Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Gravity and I have an adversarial relationship. Usually it limits itself to small indignities—stubbed toes, dropped pens, the occasional near miss on stairs. Today, apparently, it decided to escalate. To test something new.
Up until now, campus has mostly let me exist in peace—Summer-related incident aside—but apparently that streak ends here, in a lab full of witnesses, with blot papers scattered at my feet and my luck finally deciding to cut and run.
“I can help you fix it,” I say, already crouching toward the papers before looking up into the flaring nostrils of one very angry grad student.
“How about you be careful in the first damn place?” he snaps, loud enough to swivel a few heads—Damon’s included.
Alright, sure. I guess he does have a good excuse for being upset.
But to be this rude? He’s been obnoxious and loud since he and his buddy stepped into the lab, and I’m ninety percent certain at least half his procedures were sprinted through.
But personal opinions aside, he’s not exactly wrong. It is my fault.
Now we’re both staring at a mess he’ll have to start from scratch, and guilt gnaws at me while my brain flips into triage: stop the spill, salvage anything with a readable label, and survive the dozen pairs of eyes currently auditing my disaster.
I neither need nor want to be the center of attention.
Yet here I am.
“Listen, why don’t you show me your catalogue and I’ll help you reset the run?” I say, aiming a smile at his blotchy-red face. “Two sets of hands and we’ll rebuild it quickly.”
He looks me up and down with all the disdain reserved for shark fin soup. “No, thanks, you’d only make it worse.”
“You’d be surprised, I’m sure I can be useful.”
“Will you just go away?” he shouts. It’s funny how often debate in academic settings translates to a man raising his voice at a woman until she stops talking. “This is why they shouldn’t let girls in the lab.”
Oh, no. Absolutely not. I am a peaceful person—except when forced to negotiate with Excel—but nothing needles me faster than a guy who handles his samples with bare hands, skips half the prep, slaps the wrong labels on the tubes, and then announces women shouldn’t be in STEM.
Has his brain been parked in formaldehyde since the nineteenth century?
The comebacks stampede my brain: shove it; better yet, park yourself on a Bunsen burner set to high; or, if you’re feeling immortal, go repeat that line to the framed photo of Rosalind Franklin in the hallway.
But a voice, clean and unhurried, beats me to it.
“Mr. Colt. Surely I heard you wrong.”
We pivot like a lazy turntable. Holden leans in the doorway—arms crossed, height almost too much for the frame. His face is bored; his eyes aren’t. Coffee-dark with that thin ring of hazel I pretend not to remember, and right now, furious.
The room reacts as one. A couple gasps. Paper rustles. Someone whispers, “Colt’s dead,” and someone else, “the chick too,” which—comforting. The girl by the wash sink forgets to close her mouth and actually drools. Maybe not the right time, but who can blame her.
You’d think his showing up would take the heat out of being talked down to and eating tile under thirty pairs of eyes, right?
Holden, of all people, on my side? Then why are relief and annoyance elbowing each other like lab partners who won’t share a pipette?
I’m grateful, truly, but there’s nothing like being humiliated by one man and rescued by another to prove we still don’t speak the same language.
“I—uh.” Colt rubs the back of his neck and cuts me a pleading look. I almost—almost—feel bad; Holden’s gaze is a riptide, anger swirling in those beautiful eyes, and if it were aimed at me I’d run. And, given the mess I made of his lab, I might be next.
“You seemed chattier a minute ago,” Holden adds, one dark brow lifting a deliberate millimeter. “Something about women in labs? Care to enunciate?”
Colt remains silent, and Holden doesn’t raise his voice.
He doesn’t need to. “You will apologize,” he says, each word clipped and punctuated by a step forward, “then you will collect what’s left of your work and remove yourself from my section.
If you need a refresher, the harassment clause lives on the syllabus I’m now pretty damn sure you didn’t read. ”
Color drains from Colt’s face. “Sorry,” he mutters in my direction, then bolts through the opposite door, very committed to eye contact with no one.
Holden takes a few steps back towards the doorframe, the authority dialed down for public consumption, the undercurrent of anger still very much there. “Ms. Taylor,” he says, eyes on mine for one beat too long, “are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Good.” And that’s that. He turns on his heel and is gone as abruptly as he appeared, shoulders squared, watch flashing once under the fluorescents, as if this didn’t just crack my top ten most mortifying lab moments.
