I tore my eyes from his complicated face and put on my lab coat, facing away from him. When I turned around, he was staring with hungry eyes, as though I were something to be eaten, as though I were peeling off layers instead of the opposite. Jay’s lab coat was larger than mine but turned out not to be big enough for Eli. He put on rubber gloves with the ease that only someone who visited a lab every day—or a serial killer—should have. I stared at his hands stretching the latex and thought, This is dangerous. We shouldn’t be together, he and I.
