13
Ground Squirrel Orgy
Mari stepped up into the weekly bio meeting circle, humming a little Josh Ritter song under her breath. Most of the bios’ assignments got swapped around by the week, but she had to admit, it was kind of nice to know where she was headed. No one else wanted Wyatt’s crew, and so Marcus had fallen into the habit of just glancing at her for her nod, then assigning her to him.
This week, Marcus glanced up from his clipboard with his faux serious face, his cheeks hollowing slightly beneath his beard as he squinted to hold back a smile. “The apprentice from Wyatt’s crew stopped by last night. Apparently the crew took up a collection to bribe me to keep putting Mari with them. Seems she has an effect on the boss’s mood that they’re in favor of.”
Snickers broke out around the circle. She flushed, avoiding meeting anybody’s eyes. It didn’t have anything to do with her; it was most likely that he wasn’t as awkward around his crew now that he’d had lunch with them once. Which was probably nice for them since Jack covered his nervousness with ferocious shouting.
“Pretty healthy bribe, too, and we all know what that means . . .” He pulled out an envelope and started around the circle. “Trader Joe’s gift cards for everyone.”
The snickers turned into cheers and even Mari laughed now. Trader Joe’s was the universal drug of choice for biologists, who were all obsessed with healthy snack food.
Hotaka grinned. “It was her solar-oven brownies, right? I swear those brownies made me find religion.”
“Nirvana,” Lisa agreed. “One step above heaven, those brownies.”
Rajni poked Hotaka. “Mari doesn’t need brownies to charm anyone. Girl’s plenty sweet on her own.”
Mari rubbed at her arm, uncomfortable with the other woman trying to make her feel better. “You guys . . .”
Fortunately, Marcus stopped in front of her at that moment and gave her a reason to look away.
“I needed to speak with you about something else,” he said. “Wyatt’s boss, Rod, stopped by to lodge a complaint. Said you were being too hard-assed about enforcing the rules.”
Her blood clamped to a stop in her veins. “I can explain—”
“No need.” Marcus passed her not one but two Trader Joe’s gift cards. “Keep up the good work.”
And slowly, cautiously, a smile began to creep onto her face.
A low hum of conversation welled up from the coffee shop around Mari, the air-conditioning a blessed relief. She sipped her chai and half groaned at the explosion of spicy, creamy flavors on her tongue.
Lisa laughed at her reaction. “They make it from scratch here. Better than sex, am I right?”
About a thousand times better, in Mari’s experience, though she would have expected the other woman’s experience to be a bit more positive. “I’m telling Marcus you said that.”
“You do and I’m never bringing you here again.”
“Okay, I take it back.” Mari snuggled into the deep, worn cushions of her armchair.
“You better. This place is my favorite.” Lisa relaxed into her own chair and exhaled. “What does it say about us that a coffee shop visit is the most luxurious thing I can remember doing in, like, forever?”
“That we enjoy the simple things,” Mari said, because she knew it would make Lisa feel better. Privately, she wasn’t sure a drink that cost $3.87 a cup counted as a simple thing, especially not when it tasted like something fit for sultans and fairy tales. She really shouldn’t have spent the money, but after the other bios were so nice to her the other morning, she was riding high enough to follow through on her long-ago coffee date invite. Lisa always made such an effort to include her and ask her out to do things, and it felt like turning a corner in her life to have a sort-of-almost friend again. She hadn’t had close friends since she and Brad moved away from the town where they’d grown up, when he took that job in Wisconsin.
“Well, we’ll have to think up something even better than coffee shop time soon, because you deserve a treat after all those weeks on Wyatt’s crew.” Lisa shuddered.
Mari took another sip to cover her frown, and her complicated feelings. She hated Lisa thinking that Jack was some kind of cruel beast. But at the same time, she got a little guilty-selfish thrill from the idea that someone—that anyone—would be concerned about her. Enough to worry that she was being treated well at work.
And a very practical, secret part of her was aware that it would be easier to continue to get assigned to Jack’s crew if everyone thought she was doing it out of pure generosity. It would hardly be professional if people knew she didn’t just get along with the foreman she was supposed to be monitoring, but that it was starting to be . . . more. At least on her side of things.
In a lot of ways, it would be to her benefit to let her coworkers see him as a villain, but it sat all wrong to let Lisa insult Jack. After all, who would stand up for him, if she didn’t?
“Lisa,” she said, putting down her drink. “He’s not like you think. Really not at all. Outside of work, he’s quiet, a little unsure of himself.”
“And how much are you seeing of him outside of work? Is he following you around at that motel?”
