Not in love

7

NOT A CONDITION FOR ANYTHING

RUE

Meals were always tricky business for me, but none more than breakfast on days in which I pla

Which meant a lot of fucking misery.

A normal person would have bought a snack at the vending machine or packed a sandwich. But I wasn’t normal, not when it came to food: eating quickly, eating standing up, eating on the go, it all triggered some of my most cavernous anxieties. And I would have taken the hunger over those any day.

To eat I needed time and quiet. I needed to stare at my meal and know, feel, that more food would be waiting for me after the bite I’d just swallowed was gone. My issues were deep-rooted, multilayered, and impossible to explain to someone who hadn’t grown up hiding expired Twinkies in secret spots, who hadn’t discovered fresh produce only well into her teens, who hadn’t fought with a sibling over the last stale cracker.

Not that I’d ever really tried. Tisha already knew, my therapist had pried out my history piecemeal over years, and I couldn’t imagine anyone else caring about me enough to want to listen. After all, I hadn’t been food insecure in over ten years, and I should have been over this shit.

Though clearly I was not.

That morning, I fucked up on a staggering number of levels: woke up late after a fitful night of sleep, let the hot shower boil my skin for far too long, went downstairs without my car keys, and finally met Samantha from quality assurance in the parking lot, who wanted to know if, in my opinion as “Florence’s favorite,” we were all soon going to be living in a tent below the underpass, like a big happy family. Eating was the last thing on my mind, and when I stepped into the lab I’d booked, I was twelve minutes late.

And he was there.

Parked on a stool.

Loose jointed and relaxed as he waited for me.

We regarded each other with equally masked expressions. Neither of us bothered to say hi or, god forbid, How are you? We just stared and stared and stared in the deathly early morning quiet, until his eyes began roaming over me, and his pupils got larger, and my skin began to tingle.

I wasn’t proud of the way I’d acted the day before—not because he hadn’t deserved to be called out on whatever Harkness was up to, but because I hated losing control. The world was a constant, full-on maelstrom, and my emotions were the one thing I could govern. Eli Killgore looked like the kind of person who’d love to take that away from me.

“Why?” I asked plainly. Diplomacy was past us.

“I’d like to hear about the work you do.” His voice was deep, more gravelly than yesterday. Not a morning person, either.

“Did you clear this meeting with Florence?”

His jaw tightened. “I did not.”

“In that case—”

“Your general counsel did, though.”

It was my turn to tense. “I’m about to start an experiment that will need constant monitoring. Your timing is not ideal.”

“What’s the experiment?”

I bit into my lower lip, and immediately regretted it when his eyes darkened. It felt dangerous, the two of us alone in the same room. Again.

“I’ve created a new type of protective layer for fruit and vegetables. It’s an invisible substance that I put around produce. Then I measure whether it extends the shelf life of that produce in different types of situations.”

“Such as?”

“Today, humidity. So I’m not sure I can—”

“What’s the layer made of ?”

This was pointless. I swallowed a sigh. “Its main ingredient comes from shells, but it’s combined with lactic acid.”

Eli’s eyes shone with amusement; he was clearly laughing at me. Suddenly I was the Rue I’d always been: awkward, lost, unable to decipher the nuances of social interactions or to grasp what the hell people found so fu

Yet another unabridged summary of my life.

Except that the Eli I’d met the other night hadn’t made me feel this way, not a single time. Which was the reason this hurt so sharply.

“Anything else you’d like to know?” I asked coolly.

“Yeah. How will you test the efficacy of this chitosan-and-lactobacillus-based microbial coating, Rue?”

I stiffened in surprise. How the hell did he even—

“Will you be using salt solutions?” he continued when I didn’t reply. “Spraying?”

“I . . . we have a humidity chamber.”

He glanced around with the air of someone who knew what a humidity chamber looked like and found none in his surroundings.

“In the adjacent room.” I pointed at the door, half-hidden past the filing cabinet.

“Ah. How many hours?”

“Six.”

“And how will you—”

“I’m here—I’m fucking here, sorry.” Jay slammed the door open and burst into the lab. His green Mohawk flopped onto the left side of his head, nearly brushing his ear. “Sorry, it’s that fucking piece of shit. Matt decided in the middle of the night that it would be so fun to kill me and fuck my corpse, so he asked for that allergen report before nine today. I was trying to finish it, didn’t manage to, and now that whoreson is going to—”

Jay noticed Eli and shut his mouth so energetically, his teeth clinked. The entire spectrum of human emotions passed on his face—surprise, shame, resignation, guilt, anger, and, eventually, defiance. “He is a whoreson. I stand by what I said.”

