by Roxie Noir
“We have a few pure mechanical people on staff,” she said. She felt a little bad: she didn’t want to give him too much hope, but it was the truth. “One of our big projects is with artificial limbs — hands, mostly — and a fair amount of regular engineering goes into that.”
His eyes narrowed, and he looked thoughtful for a moment.
“Are you the firm that’s developing artificial hands that respond to nerve impulses?” he asked.
“That’s us,” Katrina said.
“I read an article about that,” he said. “That’s some amazing science fiction stuff, right there.”
Katrina laughed, a little embarrassed.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Do you work on that?” he asked, his eyebrows going up.
“I do,” she said. “It’s all still a work in progress, though. Science has only just barely started to understand a lot about the central nervous system, so it’s a pretty exciting thing to work on.”
“That’s a long way from Captain Hook,” he said.
Katrina laughed.
“The hook does have some advantages,” she said. “Advantage one, a hook is probably about ten dollars, and it never needs software updates.”
“The hook is probably much more threatening, too,” he said. “Which is a big plus if you’re a pirate captain.”
“Lucky for pirates, feet and legs are also coming along,” Katrina said. “Though not as quickly as hands. There’s less demand for being able to wiggle a specific toe.”
Next to her, she could hear Pete clear his throat, and Katrina remembered where she was: at work.
“Anyway, we also do some stem cell research, and have been working on artificial skin,” she said, straightening her spine. The guy glanced quickly at Pete, but then looked back at her.
“And you might need mechanical engineers for an internship?” he asked, hopefully.
Katrina paused.
“Maybe,” she said. “It’s a possibility. It depends on what we’re looking at in the next month.”
The guy reached into his bag and pulled out his résumé, handing it to Katrina, who scanned it quickly. He had a two-year degree from a community college, but he’d graduated high school ten years earlier.
Her eyebrows went up of their own accord.
“I’m what they politely call a non-traditional student,” he said, reading her face. She looked up and realized that he must have had this conversation at every single table in the hall. “Impolitely, I had some shit going on, and then fucked around for a few years. But I’m very motivated now.”
He grinned, small creases forming next to his eyes, and his smile made heat flow through Katrina a little more than she wanted, standing at a job fair.
“We’ll take that into account,” she said, smiling back at him, totally unable to help herself. “Age is just a number, after all.”
He laughed.
“That sounds like you’re justifying something unsavory,” he said.
“I’m only justifying taking the résumé of a former delinquent,” Katrina shot back, teasing. “If I should just toss it, tell me now.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said.
A line was beginning to form at the booth, and the guy looked behind himself.
“I should let someone else talk to you,” he said, and held out his hand. “I’m Zach, by the way.”
“Katrina,” she said, putting her hand in his. It was big and strong and warm, and he squeezed just hard enough. For a moment, she felt delicate and dainty, but then Katrina swallowed and squeezed back.
“Pleasure to meet you,” he said.
“Likewise,” she said.
They held on for just a second too long, and when he finally let go, Katrina was oddly disappointed.
“We’ll be in touch,” she said.
He thanked her and disappeared into the crowd.
Someone else started talking to her right away, but Katrina felt like her ears were buzzing. Pete snatched the resume from her hand, peering at it carefully, reading it like it was a treasure map, totally ignoring the college students trying to get his attention.
Finally he grabbed a portfolio folder from under the table and placed Zach’s résumé in it, then snapped it shut and shoved it into a briefcase.
Katrina just stared, a bad feeling gathering in the pit of her stomach.
“That’s him,” Pete said. Then he pulled out his phone and walked away, leaving Katrina to deal with a gaggle of college students.
* * *
The job fair felt like it went on for days, even as Katrina’s brain went on total autopilot, telling students what MutiGen did and what sort of interns they were looking for. She couldn’t even muster her usual enthusiasm for encouraging women to go into the sciences — instead she was busy thinking about Zach’s eyes, the way her insides squirmed when he smiled at her.
And, of course, about Pete’s pronouncement, right before he walked away.
About thirty minutes before the fair ended, Pete came back but didn’t say anything to Katrina, instead launching into his MutiGen pitch for a group of young men in polo shirts and khakis. She wanted to ask what they were going to do now, what the next steps were, but people kept coming up to them.
Finally, it ended. The last few students trickled out, and it felt like every person exhaled at the same time. She turned to Pete.