“No!” Mari snatched up her drink again, annoyed with herself. She could never manage to express herself right. With Brad, she’d always managed to say things just the way that would upset him. Now, she couldn’t even explain to her coworker that a man was good, not bad. Maybe she should give up on English and learn sign language.
But no, that wasn’t entirely right, because she did seem to be figuring out the key to communicating with Jack when no one else had. He didn’t just follow the rules now, he watched his own men for her. God help the one who forgot to check under all sides of his tires for a tortoise. She’d seen the men check their tires three times in a row, just because they weren’t sure if Jack had seen them doing it the first two times.
He just hadn’t understood the reasons behind the rules before. Once he’d seen the animals, how hard they were to find, how they really were everywhere out there once you knew how to look . . . she suspected he might like animals even more than the biologists did. He was certainly good at catching them. The other biologists had just approached him wrong, throwing out orders that made no sense to him and backing them up with citation tickets.
Of course, she couldn’t say that to Lisa, who had been one of the biologists who had failed to get through to him.
Mari took a breath, determined to try to be better at communicating. “It’s not that he’s following me around at the motel, at least not unless that stupid crane operator is bugging me.”
“Creepy Ricky?” Lisa curled her lip. “Hate that guy. Rajni swears she’s going to kick his ass someday. I really don’t like that he’s living at your motel.”
“I know. But if he comes within half a mile of me, Jack runs him off. Anyway, you know I cook on my camp stove in the parking lot most nights, and Jack sometimes works on his motorcycle after work. So I see him there.”
She let it stand at that. It had only started happening after that night she came to watch TV with him. And she didn’t mention that she usually pulled her truck out and angled it so he and his bike would have a little shade to sit in. Or that he seemed to enjoy the scent of her cooking so much that she fed him most nights. For all his protesting that he’d already eaten and he’d just have “a little bit if she had too much,” he gobbled up whatever she gave him. Usually so fast that she thought maybe it had been a long, long time since he’d had a home-cooked meal.
“He knows how to work on motorcycles?” Lisa winced. “Damn it, that should not be sexy.”
Mari wasn’t sure how it could not be sexy. Especially with that careless man bun of his, and how a strand always fell loose over his face when he was concentrating. And how when he swiped it back, sometimes he left a dark streak of grease over his cheekbone or his brow. It was hard not to notice, sometimes, that under the scowl and the hard hat, he was ruggedly pretty. Could that be a thing, rugged and pretty? Maybe he’d invented it.
Either way, it was good for her health because, lately, Mari cooked a lot more often than she microwaved ramen.
“He’s pretty funny, actually. He’ll catch himself swearing sometimes now, when he’s around me, and he’ll substitute it, but it’s still totally hopeless.” A smile tugged at her mouth and she leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Like the other day, he banged his knuckles when he was tuning the bike and shouted, ‘c—’ well, you know, the C word. And then he broke off halfway and said, ‘Fuck, I mean. Sorry.’”
Lisa burst out laughing. “That’s Jack Wyatt for you. Even his clean version is dirty.”
“I know, right? And he blushes.” Mari knew she shouldn’t be saying all this, but it was too cute, really, not to share. “I think he’s the only man I’ve ever met that gets more shy the more you get to know him.”
“Shut the front door.” Lisa shook her head. “I don’t believe it. Blushing?”
“Yeah, when I say anything that could be taken as dirty. Or if I say anything nice. Or—” She stopped, because there were a ton more times when he blushed, but if she listed them all, she worried Lisa would read too much into it.
The other biologist leaned forward, amusement playing around her eyes. “That is completely adorable. I never saw him blush any of the times I worked on his crew. C’mon, give me more dirt on Wyatt. I love it.”
Mari bit the inside of her lip, debating. It was risky, but part of her was bursting with stories about him, especially the one from last week.
“Okay, but you have to promise not to tell Marcus, or anyone where it could get back to Jack, because he’d be mortified.”
Lisa nodded, sitting back in her chair. “Men hate it when they’re cute.”
Mari paused for the scream of the espresso maker to quiet, then said, “Anyway, so we got to talking about hunting the other week, because he’s a hunter, too, I guess. Bow hunting, even,” she couldn’t help but add, but then rushed on because the pride in her voice was too apparent. It wasn’t as if she had anything to be proud of there, since it was his accomplishment. “And he’s a tracker, too, a damn good one. Remember that juvy I found two weeks ago, the forty-five millimeter?”
“That was a crazy-good find.”
