Chapter 19
chapter
nineteen
CALDER
Shay lifted her fork without complaint and went cross-eyed. A noise somewhere between a moan and sigh rose in her throat. Then she caught herself, shooting an embarrassed look in my direction.
I shifted.
Fuck.
It wasn’t lost on me how fucked up it was meeting Shay for a “first” date when I already knew what she looked like coming.
I couldn’t stop staring. The dress she’d worn on our actual first date was burned into my retinas forever. But this dress? This did something different. Sinful. Black. Clinging to all the perfect, soft parts of her.
My phone vibrated, and as Shay adjusted her napkin, I stole a quick glance to see Butcher had sent me a slew of chaotic, nonsensical emojis: a cloud, a robot, the demon face, two emojis of the woman dancing, and the fucking Puerto Rican flag.
This was his fucked-up way of reminding me I was still in his orbit.
“So…you’re an accountant?” she asked.
I shoved my phone back into my pocket. Tonight I was Calder.
“Forensic accounting,” I answered. It wasn’t entirely untrue.
“So you catch bad guys with math?” she asked, and tilted her head to the left, an action I was starting to see meant she was analyzing something.
It was distractingly cute.
“Something like that,” I said.
She nodded to herself, taking another bite of her appetizer.
“You’re only in Utah for a little?” Shay asked, and I nodded. “How long will you be here?”
I rubbed the back of my neck. Normally I’d be gone within the month. Andrew and Butcher were complicating things.
“Maybe another month or two,” I said.
She nodded and finished her plate. A moment later the appetizers were cleared, and we had a few minutes before the main course.
We fell into silence. She kept looking up at me, biting her lip, brow furrowed. She was more nervous in a restaurant than when I’d chased her across a fucking graveyard.
I found it oddly endearing.
“When did you become vegetarian?” I asked.
“About four years ago,” she said. “I found my body reacted better to a plant-based diet. It was one of the first things that really helped me get better.”
“Better?” I asked.
She froze, looking like a deer in headlights.
Guilt flooded my body. Because I knew what she meant. I’d crossed that boundary days ago and stolen the information.
Guilt because I still wanted to hear it from her lips.
But even when I’d been Void, she hadn’t opened up about this.
“I’ve never been vegetarian,” I said instead, and she visibly relaxed at the shift in conversation. “But when I was a kid, I thought Goldfish came from actual fish, so I didn’t eat them for years.”
She laughed, then snorted, covering her mouth, eyes wide.
Fuck. The noise went straight to my cock.
It was somehow soft, glittery, and totally fucking chaotic.
The waitress set down a steaming plate of pot roast and a thick burnt-orange soup—butternut. Next came the sides, brussels sprouts, fries, and garlic potatoes.
“I think there’s been some kind of mistake,” Shay said to the waitress. “I didn’t order this.”
The waitress shot me a concerned look, and I shook my head.
“Did you order this?” she asked, eyes narrowing in accusation.
Yes.
She’d gone from “starving” to ordering a salad, coincidentally the cheapest thing on the menu. I’d been mildly offended that she thought I wouldn’t pay for her meal.
“You were hungry,” I said, and picked up my fork, but had no intention of eating until Shay.
Shay sat back, arms folded. “Didn’t we agree it was too early to be ordering me around?”
I had to make a concerted effort not to dip my eyes to her chest. When she folded her arms, her breasts nearly spilled out.
Fucking perfect.
I wanted to bruise and bite them.
“We did,” I agreed, clearing my throat. “But you’ve finished your appetizer.”
Her cheeks flushed at the reminder. Taking a breath, she picked up her fork. She went straight for the pot roast. I waited, gaze frozen on her. Would I get another cross-eyed moan?
She paused, the fork a breath from her mouth, brow arched. “Are you going to eat?”
I blinked, looking at my own fork, nonplussed.
Oh yeah. Food.
I ate but couldn’t for the life of me say what it was or tasted like. I watched her. The way her mouth curved around her food. The way she looked like she wasn’t just enjoying it, but in heaven.
