68. Bertram
Bertram
Diana made a very good point about Bertram needing to communicate directly with Helena to ascertain her feelings about him.
Unfortunately, Bertram was able to come up with a very good counterpoint, which was: No.
No, that sounded terrifying.
No, that would require risk.
No, he couldn’t bear to lose her if she thought his romantic interest meant ending their friendship.
Every minute he could steal with her was a minute he relished, even when it was thoroughly platonic.
That’s why he had been staring lovingly at her for the past ten minutes of uninterrupted ranting she had been doing about taxonomy.
He was enraptured—drawn to her like he was a moth and she was the only light in the world.
If it were Helena thinking in such similes, she would no doubt have a specific species of moth and know its scientific name.
Bertram didn’t know what moth he felt like, or its scientific name.
All Bertram knew was that Helena was sunlight.
“I’ve never understood the need for subspecies and subspecies of subspecies,” Bertram had the audacity to say, interrupting her explanation of a subspecies of a subspecies.
He genuinely meant it, but Helena’s shocked gasp and scandalized expression did make it even more enjoyable.
“Wait, what? You can’t possibly mean that!
” Helena squealed. “You’re telling me that to you ‘mimick’ is a sufficient species descriptor for a very sheep-looking canid?
And that you find the differences between the Getulian mimick, the Melitean gentlewoman’s mimick, and Topsell’s mimick to be negligible? ”
“Helena,” Bertram said, staring directly into her eyes, “yes.”
“So, you think it’s negligible that the Getulian mimick is herbivorous and uses its sheep-like appearance to follow flocks to the best grazing patches, whereas the Melitean gentlewoman’s mimick blends in with flocks of sheep to swallow them whole one by one in the night?
! That seems like an unimportant detail to you? ”
“Yes,” Bertram said.
Bertram didn’t actually think this, but it was endlessly fun to provoke Helena.
He wondered if he knew how flushed her face became when she was making a particularly impassioned argument, how her eyes sparkled with excitement at getting to prove herself right, how she oscillated between frowning at the absurdity of the argument she was refuting and grinning at her own brilliant counterpoints.
“Does that make sense?” Helena said, concluding the diatribe Bertram had only half paid attention to.
Bertram swallowed. “Um. Sure.”
“Were you even listening?!” Helena swatted Bertram.
“You were talking about how different diets and hunting mechanisms justify subspecies. But here’s the thing, even if we look at mundane animals, Orcinus orca pods have distinct hunting methods and diets ranging from almost exclusively fish to almost exclusively marine mammals, and they’re not separate species,” Bertram pointed out.
Helena shook her head. “And here you say you don’t care about scientific names—”
“Yeah, well, Orcinus orca is pretty easy to remember. I also know Gorilla gorilla.” Bertram shrugged. “Is that particularly impressive? Should I get a cookie for that?”
“If you want one.” Helena walked over to the OmniBox, opened it, and grabbed a cookie.
She walked back over to Bertram and stood in front of him, cookie extended. “Give me one scientific name that isn’t the common name twice and you can have the cookie.”
Helena leaned over him, smiling temptingly.
“Camel leopardis,” Bertram said. “I remember that one because the humans doing all your taxonomy bullshit thought that giraffes looked leopard-print camels.”
Helena looked very torn.
“Don’t tell me that’s wrong,” Bertram said.
“It’s actually Giraffa camelopardalis,” Helena said, somewhat apologetically.
“Although, that’s actually just the Northern giraffe, which is one of four subspecies of giraffes, and then the Northern giraffe itself has three subspecies, which are Giraffa camelopardalis antiquorum, Giraffa camelopardalis peralta—HEY! ”
Bertram had leaned forward and bitten half the cookie out of Helena’s hand.
“No! That’s illegal!” Helena protested. “You did not fully earn that cookie!”
Bertram shook his head, laughing with his mouth full of cookie. “This is exactly the kind of taxonomy hair-splitting that I’m thoroughly uninterested in.”
“Then you’re not interested in the rest of this cookie,” Helena said, and held her arm up, ostensibly keeping the cookie out of his reach.
This was a tragically ineffective way to keep Bertram from the cookie, however. Even sitting down, Bertram was able to easily grab Helena’s wrist.
“No, you can’t have it!” Helena yelped through giggles as Bertram tugged her toward him.
