Chapter 210: Reid
The Q&A hits like a squall—hands everywhere, voices stacking, every scientist in the room trying to get a piece of her mind—and she handles it like she was born with a tiller in her fist. Jake and I stand behind her the way we did yesterday, flanking her shoulders, and I catch us both doing the same stupid thing: mouths a little open because there’s no other way to hold the kind of awe she’s pulling out of us.
They fire questions fast. Sample windows, error bars, offshore thermal anomalies, whether the escort patterns on #1224B could be confounded by feeding behavior; an intern asks about juvenile porpoise avoidance and looks apologetic until she grins and says, “Great catch—short answer yes, long answer… give me thirty seconds,” and then breaks it down so clean even the PI at the end of the table sits back and nods. She’s precise without being brittle, quick without being showy; she threads a little humor through the tight spots—“I promise I’m not inventing a new species of porpoise to make my graphs pretty”—and the room actually laughs. You can see eyes light when they look at her. You can feel the shift as skepticism turns into appetite.
When she doesn’t have a number at her fingertips, she doesn’t bluff. She lifts a finger and points to me—“Reid can speak to the mooring maintenance; he bribed the weather with his blood, sweat, and several busted knuckles”—and I give them the intervals and the fail-safes and watch three heads drop to type. The next curveball is modeling-heavy; she doesn’t hesitate, just tips her chin toward Jake—“He’s our statistics tyrant; please direct all righteous fury to that end of the table”—and he smiles, polite and lethal, and gives them the sensitivity analysis they wanted plus the one they didn’t know to ask for.
I can feel the room siding with us in real time. Even the quiet ones are leaning in now, elbow on knee, faces turned to catch every word when she goes back to the map and circles the cove with that steady hand. Twenty-two. Fresh out of school. And she’s running a room full of people who write the textbooks like it’s a seminar she designed.
She glances back once—just a sliver of a look—and I swear my chest goes electric. That look says I’ve got it; it also says stay. I do both. I stand still and let pride burn a hole through me.
If this weren’t a room full of people who could rearrange the next decade for all of us, I’d hook my hands at her waist, sweep her onto this ridiculous slab of a conference table, and kiss her until the glass fogged. Instead I fold my arms, keep my face neutral, and watch the smartest woman in the building make the whole place hum.
Madeline stays with Dr. Sahni, heads bowed over the map, while Jake and I follow an intern to a side hall to wait for lunch. We’re parked by a window when a knot of hoodie-and-sticker guys I recognize from the meeting near the copier starts running their mouths.
“Dude—she’s so fucking hot.”
“Right? I’ve never seen a scientist look like that.”
“The skirt? Unreal. And that cardigan—like, a sexy librarian who could outsmart you.”
“I’m into the boss thing,” another says, grinning. “Let her handle me in the bedroom.”
My teeth click. Jake’s fingers tap my elbow. "Easy, Reid."
They keep going, louder now that they’ve got an audience of each other.
“Her hair has to be that soft, right? It looked so damn soft.”
“Bet it smells like vanilla like the rest of her. She looked right at me when I asked about the thermocline.”
“You asked about the thermocline because you wanted her to look at you,” someone snorts.
“Guilty.”
“Think she’s single?”
“No ring,” one says. “Should I ask for her number?”
“Do it, man. Shoot your shot.”
“Walk up with a coffee and a line about models and data—”
“Yeah, tell her you’ve got a dataset she can—”
I step away from the sound before my hands do something I’ll regret. The window is cold under my palm. Count to five. Then ten.
Jake ghosts after me, casual like we’re just stretching our legs. Up close, his eyes are the same lit fuse as mine.
“We can’t blame them,” he says, mouth wry. “She looks absolutely gorgeoys today. I got hard watching her run the room. Reid, hard during a meeting. Like...”
“Not helping,” I tell him, but it comes out almost a laugh.
He shrugs. “We don’t have to like it. We just have to be smarter than a pack of bros who think ‘thermocline’ is foreplay.”
Down the corridor the intern reappears, juggling a cardboard tray and a case of water. The chatter snaps shut; hoodies scatter back to screens like roaches. Jake takes the tray; I grab the bottles.
“Conference room,” he says.
“Conference room,” I answer, anger folded tight into something cleaner—pride, possession, the kind that belongs in daylight. We carry lunch back to the woman half this building is about to quote for the next decade.
We haul the sandwiches and a crate of water back in just as Dr. Sahni caps her pen. She tells us she’ll swing by in an hour to take us down to the lab, gives Madeline that keen little smile like she’s already halfway convinced, and slips out.
The door hushes shut. Madeline tries to smother it, fails, and lets a squeal leak through her fingers. “Didn’t that go so well?”
“It did,” I tell her, and it’s nowhere near big enough for what I’m feeling. “Now eat.”
Jake adds a quiet, “Please,” and sets a bottle at her elbow. I pass her the better sandwich—rosemary chicken, good bread—and take the chair at her right while Jake anchors her left. Professional on the surface; everything else under the table where it belongs. I let my knee settle against hers, firm and constant. Jake’s hand finds her thigh, knuckles grazing just above her knee, casual to anyone watching, a promise to the only person who matters. She takes a bite and tries not to beam; fails again; I have to look away so I don’t grin like an idiot with her.
We talk logistics—what to queue first on the scope, who’s grabbing which vials, what we want to replicate before we leave—smooth and neat for the glass walls. Between bullets I catch a curl slipping forward and tuck it behind her ear with two fingers, slow enough that she feels it, quick enough that no one could write it up as anything but habit. She exhales, shoulders dropping a notch, and that’s my payoff. I’d put her on this table and kiss her senseless if the room were empty; instead I memorize the way her mouth curves around the straw, the light in her eyes when she thinks about the data, the way her shin drifts toward mine like gravity knows our names.
“Forty minutes,” Jake says, scanning his watch. “Plenty of time.”
“Plenty,” I echo, and under the table I let my thumb draw a single circle at the edge of her skirt—nothing that will leave a mark, everything that says keep going, we’ve got you.