A forty-five-millimeter juvenile tortoise was smaller than the size of a ChapStick, and harder to locate than a unicorn, since they lived in a desert riddled with thousands of rat-sized burrows they could disappear into.
“It wasn’t my find, though, because Jack found it. Well, kinda.”
He’d noticed her frowning at some eggshell fragments on the ground and said, “Somebody peeled an egg for lunch, big fucking deal. Biodegradable, ain’t that what you call it?”
But when she’d explained the difference between the fragments of a chicken egg and a tortoise egg, how one was matte and one was a touch shiny, and the curve was different, round not ovoid, he’d looked thunderously impressed.
“You can tell all of that by a piece of shell?”
She’d ducked her head, feeling odd about the praise, but had to nod. She had followed it quickly with the confession that she couldn’t find the hatchling tortoise who’d crawled out of the egg, but was worried that it must be nearby.
“The soil was rocky around the burrow,” Mari explained to Lisa, “so there were no tracks and I thought it was hopeless. Except he just started looking around and didn’t stop.” It was the only time she’d seen him get off task at work, and after ten minutes, she felt really bad about distracting him. But he had picked up the tiny tracks a shocking distance away, and followed them to a bush, where he proceeded to scowl himself half to death because they seemed to vanish into thin air.
“But you found the tortoise?” Lisa asked when she got to that part of the story.
“Yup. Deep in a rat hole, could just see one tiny foot around the corner with a flashlight. I had to dig him up to move him because he was right on the edge of the site.” Mari flushed with pleasure at the memory.
Jack’s face when she’d held up the baby tortoise on her gloved palm . . . she’d never seen reverence like that outside a church. She had felt like the world’s worst villain when he asked, in a halting whisper, if he could hold it, and she had to say no, since he didn’t have the proper permit.
She should have just let him. She had extra gloves and no one would have known. Jack wouldn’t have hurt the newborn, no matter how soft its little shell was at that stage.
“How did he know how to track a tortoise?”
“Just by watching one walk, once,” Mari scoffed, and shook her head. “Anyway, that wasn’t the story I was going to tell you—that happened on another day. Get this.”
It had been the tracks that started it. She’d noticed him staring down at the ground, and had come over to see what had caught his attention.
“The hell kinda tracks are those?” he had asked, still frowning.
She’d glanced down, and froze. The tracks in question were a round, slight depression, like someone had taken a large serving bowl and pressed the bottom maybe an inch down into the sand. Except, of course, for the texture, which was more like hammered copper. At one side was a dash of darkened earth.
She had understood his confusion. The first time she’d seen one, she didn’t know what to think of it, either.
She’d glanced away and cleared her throat. “They’re tortoise tracks.”
“Don’t they teach you tracks in biologist school? It’s all about how they move, what shape of foot they’ve got. Turtles don’t walk nothing like that.”
“I didn’t say they were walking.”
He had looked at her.
To the ground.
Back at her.
“You saying they was fucking?”
Even now, just at the memory, Mari couldn’t contain her laughter. “He just couldn’t get it,” she gasped out, stifling her giggles into her hand. “How the tracks ended up making a circle.”
“Oh God,” Lisa said.
“So then, of course, I had to explain. That tortoise shells are so rounded that when you balance them on top of each other, they get a little, well, wobbly.”
Lisa covered her face, blushing and half laughing, half moaning. “You didn’t. Did you have to do the dance?”
“Well, no one ever gets it if you don’t do the dance!”
They both knew exactly what she meant. How every thrust unbalanced the male tortoise and he’d stagger to the side, scraping for purchase with his back legs while the female staggered along with him, both their feet stomping down the ground as they went round and round, trying to get the deed done. The thrust-and-stagger dance was a hilarious staple of the public education portion of explaining mating circles.
“Tell me,” Lisa gasped, both of them laughing so loud now that the other coffee shop patrons were turning to stare. “Tell me he didn’t notice the wet spot.”
“Oh, he so did.” Mari choked on her laughter, remembering.
Jack had eyed the patch of wet dirt at one end of the mating circle. “Uh, that ain’t . . .”
“Oh,” Mari had said, her face red with the effort of restraining her giggles, her voice a little strained as it threatened to burst free. “It definitely is.”
“My God,” Lisa wheezed, holding her stomach. “You’ve got to trade me assignments next week. I have to see his face when I tell him about ground squirrel orgies!”
Mari poked her in the arm, whispering, “Why don’t you say ‘ground squirrel orgies’ a little louder, Lisa, my goodness, we’re in public!”
But a smile still brightened her face. Because maybe, just maybe, she’d won Jack another ally.