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All I knew was that I loved my current job at Kline, the most important project of my life was at a pivotal point, and I was too socially challenged to easily transition to another workplace.
If you’re not pocketing printer ink, you can expect your professional life to remain constant.”
Joking around with people required a degree of ease that usually took me decades to reach, but with Eli it had been simple, for no reason that I could discern.
“That’s quite a . . . I believe the scientific word for it is ‘coinkydink.’”
If people perceived me as aloof and detached, then they would want to keep their distance. And if they kept their distance, then they wouldn’t notice how nervous and blundering and inadequate I was.
had no talent for enticing people to care about my work: either they saw its value, or they were wrong.
“No. I’d like to do something that’s actually useful,” I said solemnly, with a self-importance I’d manage to shake off in the second half of my twenties, but whose memory will make me cringe well into my eighties.
I had grown up poor, poor in a way that meant duct tape on skinned knees and the flavor of ketchup on toast and prayers that I’d soon stop getting so tall, because I’d reached the end of my hand-me-downs.
My first impression of him was probably highly similar to others’ first impressions of me—with the caveat that serious, unsmiling men tended to be considered consummate professionals, while serious, unsmiling women were often written off as haughty shrews.
“Dude, you have a budget of fifty words per day, and you use six of them to give me shit?”
To eat I needed time and quiet. I needed to stare at my meal and know, feel, that more food would be waiting for me after the bite I’d just swallowed was gone. My issues were deep-rooted, multilayered, and impossible to explain to someone who hadn’t grown up hiding expired Twinkies in secret spots, who hadn’t discovered fresh produce only well into her teens, who hadn’t fought with a sibling over the last stale cracker.
“I’m not your dancing bear, Rue. I don’t perform on command.”
He put on rubber gloves with the ease that only someone who visited a lab every day—or a serial killer—should have.
“Your damn mouth,” he murmured, “is the most obscenely lovely thing I’ve ever had the burden of seeing.”
“You never try to be anything but what you are.” We stopped by his vehicle. “I think people are puzzled, and intimidated, and generally unsure of what to do with you.”
“Please don’t say that the real equity in the biofuel tech was the friends we made along the way.”
Unfortunately, the gap between “not just fucking” and “wanting a relationship” was wider than the Sargasso Sea.
