She sat silently, weighing his words. They made annoying sense in a terribly unfair way.
“Now here’s a lucky coincidence: I’ve been trying to rethink polyphosphoric acids for the last year and I’m getting nowhere. Your research could change that. If I tell Donatti I need to work with your findings, you’ll be back on it tomorrow. And even if I didn’t need your work—which I do— I owe you. Once for the secretarial remark, and again for the vomit.”
Elizabeth continued to sit silently. Against her better judgment, she felt herself warming to the idea. She didn’t want to: she didn’t like the notion that systems had to be outsmarted. Why couldn’t they just be smart in the first place? And she certainly didn’t like favors. Favors smacked of cheating. And yet she had goals, and dammit, why should she just sit by? Sitting by never got anyone anywhere.
“Look,” she said pointedly, as she brushed a strand of hair off her face. “I hope you won’t think I’m jumping to conclusions, but I’ve had trouble in the past and I want to be clear: I’m not dating you. This is work, nothing more. I am not interested in a relationship of any kind.”
“Nor am I,” he insisted. “This is work. That’s it.”
“That’s it.”
And then they gathered their cups and saucers and went off in opposite directions, each desperately hoping the other didn’t mean it.
Chapter 4
Introduction to Chemistry
About three weeks later, Calvin and Elizabeth were walking out to the parking lot, their voices raised.
“Your idea is completely misguided,” she said. “You’re overlooking the fundamental nature of protein synthesis.”
“On the contrary,” he said, thinking that no one had ever called any of his ideas misguided and now that somehow had, he didn’t particularly like it, “I can’t believe how you completely ignore the molecular struc—”
“I’m not ignoring—”
“You’re forgetting the two covalent—”
“It’s three covalent bonds—”
“Yes, but only when—”
“Look,” she interrupted sharply as they stopped in front of her car. “This is a problem.”
“What’s a problem?”
“You,” she said firmly, pointing both hands at him. “You’re the problem.”
“Because we disagree?”
“That’s not the problem,” she said.
“Well then, what?”
“It’s…” She waved her hand uncertainly, then looked off into the distance.
Calvin exhaled, and laying his hand on the roof of her old blue Plymouth, waited for the rebuff he knew was coming.
In the last few weeks, he and Elizabeth had met six times—twice for lunch and four times for coffee—and each time it had been both the high and low point of his day. The high point because she was the most intelligent, insightful, intriguing—and yes—the most alarmingly attractive woman he’d ever met in his life. The low point: she always seemed in a hurry to leave. And whenever she did, he felt desperate and depressed for the rest of the day.
“The recent silkworm findings,” she was saying. “In the latest issue of Science Journal. That’s what I meant by the complicated part.”
He nodded as if he understood, but he didn’t and not just about the silkworms. Each time they’d met, he’d gone out of his way to prove that he had absolutely no interest in her beyond a professional capacity. He hadn’t offered to buy her coffee, he hadn’t volunteered to carry her lunch tray, he hadn’t even opened a door for her—including that time when her arms were so full of books he couldn’t even see her head. Nor did he faint when she accidentally backed into him at the sink and he caught a whiff of her hair. He didn’t even know hair could smell like that—as if it had been washed in a basin of flowers. Was she to give him no credit for his work-and-nothing-more behavior? The whole thing was infuriating.
“The part about bombykol,” she said. “In silkworms.”
“Sure,” he answered dully, thinking of how stupid he’d been the first time he’d met her. Called her a secretary. Kicked her out of his lab. And then what about later? He’d thrown up on her. She said it didn’t matter, but had she ever worn that yellow dress again? No. It was obvious to him that even though she said she didn’t hold a grudge, she did. As a champion grudge holder himself, he knew how it worked.