Because a fantasy of sex was easy enough to conjure, but there was no ending to the story. No way they picked themselves up off the floor or spoke to each other the next day.
Hell, he’d all but been forbidden from speaking to her tomorrow.
He swept his clean hand over his brow and grimaced at the other one with not a little bit of belated disgust. But there was nothing he could do about it now. He wanted her. Obviously, he wanted her.
But there were a lot of things he wanted. And very few of them were things he ever got to keep.
It was another one of those lessons Jo had learned from her father: never, ever admit you’re wrong.
She sucked her bottom lip into her mouth and tongued at the ring there. Darted her gaze from the streams of data coming in from the telescope, toward the sight of Heather and Adam both sitting there beside her.
The sad fact, the one she’d only admit to herself, was that she’d been wrong about a lot of things this summer already. She’d packed the wrong clothes, completely underestimating how oppressively hot it was going to be. She’d assumed the wrong things about who P.J. Galloway was and why she’d assigned her to Heather in the first place. Assumed all the wrong things about what kind of advisor Heather would turn out to be.
And Adam. The big, gorgeous guy who didn’t respect her boundaries, and who’d gotten here on account of his professor’s connections, and who was uselessly mooning over an ex-girlfriend who clearly didn’t care as much about him as he did about her. She’d pegged him for the kind of asshole guys like him usually turned out to be. As an idiot riding other people’s coattails. As a cuckolded wimp. And he wasn’t any of those things.
Already tonight he’d defied her expectations, keeping quiet when the silence in the observatory was even starting to get to her. Interjecting only to point out an issue with some of the calibrations they’d performed when they’d been getting started. Working steadily on a notebook full of calculations she begrudgingly admitted looked pretty freaking complicated.
Coming to her and asking if he could sit in on her telescope time instead of just running ramshackle over it and barging his way in.
And nobody—absolutely nobody—should look good in a hoodie and running shorts, under awful fluorescent lighting, in the middle of the night. But goddammit all, he did.
Silly her, worrying he’d distract her by trying to make small talk all night. Turned out the biggest distraction was just his stupid, perfect face.
Rolling her eyes at herself, she turned back to her monitor. The next star they wanted to look at was just starting to rise, so she input the new coordinates. Heather pretended not to pay too much attention to what Jo was doing, but she wasn’t very good at it. Only after the telescope had swept out to the correct patch of sky did she let out a breath and rise, taking her tablet with her.
“All right, kiddos. Looks like you’ve got this in hand, so I’m going to take off for a bit.” Translation: time for a quick nap on the couch in her office.
It was a heady thing, being trusted to run this baby all by herself. Sure, there were a couple of operators there to call upon if anything really bad happened, and Heather would be right upstairs, but still. Jo was really in charge now.
“Okay.”
Heather headed off, leaving Jo and Adam by themselves. Jo tapped her booted foot against the linoleum, her throat suddenly tight. Adam was sitting a respectful three or four feet to the side—close enough to see the monitors but far enough away that he wasn’t encroaching on her space or her experiment. It suddenly felt like he was sitting right on top of her, though, her skin buzzing and pulse humming with the promise of proximity. The possibility of contact.
She looked over at him, meeting bright blue eyes, and for the longest moment, their gazes held. Heat bloomed up and down her spine, because there was something about his stare. Something that made her think he was really seeing her.
Except then he seemed to remember himself and tore his gaze away, directing it outward, toward the window.
The room suddenly felt even more silent than it had a minute before.
She’d brought a bunch of articles with her, but it was after midnight, and the idea of really concentrating on the text made her temples hurt. She dared another glance over at him, and then another, and she bit her lip. She wasn’t going to break. He was the one who was supposed to give in and fill the quiet, not her. That was how it always went. For once, she actually wanted him to, and the fact that he didn’t made her skin itch.
Who the hell was she kidding?
“What are you working on?” she asked, pushing her papers and any pretense at disinterest away.
He arched a brow. “I’m sorry. I thought I wasn’t supposed to be distracting you with small talk?”
Mock-glaring at him, she waved her hand. “It’s more of a no speaking unless spoken to kind of thing.”
“Oh.” His smile got awfully smirky, but there wasn’t any malice to his tone. “In that case”—he shrugged, looking up—“it’s just some background calculations for my project.”
“Yeah?”
He licked his lips, distracting her from his eyes with the soft pout of his mouth. She wondered how it would yield beneath her teeth. How his equations would taste on her tongue.
“Jo?”
She blinked, refocusing. His voice had that quirk to it, like he was saying her name for the second time. Like she was the one who hadn’t been paying attention. “Hmm?”
He tapped his pencil against the paper and pushed it closer so she could see. “Did you want me to take you through it?”
“Um. Sure.”
He scooted a few inches closer. After a quick glance at the monitor, she did the same.
His voice got softer as he ran through the lines of letters and symbols scrawled out across the page. It wasn’t difficult to follow, and half of it she’d seen before, if not quite in the same configuration, but he explained it nicely, answering the couple of questions she interrupted with.
At the end, he frowned. “It’s not quite working out right, but I think I’m pretty close.”
She traced his calculations back a handful of steps, leaning in even closer. She paused in her scanning and tugged at the corner of the notebook, then without thinking, reached over and grabbed his pencil out of his hand, brushing his skin as she did.
“You dropped this term,” she said, circling it, then looking at him.
He’d somehow ended up almost on top of her, their chairs bumping, his knee warm where it pressed to hers. His lashes were impossibly long against the fall of his cheek. He inspected the page, mumbling to himself. When he lifted his gaze again, it was with the most brilliant, beautiful smile on his face.
“How did you catch that?”
“I don’t know. Just did.”
“Impressive.”
The compliment made her warm inside. People didn’t say that kind of thing to her very often. Probably because she usually shoved their mistakes in their faces instead of quietly pointing them out. She quirked her shoulder up but didn’t move away.
He was so close, and it was the middle of the night, and he’d been looking at her. Maybe if she pushed just a little…
His grin faltered as their elbows bumped, and oh yeah. The darkness in his eyes wasn’t her imagination.
But neither was the way he sat up straighter a second later. The way he laughed and raked his fingers through his hair and edged his chair a few inches to the side.
Right. Just like that, the intimacy of the space and the math and their lowered voices dissolved, and the softness she’d let out for just a second did, too. She turned to the monitor, but there was nothing new to see. The experiment was chugging right along, the telescope slewing slowly but surely over an unappreciated patch of sky.
“Um . . .” he started.
She moved the mouse around the screen for lack of anything better to do—for the pure comfort of having something to look at that wasn’t him.