestine couldn’t stop thinking about him.
She only came up to his shoulder. He was so big it was nearly impractical.
And yet, there was something endlessly appealing about it.
It was one of those biological imperatives, she was sure.
It made sense that often women were very attracted to very strong, very large men because they exemplified the traits of a protector and a provider.
So, there was that. She was biologically predisposed to a fascination, the end.
She looked around the cabin. What she should have been focused on was this place. It was like something out of a dream or a cartoon. The kind of fantasy play she would’ve loved to see when she was a kid.
The entire place was fascinating. Maybe he seemed fascinating because of the context of it.
That was entirely possible. She’d never been to a place like this before.
She’d been to a lot of dry, dusty type environments, so she didn’t so much mean the environment as the ranch.
She didn’t think she would be interested in that kind of thing.
Though she should have known, anything new and novel was likely to find a trench in her brain to park, and marinate.
It was just how she was wired. New information was gold in every fashion imaginable.
He was a real cowboy. He had rolled up on the dig site with his cowboy hat, his blue jeans and his boots, and she felt transported to some other time and place.
It had always been a contradiction in Ernestine’s personality that she loved to get lost in fictional worlds as much as she loved to learn facts. At least, her parents had found it contradictory. But then, they found everything about her contradictory. They still did. They tried; they really did.
But the truth was, her parents were the most boring people alive.
That was maybe not fair, but she had spent more time with them than she had with other boring people.
Her parents were interested in social status and the goings-on of the neighborhood.
In small talk. The weather and the Joneses and how to keep up with them.
Ernestine could think of nothing she cared less about.
Her two sisters were the same as their parents.
They cared about clothes, and they cared about the minutiae of interpersonal relationships at school, at work and in their neighborhood.
And Ernestine cared about concepts. Ideas.
And characters in books, movies and TV shows.
She wanted to sit down and think about the world-building and her favorite fantasy series, or the composition of extremely nice sedimentary rock.
It felt like a gap. Like her brain existed at two completely opposite ends of the spectrum, and nowhere in between.
It worked for her job. She could dig for fossils while listening to audiobooks. And life was pretty good. If lonely sometimes.
Though staying in this place might minimize the loneliness. She had been prepared to do all of this entirely by herself, but maybe she didn’t have to.
And maybe when she had days off, Jax could show her around the ranch. That would be very interesting.
She thought about Rowdy and Dakota. They were also extremely handsome. But she had a feeling she was experiencing first-sight bias. Jax was the one she’d seen first, and so he was the one she was the most fascinated by. The one who felt the most handsome to her.
She felt compelled to figure out where each of their faces sat along the lines of the golden ratio.
That was kind of weird. Sometimes she was weird.
At least she knew that now. When she was a kid, she didn’t.
Because she could only experience life the way that she saw it, and when others didn’t experience it the same way, it was confusing and frustrating.
She had a lot of friendships that lasted about a year, then ended abruptly when she made a comment that the friend deemed offensive.
And she always struggled with that.
Because why wouldn’t people want to know the truth?
It seemed like something that would be useful.
If you couldn’t see a situation clearly, wasn’t it a good thing when a friend could see it for you?
But no. People always thought she was insensitive, which really hurt her feelings, because she was extremely sensitive.
It was why she cared about people getting a new perspective.
It was why she was trying to help in the first place.
Because other people’s pain was so uncomfortable.
It was why she chose a job where she, by and large, got to work alone.
She crept out of her basement office in the museum two days a week for junior programming and otherwise she was able to just do her own thing.
That suited her just fine. Her days were filled with cataloguing things that needed cataloguing, working on displays; mainly, it was a lot of research, a lot of writing, and…
grant writing. Lots and lots of grant writing.
But that was where her direct form of communication was helpful.
And that was the thing. Ernestine had figured out how to make qualities that people found irritating in her into assets. So there was no point in self-pity.
She looked around the beautiful glass cabin.
At night, she was going to be able to see the stars.
Oh, she really wished that she had brought her telescope.
Because that would be fascinating, of course; looking outside here would’ve been amazing as well.
It was just so dark, so far away from everything.
She loved places like this. It was like there was finally space.
Enough space around herself, enough space around her thoughts.
Someday, she’d love to live somewhere like this.
The idea that she could go out onto her vast expanse of property and dig for fossils at her leisure seemed like a crazy fantasy.
She looked at the time and sighed. She had to call her mother. It was her weekly FaceTime. Sometimes her dad joined.
Maybe she should be grateful for the fact that they wanted to speak to her on a regular schedule, particularly when they did find her mystifying and difficult.
But the older she got, the more she found it difficult to be grateful for people who didn’t even seem interested in understanding her.
To be fair, she wasn’t all that interested in understanding them.