Eli nodded, as if expecting no less, and held out his hand. “I’m Eli Killgore. From Harkness.”

“Jay Sousa.” His tongue darted out to play with the ring on his lip. “Nice to, um, meet you?”

“Jay is assisting me today,” I said. “The humidity chamber room is quite small, so if you want to stick around, space might be a little tight.” Go away. Leave me alone. It’s for the best and you know it, too.

Eli looked between Jay and me, sharp-eyed. “How much would you like to not have your corpse defiled, Jay?”

“Um. A normal amount?”

“I assume you were going to help log the data?”

“Yeah?”

“I can do that. Why don’t you finish your report?”

Jay shifted on his feet. “Are you even capable of doing that?”

“Capable of using a click pen, you mean?”

Jay pondered the matter. “I guess you’ll manage,” he conceded. “Rue? Okay with you?” he asked, with something that felt a lot like hope.

I considered my options. Say no, let Matt unjustly use Jay as his whipping boy—probably to take out on an i

“Okay with me,” I said. Pain now, freedom later. Delayed gratification. “Come back when you’re done. No rush.”

Jay looked up to the ceiling, did the sign of the cross, and scurried out as quickly as he’d arrived, leaving me to wonder why god deserved gratitude when his salvation was clearly Eli’s doing. Once we were alone again, I stepped closer to him and folded my arms on my chest.

I couldn’t remember why I’d chosen to message him of all people. To avoid dick pics, name-calling, and requests to smell my used panties in lieu of hello, I only used apps that required women to make the first move—as at ease as I felt in sex-forward spaces, I liked to consent before seeing someone’s junk. But my selection criteria were sparse: men who were local, who’d been marked as safe by other users, who were willing to accept my limits. Their looks had always been little more than an afterthought, and I’d had perfectly satisfying sex with guys who were objectively not handsome and with guys whose particular brand of attractiveness did little for me.

Eli, however. He defied categorization. There was something all-encompassing about his presence, something physical and visceral and simmering that had a near chemical effect on me. He crossed his arms, too, and the bands of muscles under his thin shirt made me picture reaching out. Tracing. Touching.

“That was heavy handed,” I said without inflection.

“It was,” he agreed. Then something occurred to him. “Do you feel unsafe? Being alone with me?”

I thought about it. Considered lying and dismissed the idea. “No.”

“Then I won’t call him back.” His shoulders relaxed. “At what intervals do you measure?”

I cocked my head to study him, reassessing his role here at Kline. Remembering Euler’s number. You know this man’s phone’s passcode, his opinions on anal sex, and his interest in negotiated kinks, but you have no idea where his knowledge of food engineering comes from. Nice work, Rue. “Why don’t you guess?”

His mouth twitched, indulgent. “I’m not your dancing bear, Rue. I don’t perform on command.”

“No. You like the element of surprise.” His silence read like assent. He stared at my mouth until I asked, “What’s your educational background?”

“Is it relevant to what we’re doing here?”

I licked the backs of my teeth. Was it? Did I need to know? Or was I simply unjustifiably, uncharacteristically curious about this man I should be ejecting out of my life and mind? “I’m harvesting microbial growth every thirty minutes, and logging chamber conditions every fifteen, just to be safe.” I tore my eyes from his complicated face and put on my lab coat, facing away from him. When I turned around, he was staring with hungry eyes, as though I were something to be eaten, as though I were peeling off layers instead of the opposite.

Jay’s lab coat was larger than mine but turned out not to be big enough for Eli. He put on rubber gloves with the ease that only someone who visited a lab every day—or a serial killer—should have. I stared at his hands stretching the latex and thought, This is dangerous. We shouldn’t be together, he and I.

“When I was eighteen or nineteen,” he said, “I was working in a lab as an undergraduate RA, and I accidentally messed with the settings of the liquid nitrogen tank. My lab lost several important cell lines that were stored in it. It was a dumb mistake that set their research back by weeks.” He bit the inside of his cheek. “Everyone assumed that it was machine malfunction, and even though I felt guilty as shit, I never corrected them. The following semester, I moved to another lab.”

I blinked at him. “Why are you telling me this?”