Somehow she ended up in his lap, straddling him, and he took the rest of the cookie out of her hands with his mouth, legally earned or not.
“No!” she shrieked and leaned further forward. She was fully pressed against him now and they both seemed to realize it at the same time.
Bertram grabbed Helena around the waist, as though he meant to pull her away from him and put her back down on the ground, but then he didn’t.
He froze beneath her, hands on her waist, their hips pressed together, unsure exactly what should happen next.
There was a long moment of fraught, tense silence and utter stillness.
“Are you okay?” Helena asked softly, brushing some of his hair off his forehead.
Bertram hesitated. “Been a long day. Probably just tired.”
“Do you—do you want to go to bed?” Helena asked.
Did she mean with him? She could absolutely just be sending him off to bed alone.
And even if she did mean that she would retire at the same time as him, she could mean the way they’d been going to bed together, falling asleep cuddling, waking tangled in each other’s arms, legs entwined, just like he did with all his platonic friends . . .
“Helena.” Bertram swallowed. “We can’t keep on like this.”
“Like what?” Helena asked, though the intensity in her eyes suggested to Bertram that she knew perfectly well.
Bertram shook his head. “It’s too confusing. I—I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Funny thing about that, Bertram,” Helena said. “If you’re curious about what someone wants, you can often find out by asking.”
“I don’t know what I want,” Bertram confessed.
Helena deflated slightly. “Well. I can’t help you there.”
“I—you’re beautiful, Helena, fucking hells you’re so beautiful, and I want you—that’s the truth—I want you; I want you so fucking badly it feels like I can’t breathe sometimes, but . . . we work together, and we’re stuck here with Lovey, so if things went badly . . .”
“I’m not afraid,” Helena said, softly. “Forget about asking me what I want, because I’ll just tell you right now. It’s you. I want you. However much of you as you’re willing to give.”
Bertram stared into Helena’s dark eyes. The intensity of the longing he saw within them was enough to melt his heart, but not quite enough to melt his resolve.
Bertram weighed his options. Walking away from Helena when she was staring at him like that, with such naked desperation in her eyes, seemed all but impossible.
But so did risking their friendship, their livelihood.
All it took was for things to sour once again .
. . not only would he be deprived of Helena as a lover, he would lose her as a friend, and as a colleague.
She was a brilliant scientist. There was not a Person in the world he would rather have by his side on any project.
And she was a good friend, a loyal friend.
Someone he could count on forever, unless he risked it all for a romantic relationship that might fizzle and fade, leaving them both broken.
Again.
His desire for her was like a vice around his heart. But he knew what he had to do.
“I can’t,” Bertram whispered.
He barely caught sight of the disappointed look on Helena’s face as he forced himself to put her down on the floor. He exited the lab, closing the door firmly and decisively behind him.
But Bertram’s fingers had not even left the doorknob before he swung the door back open and crossed the room to Helena in three strides.
“Fuck it,” Bertram said.
He grabbed Helena’s face roughly in his hands and brought his lips crashing down onto hers.
Helena gasped between kisses. “What happened t—”
“Changed my mind,” Bertram said as he nipped at her ear, her throat, her collarbone.
“Oh, good,” Helena said simply, grabbing his hair to bring his face back up to hers so she could resume thoroughly plundering his mouth.
Bertram knew that there was a reason why he hadn’t done this earlier, and if he had withheld this pleasure from himself, it was probably a very good reason.
But Helena’s hands were all over his chest, his shoulders, his back, as if re-memorizing the map of his torso, and his fingers were digging into Helena’s ass, and whatever those very good reasons for waiting must have been completely fled his mind.
Helena removed her shirt and Bertram’s mind fled his mind.
He vaguely remembered that he once had the ability to think, but he couldn’t recall what that was like.
All he knew was the feeling of Helena in his arms, his hands running down the smooth skin of her back, her breasts pressing against him through his shirt and her bra and even that was far too many layers between them.
He brought his mouth to her neck as Helena’s nimble fingers skated across the buttons of Bertram’s shirt.
“Is this—okay?” Helena asked as she practically ripped his shirt off him.
“Mhm,” Bertram said, his mouth not leaving her shoulder. He bit down gently as she divested him of his shirt.
Helena gasped.