“What now?” she demanded.
He wouldn’t look at her, but she knew that he knew what she was talking about.
“Not here,” he said, resolutely stacking flyers and pamphlets together, then putting them into a crate.
Katrina didn’t like it, but she busied herself taking down the MutiGen sign that hung on the front of their table, folding it neatly and putting it into a box.
I don’t know about this, she thought. If we’re just going to get him in for an interview and ask some questions, why the secrecy?
She closed the box and folded the top in on itself, then placed it on the plastic folding table.
Why are Pete and Carol always in her office, talking quietly with the door closed?
“Hi again,” said a voice behind her. One that she recognized immediately. Zach.
Katrina turned around, startled.
“Hi,” she said, one hand on her chest.
“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” he said.
“I was totally checked out,” she said. “I’ve been talking to college kids for a couple of hours, and my brain is pretty much on strike now.”
He nodded, a smile playing on his face.
“That bad?” he asked. He had taken off his suit jacket and it was slung over his briefcase, his sleeves rolled up to reveal thick, muscled forearms. Katrina stared just a little too long.
“Well, not all of them,” she said, half-smiling up at him. “Just the poets who are confused when we don’t have jobs for them.”
“Well, someone has to write ‘Sonnet for Fake Skin,’ you know,” he said. “It’s not gonna be me.”
“I bet you could,” Katrina teased. “How hard can it be?”
Zach shook his head.
“Sonnets have rules,” he said. “They’re sixteen lines, maybe? And have some number of syllables and a rhyme scheme?”
“You’re right,” she said. “We should hire a poet instead of you.”
“I didn’t say that,” he said, laughing.
Pete walked back in and stood behind the table. Katrina stood up straight, suddenly feeling incredibly unprofessional.
“Did you need more literature or anything?” she asked. “We have a signup sheet...”
“I already got some,” Zach said. “Actually, I came here to see if you wanted to get a drink tonight.”
“Oh,” Katrina said.
Her mind raced.
I should say no, she thought. Especially if we might hire him, or at least interview him. It’s pretty unprofessional.
Besides, I drove here from Salt Lake with Pete.
She looked into Zach’s face, and no died on her lips.
“I can’t tonight,” she said, carefully. “I drove up here with Pete, and I don’t have my own car here, and I doubt he wants to stick around and wait for me.”
“Some other night, then,” Zach said. “I’ll come down to Salt Lake. There’s nothing to do in Meadows, anyway.”
“Okay,” Katrina said, a little too quickly. “Friday?”
“Perfect,” Zach said. “Give me your number.”
As they exchanged phone numbers, Katrina quickly glanced over at Pete.
He nodded slightly and gave her a thumbs-up.
Her heart sank.
Please don’t let this be part of whatever scheme they have going on for this guy, she thought.
“All right,” said Zach, putting his phone into his pocket. “I’ll see you Friday, then?”
“Perfect,” Katrina said.
For a moment, they looked at each other. Katrina wasn’t quite sure what to do — did they shake hands again, or hug, or something?
Before she could stop herself, she rose onto her tiptoes, put one hand on his shoulder, and kissed him on the cheek, a shiver of electricity rocketing down her spine as she did. He was almost too tall for her to reach, and she wobbled a little. Zach put one hand in the small of her back to steady her, and left it there until she pulled away.
For another second, they looked at each other.
He felt that too, Katrina thought.
“See you then,” he said, grinning.
Then he left the room, and Katrina put one hand to her back, where she could still feel the heat of his fingers.
She was half excited and half filled with dread.
“Good,” Pete said softly behind her. “We’ll have a backup line to him.”
Katrina felt like she’d swallowed a lead weight.
Chapter Three
Zach
Zach eased his foot down on the gas pedal, watching the speedometer carefully. His ancient Ford Escort tended to start rattling around fifty-five miles per hour. If he got to sixty-five, things really got dire. Frankly, he was amazed that the car still worked at all, and he hadn’t shaken it to bits by now.
He got up to sixty miles an hour and decided it was good enough. As much as he hated blocking the slow lane of Interstate 15, he wasn’t about to let his stupid car get between him and Katrina. Hell, he’d piss off every driver in Northern Utah as long as it guaranteed getting to her place on time.
It had been a long, long three days. Three days where he hadn’t been able to focus on a single thing, looking at systems of equations in his homework and seeing her blue eyes and curly blond hair, the sparkle in her eyes when she’d teased him about poetry.
