Chapter 4

For the better part of a decade now, I’ve spent most of my waking hours in a lab like the one I’m in right now. Clean white walls, aluminum work surfaces, hard tile floors. This is home to me, unwelcoming as it may have seemed to me once. I work in medical research for a non-profit, and it’s essentially a boys club; a few women work in other labs in my building, but I’m the only one working in this lab, focused on gene therapies.

In college, I was one of three women in my program and as a consequence of that, every single person assumed that we would have to be best buddies. I mean, we all loved biology and shared the same sex chromosomes; clearly we should all be pals! Except that one of the girls – Sharon – was a raging bitch. But yet any time we had a class together, we’d always be partnered together in a show of support for “women in the sciences.” I just wanted to be a scientist in the sciences.

The other was my first and only girlfriend, Ashley. It didn’t last long, only a semester and a half, but we had a good run. At the time I thought I might love her, but it was really just college experimentation. Between being drawn more to my computer than to parties and my strict parents forbidding dating, I didn’t have much experience with either sex when I got to college. Then – in the words of Erica – I “slutted it up” for a while, dating half a dozen guys (and Ashley) by my Junior year. It taught me two things: 1) I need a real connection, and 2) I’m definitely not completely straight, but women tend to irritate me, so what’s a girl to do? When you exclude hookups and dislike most of a gender, it makes relations with that gender a bit difficult.

I met Erica at the same time I met Paul and she’s one of only a handful of women I consider friends, probably because she acts more like a guy than even Paul does. She’s very much a lesbian, but outside of drunken talk of threesomes that never happened (which is for the best, I have no doubt), our relationship has always been strictly platonic. I feel like I should talk to her about my little infatuation with Dani, but frankly, I feel kinda silly doing so. I mean, I know essentially nothing about the woman outside of her writing.

Needless to say, my mind wasn’t on my work all day, but whose brain ever is when you’re coming back from a break? I got my work done and got out as soon as possible. When I pulled into the garage at home, I saw Paul’s car; not a surprise, given that he works from home almost every day. If I had a dollar for every time he said, “I’ll never again work a job where I have to wear pants,” I’d be a rich lady.

He was sitting on the couch, one leg crossed under the other, engrossed in something on his laptop. I kicked off my shoes and walked over to him, wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing the side of his head. “Hey honey. How was your day?”

He turned to give me a kiss and smiled. “Long, but productive. I’m guessing you helped me into bed last night? I saw drool on my keyboard this morning and I’m assuming you didn’t leave that there.”

“I’m honestly amazed I didn’t have to carry you. You’re not as young as you once were – you can’t pull all-nighters back-to-back anymore. You’re gonna end up with a permanent imprint of your keyboard in your cheek if you keep this up,” I admonished, jokingly. “Seriously though, it’s not good. You have to get some decent sleep tonight. Doctor’s orders.”

He laughed and rolled his eyes. “Fiiiiiiiine. Want to see what kept me up, though?” He switched windows on his laptop and typed a command, turning the screen to face me before hitting enter. After a second of nothingness, color-changing unicorns began raining down his screen, their wings fluttering as they fell.

I looked at him, looked back at the screen, looked at him again, and then just let my face fall into my palms. “You were up for 36 hours working on this?!”

He just laughed harder and hit escape, turning the laptop back to himself. “It’s for a 72-hour art contest. The theme was mythical creatures and this just hit me. Can’t help myself when inspiration strikes! But really, what else am I going to do? I’m bored and this helped, even if only for a couple days.”

Sighing quietly, I nuzzled his neck and said, “I know, love. None of your ideas have stuck for a while, have they? You’ve seemed more and more restless lately.”

“Not one. I have what feels like an endless stream of project concepts, but none of them really hold my attention. But you know me; art projects like this always help jumpstart things.”

“Well, I hope so. I want you back to your normal, crazy self. But really, lovely unicorns. I didn’t know they gave acid to My Little Ponies.” I grinned and hugged him tight from behind.

“Yeah, yeah. You know you’re jealous.” He closed his laptop and put it to the side, rising up and circling the couch to give me a kiss. Truth is, he wasn’t wrong. I’ve always been jealous of his drive, but I don’t envy the stress it puts on him when he’s not working on something he deems worthy.

We sat down for dinner a bit later. He started telling me about the book he had just finished, about an astronaut stuck on Mars and believed to be dead. I vowed to read it, after he explained the lengths that the character had to go to in the quest for survival. In turn, I told him all about Dani Collins’ books and then, apparently too eagerly, about the signing and the Facebook group.

He cocked his head a bit to the left and smiled, finally saying, “So do you have a crush on the author or one of the characters? I know that look. Well, and you just went about twenty minutes without taking a breath.” He may not be the most social of people, but he has always been able to read me.

I flushed instantly and too quickly replied, “Neither, she’s just a great writer.” But then he raised an eyebrow at me inquisitively and I followed with, “Okay, maybe a small crush on her. So what? It’s not like anything is going to happen; I don’t even really know her, we’re just both on Facebook and I’ve read her books.”

“If you say so, lovely,” he said with a grin as he collected our plates and took them to the kitchen.