The room resumes its hum like nothing happened—pumps, fridges, the soft tick of timers—while my pulse tries its very hardest to settle.
When I’m finally convinced no one’s still watching, I head for my bench.
Naturally, my lab coat snags on the corner of a desk and yanks me backward like I’m on a leash.
If this scratchy polyester penitentiary manages to strangle me, at this point I just hope someone has the decency to lie at my funeral and say I died saving a whale.
“You’re going through it,” Kai says, dragging a stool over and perching, one corner of his mouth smirking, the other busy with a Nerds Rope.
I drop onto mine with a thud. “No food in the lab.”
He pockets the candy without blinking. “You’re right, we wouldn’t want yet another reason to summon Wilkes so he can come scowl at us, would we?”
I bury my face in my hands for a beat. “Ugh, I hate you.”
He chuckles, perfectly unbothered. He claimed he finished his work in the first hour, which is adorable, and has spent every minute since delivering what he calls essential campus updates.
In retrospect, he is at least forty percent of the reason I wasn’t looking when I manhandled Colt’s samples.
I will be listing him as a co-author on the incident report.
What upgrades this from mortifying to catastrophic is that it’s my first contact with Holden since he hauled me out of the Pacific a week ago.
We’ve sustained a tidy week of mutually assured avoidance—mostly my strategic rerouting around his known office hours and, if the empty doorways are any indication, his.
Separate orbits, nonoverlapping home ranges. Until now.
And Kai knows it all too well. “You know what you need?” He eases my pH meter out of my hands like he’s confiscating contraband. “A day out of this place.” He gestures at the gloss-white walls and surgical tables. “Self-care.”
“I do self-care.” Which, for me, is lowering my shoulders from earring height, letting Maya’s playlists pressure-wash my brain, and consuming an irresponsible number of spam musubi.
Maya says I should go outside more. I told her I spent six hours in a tide pool last week. She says that doesn’t count.
I respectfully disagree.
I can’t help it; the reason I’m here requires stellar grades, perfect attendance, compliance with every rule in the binder. I owe the version of me who fought for this scholarship the courtesy of not fumbling it.
“Prove it, then. Let’s get out of here.”
The panic must flash across my face, because Kai laughs. “Just an hour, Taylor. A tiny one. In the real world.”
I look at my station, still frozen in the aftermath of the Colt fiasco, then at his lopsided grin. Fine. I cap what needs capping, wipe the bench, hang my lab coat like it can sulk without me, and we’re out.
Ethanol gives way to chlorophyll as we push through the door and onto the freshly cut campus lawn. The sun feels indecent in the best way.
One thing is for certain: I might never get used to the island’s vibrancy. It’s like borrowing a mantis shrimp’s eyes—every channel cranked, every color saturated to the brim and then some. Even Kai, who moved here in his early teens, says it still blindsides him.
Biology has a reason for all this color.
Evolution is a wonderful thing; and in a species-rich environment like this, plants and animals have to be legible fast. Flowers push pigment to steer pollinators, birds and geckos flash throat patches like uniforms, and a few neon show-offs go bright on purpose—to send a message.
When the backdrop is loud, you either speak in color or you disappear.
Some species use it as a straight-up threat display: vibrant says do not touch.
Holden’s eyes, for example—smoky at the rim, warm amber in the center—read like a hazard sign to my nervous system.
A threat to, well, my sanity. And I do believe in signs.
Especially cautionary ones. I’m just apparently very good at ignoring them.
We veer into a small bookstore a few streets from the marine sciences building—part of the deal I struck with Kai.
I’ll kick academia to the curb for a couple of hours if he buys a book that isn’t about the ocean.
No reef IDs, no field guides, no “Fishes of the…” anything.
He admits he can’t remember the last time he picked up something that wasn’t a manual.
And after the day I’ve had, I’m allowed a few romance tropes myself. On paper, of course.
We skim the aisles. It’s cooler in here, the air faintly papery-sweet, a ceiling fan clicking like a metronome.
I hate to say it, but I’m having fun. More than fun.
Kai is adorably out of his depth, reading blurbs with his eyebrows raised and firing questions I have all the answers to.
Yes, two beds at the inn is a crime against humanity.
Of course, “who did this to you” is the superior trope.
And no, Holden and I are not grumpy/sunshine. I don’t think.