She picked her phone up and dialed her mother.
It took a couple of seconds of ringing, and her mother’s face filled the screen.
“You got some sun today,” she said, first thing. Ernestine touched her cheeks. “I guess so.”
“Whereabouts are you?”
“Eastern Oregon. The middle of nowhere, frankly. I’m doing a dig.”
“Oh. That sounds nice.”
“What’s happening?” She could hear her dad’s voice coming from just out of the frame.
“She’s on a dig.”
“Oh.” Her dad’s face popped into the frame. “Good for you.”
“Thank you.”
“Your father’s golf swing has really improved. He’s going to be in a tournament with other retired dentists.”
And that was when the conversation turned entirely toward things Ernestine didn’t care about. But she had gotten very good at smiling and nodding the entire time people talked about such things. “What is it you’re looking for exactly?” her mom asked.
She always found these kinds of questions uncomfortable.
Because she wanted to talk about it. She wanted to talk about it, though, in detail that she knew no one else would be interested in.
She wanted to get deep and granular into why the fossil beds out here were so important, and why they held information that mattered.
She wanted to talk about the time period, about the ancient mammals that always took a back seat to dinosaurs as far as public interest, and how recent discoveries that had preserved footprints and even some hair were drawing the scientific community closer to filling in evolutionary gaps.
But she knew they were asking, not on that level. And it made her not want to talk about it at all, because it was just…unsatisfying.
Think about how you would explain it to kids at the museum.
Well. The truth was, if she was going to explain it to kids at the museum, she would do it in detail.
So, she would make the details as sensational and gross as possible, because kids did seem to enjoy that.
She liked teaching kids. Especially the ones that came to the museum for the purpose of learning.
Because no one in her life had been excited that she wanted to learn, she took it as her solemn duty to make the kids that came into the museum feel appreciated for being inquisitive and curious.
“Fossils,” she said.
“Well. That’s… You do like that.”
“I do,” she said.
Then her mother spent another fifteen minutes telling her everything there was to know about her sister Violet’s wedding plans, and her sister Abigail’s bid to be on the HOA.
And Ernestine was antsy to get off for dinner.
Which she felt she managed to do in a very polite way, and was feeling self-congratulatory as she heated up her instant meal.
It was nice to be able to use a stovetop and not have to cook it over a fire.
She also decided to take it to her bed, which was beautiful, and ironically made her feel closer to the outdoors than the tent had.
She opened up her laptop and put on a cherished sitcom.
She liked to watch the same characters over and over sometimes because it was comforting.
No matter how much life changed, no matter how much she felt like she was being left behind sometimes, those people and places never changed. They were always there for her.
She thought about Jax again. Who was an entirely new person, and was all the more fascinating for it. More like a fossil than a fictional man. Because he was something that she wanted to learn about. Not something she just wanted to become familiar with.
She hadn’t met very many men who were that physically distracting.
There had been a man she’d been on a dig with back in college, and he’d been that same distracting sort of handsome, and it had been difficult for her to think as deeply about the work as she wanted to when he was around.
He’d also been married, and she definitely would never pursue a married man.
It was absolutely outside her moral code. But he thought there was something else going on…
The disappointment of that—of the moment he’d tried to kiss her—and said that she had been sending hints… That was something that she hadn’t really gotten over.
It’d been five years since then, but she had no idea how she was supposed to know she was sending signals if she was really sure that she wasn’t.
Or maybe she had been, because she was attracted to him.
So maybe it was her fault. Whatever, she had decided it was much easier to just keep blinders on.
And for someone who really liked to learn things, leaving that part of life unexplored was unsatisfying sometimes.
But it kept her safe.
People just felt too dangerous sometimes.
Like Dr. Haley Boesch and her stolen dig site.
Jax might not understand what bone wars were, but she did.
All too well. If she thought too much about it, she was going to get angry, and then she was going to spend all night obsessing about it.
Then, she was going to have to stop herself from marching over to that stolen dig site and telling Haley it was entirely wrong of her to have done this.
Because her taking that spot was based on her stealing Ernestine’s research.
There were plenty of people who thought that doing whatever they had to do to get ahead was all right.
But Ernestine would just never be okay with that.
What was the point if it wasn’t your own discovery?
What was the point if it wasn’t your own research?
She had a brain for a reason. It was to figure things like this out. To explore these sorts of things.
That kind of laziness was just something she couldn’t tolerate. The lack of integrity. That had always been another big schism she had found existed between herself and the people around her.
A lot of people just wanted the things. Ernestine cared about how she got them.
She turned her focus back to her laptop, watched her show and finished eating dinner. And when she lay back and looked up at the stars through the glass ceiling, she thought that just maybe her integrity had been rewarded.