“Oh hey, luv.” She grins when she sees me. “Thank God you’re here. I need some advice.” She twirls in front of the mirrors. I can’t help my smile. I know this look, and it’s about time. Reagan has a hot date after a month of mourning her breakup with I’m-too-good-for-Portland Aaron who moved to New York, unwilling to try long distance. His loss.
I take my spot on our cream sofa and curl my legs under me. “So who is he, where did you meet and yes, this dress looks brilliant.”
She giggles. “His name is Nate. I think I had a mini-orgasm just looking at him.” She closes her eyes and bites her lip in faux ecstasy.
I keep my smile fixed. Lucky Reagan and her orgasms. I can’t go there. Truth be told, I think there’s something wrong with me in that department. My body hasn’t experienced arousal since the accident. Scientifically, I know why. My brain has been too sad to produce serotonin. But knowing that doesn’t make me feel more human. Luckily, when you are working two jobs, keeping a 4.0 GPA for your scholarship and inventing a protein supplement so that you can keep your father’s dream alive, you’re too exhausted at the end of the day to think about orgasms.
I resurface in our living room. “So where did you meet Orgasmic Nate?”
“He’s one of the construction workers renovating the Reed gym. I was drenched in sweat and there he was—jeans, hard hat and all.” She giggles again.
“A construction worker. I guess I know who’ll do the hammering and the nailing.”
Reagan laughs and gives me an I’m-going-to-miss-you look but composes her face quickly. She tries on four more dresses but the burgundy one is still the winner. An hour later, she’s out the door, almost tripping over her Louboutins. I’m left behind in a cloud of her Lolita Lempicka perfume.
It takes fifteen seconds to realize that being home alone is a bad idea. With no finals, no presentation and no work, I’m left with too much time to think. And that, I cannot afford. I start manically cleaning the apartment. When it’s all done, I rearrange the furniture in the living room because pushing, pulling, grunting and lifting suddenly feel like a really good idea. In the end, I admire my handiwork. It doesn’t even look like our place but maybe that’s good. Maybe my subconscious knows that change is coming and it’s expressing it in weird ways.
But, instead of feeling exhausted, I’m all fired up. I go to my bedroom but when I see the things that make up my entire universe, I feel nauseous. I don’t have much to my name, only what I could fit in one large suitcase when I crossed the pond. I can count my treasures on my fingers: my mother’s calligraphy set on my desk; a dried rose from her rose garden in a vial; some of her clothes in my closet; my father’s chess set in the first drawer; a picture of them dancing Argentine tango on my nightstand. A crater opens in my chest, so I dart back to the living room. My new target is my desktop computer, whose age rivals that of Tyrannosaurus rex. There is one thing that I know will distract me: my Mr. Hale.
I set myself loose on his Google trail with the fervor it took to study for organic chemistry. As always, he never fails me. He’s got me good and light-headed in minutes. But distracting as his pictures are, my wired brain has discerned three patterns.
One, there is nothing personal about Mr. Hale anywhere. This means he either controls it or he has no life. The former is more likely, which means he must be hiding something.
Two, he has no business partners or relationships of any kind. He finished University of Washington with a 4.0 GPA in fourteen months and founded HH one year later. Now, at age thirty-five, he controls over a hundred subsidiaries. All alone. This means he is more isolated than even his cold exterior suggests and he must have a powerhouse where the rest of us have brain tissue.
Three, in all pictures he is always alone against some wall or window. No women. No men. This means he’s either a hermit, asexual or closet gay. All options distress me tremendously, so I move on and focus on his scar. It’s strange that in the perfect face, it’s the flaw that draws me. It makes him real when everything else about him is surreal. When I start considering printing one of his pictures and tucking it under my pillow, I shut down T. rex and curl on the sofa.
The exercise worked. I’m finally exhausted. I fall asleep in minutes, dreaming of distant blue eyes.
Chapter Ten
Paradox
I wake up Saturday morning, feeling a little groggy. My alarm clock informs me that it’s 8:30. I yank the plug out of the wall. No more schedules, no more clocks, no more rules.
I shuffle down the hall to the restroom, passing by Reagan’s bedroom. She is passed out on the bed, burgundy dress still on. Nate must be better at hammering than nailing. I throw her favorite fleece blanket over her and close the door. If anyone deserves true love, it’s her. I smile, thinking of her Pinterest board of wedding ideas.
One hour later, after brewing some ginger tea for Reagan, I head to the lab to train my replacement, Eric Lee. After that, who knows? For the first time in my life, I have no plans. On my way to the lab, I practice my American accent. Four years later and I still can’t get the rhotic lilt of the tongue. I’m better with the slang though.
When I walk through the lab doors repeating “vite-a-min”, not “vit-a-min”, I freeze. Right inside the lab, by the fume hood, is an unmistakable head of swept back dark hair, a set of tense, broad shoulders clad in a light gray sweater and an inordinately firm derriere dressed in dark jeans. Don’t act like a daft bimbo. And don’t drool.
“Ah, here she is,” Eric says, looking a little panicked. Even his glasses and the pens in his pocket protector are trembling.
Mr. Hale turns and x-rays me, lingering a fraction too long on my collarbones, peeking from my boat-neck sweater. His eyes change subtly from sapphire to turquoise. Why do they do that?
He saunters my way. I try to calm my heartbeat lest everyone from here to London hears it.
“Hello again, Miss Snow.” His voice is tuned to Alaskan spring, rather than Arctic tundra. Brilliant.
“Good morning, Mr. Hale. This is a surprise.”
“Yes, it is,” he says cryptically, as if he is talking to himself rather than me.
“Did you have any other questions about my project?” It’s the only reason I can think as to why he would be here.
“Not as such, but I’d like to speak with you for a few moments. I understand from Mr. Lee that your schedule is flexible.”
“Sure. Let me just leave a note for Professor Denton and show Eric the timer.”
He gives me a nod and the first full smile I have seen on him. The innocent dimple lifts higher in his sculpted cheek, flirting with his scar. I feel warmth on my cheeks and dart to Denton’s office, careful not to trip. I scrawl Denton a Post-it Note with shaking hands, show Eric the timer and skip back to Mr. Hale, trying not to look impatient.
He opens the lab door and I walk through, sensing him behind me like a homing beacon. He asks where I want to go and suggests places that Javier and I admire from the windows because their coffee alone would deplete the eighty-seven dollars I have to my name.
“They all sound lovely but I need to be back soon. Eric is still learning how to use the bioreactor. Maybe Reed’s Paradox Café?”
“Sure. Although if a reactor is about to go off, Tour Eiffel may be safer.” He smiles. I try to calm my ridiculous pulse at the realization that he has a sense of humor. I smile back, searching my brain for something witty to say. But the only things that come to mind are geeky scientist jokes. A virus and a chromosome walk into a bar—no, I better keep my mouth shut.
We walk to Paradox mostly in silence. Some distance away, his bodyguard follows us discreetly even though the campus is almost empty now that school is over. Mr. Hale makes small talk about my finals, but I have the feeling he is only warming up or perhaps studying my reactions. Like they do with polygraph tests, ask you simple questions first, and then drop the bombs.