Now she turned her focus to the notebook, re-calculating in her head the approximate values for the pertinent chemical composition of the varieties of leaf extract. The numbers blurred into one another, but she powered through until she was sure of her results. John would want to know specifics. And she’d have to talk to him about something when she went out there, and preferably something that didn’t touch on the fact that she’d spent the night fucking her colleague’s buddy. She’d never been good at social occasions where people stood in tight groups trying to make each other laugh, chatting about this one’s baby and that one’s upcoming marriage and the illicit affair going on between a teacher and a graduate student. With only John and Logan out there, she’d be expected to keep up her end of the conversation, so she had to be armed with Suitable Topics. She wouldn’t be able to hide behind her cup of coffee while checking the clock at intervals to see when she could in good conscience leave. Nor could she linger in this lab for much longer, when the men were expecting her to join them any minute, even if the lab tempted her with all its unfinished experiments, even if she yearned to just burrow here for the whole afternoon with the excuse of needing to finish just one last bit of work.
How on earth were all three of them going to ignore the morning’s incident?
She sank on the lab stool that had seen better days and dropped her head into her hands. She couldn’t think of anything else. The inside of her thighs still throbbed, pleasantly sore, her whole body logy and loose-jointed, even after a high-pressure shower and an exfoliating body rub. Their morning might have been interrupted, but it had continued in detail in her mind ever since. Her skin was alive with sensation. She was less concerned about facing John’s knowing twinkle and his laughing eyes than the fact that she wanted the professor to go home as soon as possible so she and Logan could return to the bedroom and finish what they’d barely begun.
Her attention once again drifted back to the window, drawn by the continuing murmur of the men’s voices. Logan talked as if he hadn’t been knocked off his axis by the explosive lovemaking, and for all she knew, he hadn’t. Maybe this was just an interlude for him. She hadn’t a clue. She’d only known him for a few days. He was a freakin’ cypher. But she supposed she could act with the same insouciance; pretend she wasn’t turned inside-out, that their coupling hadn’t shaken her in a way she couldn’t define. But whatever she did, she had to do it now. For if she stayed in this lab too much longer Logan and John would both wonder why she was hiding. If she was hiding, they would assume she was dodging. And she absolutely did not feel embarrassed for enjoying the best sex of her life.
The next thing she knew she was rounding the house to join them on the back lawn. She held a hot cup of coffee and her sunglasses in her hand as she glanced at Logan, standing in front of a smoky grill by the house, his black hair thick, the column of his neck bent and strangely vulnerable. She’d grasped that neck in the heat of it all, to draw him down closer. Logan suddenly glanced over his shoulder as if she had winged the memory to him on a gilded arrow.
“There you are.” Dr. Springfield lifted his bottle of water in a welcoming toast. “Logan’s just putting on a batch of burgers. Better tell him if you like them anything but crisp, Jen, ‘cuz that cowboy has a heavy hand.”
“Make mine rare, Logan.” She slipped her sunglasses up the bridge of her nose. “Just shy of bleeding.”
John let out a laugh that bordered on a whoop. “Jen knows how to eat a burger.”
“Keep this up,” Logan muttered, fixing his gaze on the meat sizzling on the grill, “and you are both going to die young.”
“Don’t you listen to him,” John said. “He’s been living in too many foreign countries. It’s got him spooked.”
“Food poisoning,” Logan reiterated. “Number one killer of children under three in some places.”
“I’m over three,” John said, turning to her. “Logan needs to remember that the U.S. government has standards for beef—“
“—and suggestions about how it should be cooked.”
“So let the government eat its burgers their way,” John said, “and Jen and I will eat them ours.”
She smiled through the banter as she sank into a lounge chair next to John’s. She settled her lips over the lip of her coffee and took a swig of the strong, sugary brew. Glancing around the backyard, she took in the blue smoke of the grill rising into the trees, and the birds chirping amid the leaves, the way a bee lazily buzzed around a thatch of dandelion gone into seed. This is what people did when they weren’t working, she figured. They sat in their backyards or on their decks and soaked in the sun while enjoying the company of family and friends. This is what her friends did all those summers while she was hiding in the dampness of some musty laboratory filling her notebook with calculations and experiments. This was the life of people with unbroken hearts.
A pang twisted