She’d been on edge from the moment she noticed me outside. But now pieces of the woman I’d seen weeks ago in the restaurant filtered through. I wanted the version that dripped egg yolk all over her hands.
A greedy thing to want.
I didn’t fucking care.
A comfortable silence settled as we ate. Occasionally Shay glanced up at me, catching me watching her unapologetically. Her answer was another curious tilt of her head.
“You’re a cosmologist?” I asked. When she nodded, I continued. “I assume by your second photo, your area of study is origins of the universe or dark matter?”
Maybe I’d already looked her up and found some of her papers, but that didn’t mean the question wasn’t earnest. I was doing my damnedest to translate the jargon, and failing. Her brain, holy shit, it might be the hottest thing about her.
She smiled softly, eyes on her plate. “Dark matter.”
My eyes dropped to her lips.
Fuck. How could one smile cause such a chain reaction in my body? I shifted in my seat, adjusting the napkin on my cock.
I cleared my throat. “How’d you get into that?”
“It’s hard to pinpoint exactly, but after—” She broke off again, as if stopping herself from saying too much.
After?
After what? I leaned forward. Greedy.
“Uh…” she continued. “Eventually it became more than a passing interest. It was a necessity. I had to understand the dark, misunderstood why of the universe.” Some kind of pain flickered in her brown eyes, but she quickly smothered it.
“I love the mystery behind it,” she continued.
“The poetry. That there is something dark and unseen holding up all the light in the universe.”
I could usually figure people out quickly, but Shay was a constant contradiction. Nervous and confident. Honest and mysterious. Bright and withholding. Soft but somehow with a metal in her eyes reserved for warriors.
“It’s the longest unsolved mystery in all of science,” she said.
I had never experienced anyone like Shay.
When she spoke, she spoke with her whole body, hands gesturing as she told me about something called nonbaryonic matter and the difference in theories on what dark matter could be.
Enthusiasm seeped out of her like steam, filling up the space, until I felt it in my lungs.
I could listen to her talk about wet cement, and as long as she was like this, it would be the most interesting thing in the fucking universe. When was the last time I’d been around someone who had such joy for life?
Maybe my mother.
So, decades ago.
“We often think the most important things are what we see,” she said, “but without dark matter scaffolding everything, we wouldn’t be here. And when you actually look at it, it’s undeniable how everything connects. It follows the same organic pattern of dendrites, of slime mold, of tree roots—”
She stopped suddenly.
I leaned forward. “Why did you stop?”
She poked her fork at her mostly bare plate, eyes down. “I’m rambling.”
“I love it,” I said.
She lifted her eyes, surprise and delight written on her features. Then bit her lip, nervous. Those nerves were doing something to me. Igniting some primal, caveman need inside my marrow. A challenge.
I was looking forward to getting her out of her head. Fucking all the anxiety out of her body until she was a puddle of submission. Until I saw the truth she hid beneath the nerves she wore like armor.
Her eyes shifted as the silence stretched. “What?”
“I’m wondering what else will make your cheeks flush like that,” I said truthfully.
“Oh,” she said, voice soft.
Another flush crept across her cheeks, this one lighter than before, hazier, like a foggy sunset. Her eyes softened. Her whole fucking body softened. She looked up at me through thick lashes.
For the first time all night she looked hungry—
“In the mood for dessert?”
And just like that, the mood was shattered by good service.
Shay blinked out of it, as if catching herself.
“Do you want dessert?” I asked. She rolled her mouth, shaking her head. “Just the check,” I said, eyes still on her.
The waitress set down a black leather book on the table. Shay pulled out her wallet.
“What are you doing?”
“Um…paying my half?”
I placed a card in the leather book. “It’s taken care of.”
“Maybe I want to pay.”
That defiance sparked something in me, a glimpse of the woman I’d chased through a graveyard. She folded her arms again, and this time I didn’t pretend to not look at her chest.
“Too bad.”