I tried to speak.
Nothing happened.
Just me standing there, gaping at him, my mouth partially open like a fish that had just been yanked out of the water.
“Hi! I’m Catalina Diaz, and this is Anna Ellis.” My best friend came rushing to my rescue, and I had honestly never adored her more. Although why she felt like she had to introduce me, I wasn’t sure. We’d met. He knew me.
“Craig Kimball,” he said, as if we were unaware. Like I didn’t think about him every single day.
As if I didn’t remember what he had done for me two years ago.
And my memory of it had me making a strange gagging noise in response.
Now my face was flushing for a second time that day but for an entirely different reason.
“You’re our two lady scientists,” he said with a wink.
Catalina bristled beside me as she responded, “Actually, we’re just scientists. No qualifier necessary.”
I felt completely off kilter. There was still that lingering feeling of dread and embarrassment from Jerry’s mini-lecture, and now I couldn’t quite catch my breath with Craig standing in front of us, his arms folded, smiling at me.
At. Me.
I could sense Catalina was aggravated, but I wasn’t sure why exactly. I was too busy focusing on the way Craig’s mouth moved, how he seemed to caress the words coming out of it.
I forced myself to pay attention.
“Oh, I hope you didn’t take that the wrong way,” he said. “It’s just so impressive that you two are succeeding in what’s typically a male-dominated field.”
Ah. That’s why Catalina was annoyed. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn’t mean any harm by what he’d said, but I also understood why she felt defensive—we were often treated as “less than.” Not only here at work but at conferences, too. As if we didn’t have the same level of education and skills as our male colleagues.
Craig cleared his throat, as if he finally realized that he’d stepped in it, and changed the subject. “What are you working on?” he asked.
My tongue still felt too big for my mouth, but if I didn’t say something soon, he might think I was weird.
Weirder than he probably already thought I was. “Uh, we were, um, getting supplies.”
I had spoken! Actual words had been said!
Never mind the fact that I hadn’t answered his question. I could only stand there, grinning at him like a demented jack-o’-lantern.
Catalina shot me a look that very clearly said, “Why do you like this guy?” and I shrugged in response. There was no way to make her understand. She just didn’t know him.
Technically, neither did I, but I could personally vouch for the fact that he was a good guy.
She shook her head and announced, “I’m going to head back to my workbench and make a little nitroglycerin.”
I got her intent, even though her concerns were misplaced. She left the supply room, and I was alone with Craig.
Alone—and talking to him.
“Did she say nitroglycerin?” Craig repeated, sounding amused.
“Vegetable glycerin,” I said, not wanting to explain what my best friend had meant. “She’s making an organic moisturizer. Personally, I like working on makeup better. It’s my favorite thing to create. Like now, I’m working on this lipstick that will be long-lasting and totally natural. Really vibrant colors, too.”
His gaze shifted, and he glanced around the room. Was that . . . boredom in his expression?
I thought we’d bond over a love of cosmetics. This was my fault. I was nervous and saying things he didn’t care about. I had a tendency to do that sometimes.
Time to trot out a story that people usually enjoyed. “You know, speaking of nitroglycerin, I had a lab partner in college who wanted to see if he could make it himself and blew out all the windows in our lab.”
It worked. I had Craig’s attention again, but now he looked concerned.
“It’s okay—he was fine. It burned off his eyebrows and the front of his hair, but he was far enough away when it blew up.”
That was the one exciting story I had in my past. I knew how sad that made my life, but I was just happy that I’d succeeded in getting his attention back.
“Is that the sort of thing that goes on here after hours? Are you guys busy making black-market explosives?”
Had I implied that somehow? “My lab partner, that wasn’t a money thing. He was just curious. But no, we don’t make explosives here. And we won’t. Not unless someone figures out a safe way for people to use them in order to diminish wrinkles and fine lines.”
I hoped he’d laugh, but he just nodded. “You wanted to show me that lipstick thing?”
“The formulation? Yes. Just follow me. I have it on my computer.”
Somehow I managed to make it all the way to my workbench without tripping over my own feet. I was keenly aware of him walking just behind me, and I wanted to pinch myself. We’d been having our second-ever actual conversation!
I got to my laptop and pulled up the formulation. He stood to the right of my workstation, and the fact that we were breathing the same air made me unbelievably happy.
He picked up a sparkly, golden eye-shadow sample that I had on my workstation. “Newest blush?”
Had he not seen the gold and glitter? You’d only wear that on your cheeks if you were going to disco night at the club. “No, it’s an eye shadow. Marketing says it’s creasing, so I’m going to . . .”
My voice trailed off when he did the worst thing imaginable.
He started cracking his knuckles one by one. Loudly, each sharp popping sound fracking my soul and making my ears want to bleed. I loathed that sound with every fiber of my being.
A little voice whispered that my soul mate would never crack his knuckles around me. That was silly; I couldn’t believe I’d even thought it. I was about to ask him to please stop with the stomach-turning noise but realized how odd that might sound.
“Here,” I said, handing him my computer, hoping I could distract him.
Thankfully, taking my laptop stopped him from messing with his poor, abused knuckles. He made me so flustered, and I realized just how much his opinion on my project mattered. I wanted him to see how smart I was, to be impressed by me. I knew looks-wise that I’d never win him over, so he had to get to know me so that he could fall in love with my sometimes-winning personality.
But he wasn’t saying anything, and my stomach was starting to fill up with hard knots. I found myself wanting to explain my thought process to him. “I have to be careful with the formulation to meet all the vegan parameters, to make sure I don’t get impatient and raise the pH balance too quickly. I mean, all cosmetic chemists are guilty of that.”
“Yes, we’ve all been there.”
Was that sarcasm? I shifted on my stool. He had that bored expression back on his face. I pushed my glasses up my nose, worried that I might accidentally fog them up as I was breathing harder than normal. I told my brain that this moment was not as important as my central nervous system apparently thought it was. Needing to calm down, I reached for my beaker of water and took a drink.
Nope, not water. Not water. Cyclopentasiloxane.
I leaned forward and spit the entire mouthful into the sink. I grabbed the beaker that I’d filled up earlier with water and rinsed my mouth out, two, three, four separate times.