That had never happened to Zach before. He’d had a couple of girlfriends, been on dates. He’d seen beautiful women, but he’d never found himself so hopelessly enthralled by someone like he was by Katrina. He’d never thought of someone to the point of total distraction like he did with her.
He pulled off the interstate and his little car finally felt less like a death trap, and he drove to her quiet, apartment-building-filled neighborhood.
I should have brought flowers or something, he thought when he looked at the front door of her building. Shit.
He stood at her front door and pressed the buzzer next to her name, standing in the warm night, flower-less. Minutes later, she was coming down the stairs and Zach’s heart caught in his throat, just like it had the first time he’d seen her.
She was beautiful, her blond curls bouncing against her shoulders, her blue eyes almost glowing. She wore a blue dress that matched them exactly, and it fit her perfectly, hugging her breasts and nipping in at the waist, then flaring out into a full skirt.
Zach had to fight back his erection, just watching her come down the steps.
When was the last time I got a boner over someone fully dressed? he wondered.
Then he thought about quadratic equations. He thought about them very, very hard.
“You’re on time,” Katrina said, pushing open the glass front door to her building.
“You sound surprised,” Zach said.
“No one’s on time to anything anymore,” she said. “So it’s a lovely surprise.”
As the door closed, he looked over his shoulder into the building, wondering what her place looked like. It had to be nicer than his dorm room — after all, she had a real job and everything.
Then she threaded her arm through his, her hand resting on his forearm, and he forgot about everything else immediately. Her fingertips were warm and made him feel like he was buzzing, deep down inside, a thousand excited bees all waking up at once.
Zach felt like a prince or a king or a very high nobleman at least as he walked her down the steps, down the sidewalk, and to his car.
He stopped feeling royal immediately.
This is why you don’t date much, he remembered. Because you tell women that you’re a college student, and then they see your car, and then they go to dinner with a lawyer instead.
“I used to drive one of these!” Katrina said. “Mine was blue, though.”
“This used to be blue,” Zach said, eyeing the huge, ugly sun spots on the side of the car where the paint had almost faded white. “I think, anyway. Either that or green.”
She laughed again.
“I loved mine,” she said. “Looking back, it was probably shitty, but I was seventeen so I thought it was the greatest. I named it Burt.”
“Burt?”
She shrugged.
“Seemed like a Burt, I guess,” she said, and sighed. “God, I used to drive Burt eighty, ninety miles an hour on some of the back roads in the desert west of here, going to parties out in the middle of nowhere. I’d tell my parents I was studying.”
Zach looked down at her. A grin crept onto his face.
“Troublemaker,” he said.
He bent down and opened the door for Katrina, offering her a hand. It seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do, and she took it, then gathered her skirt with a flourish, daintily lowering herself into the passenger seat.
Zach was the tiniest bit disappointed. He wouldn’t have said no to a flash of thigh, a quick peek down her neckline.
Quadratic equations, he thought. Come on.
“I used to be a troublemaker,” Katrina said, once he was in the car. She had a grin on her face, almost like she was daring him to do something.
Like kiss her? Zach thought. He nearly leaned over right then, aching to press his mouth against hers, hear the soft gasp as he ran his hand up her...
The area beneath a curve can be found by integrating a function between two points, he thought.
“But not anymore?” he asked. He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine made a half-hearted scraping sound. Katrina looked at him skeptically.
“Practice try,” Zach said.
“We can take my car,” she offered.
He turned the key again, willing the car to start, and this time the thing finally sputtered to life. Zach patted the dashboard.
“Atta girl,” he said to the car, and pulled away from the curb. “And now you’re squeaky clean?” he asked Katrina.
“As far as anyone knows, I was always squeaky clean,” she said. “I was very good at telling my parents that I was at a friend’s house when we were really both getting drunk in the desert and waking up when the coyotes sniffed our faces at ten in the morning.”
Zach shuddered involuntarily.
“That only happened once,” she said. “We were always more afraid of rattlesnakes and most afraid of getting busted by the cops. In retrospect, I’m not sure how we didn’t.”
She looked out the windshield thoughtfully.
“You can get away with a lot in the middle of nowhere,” Zach said.
And even more when you don’t have parents, he thought.
* * *
Soon, they were sharing nachos and drinking margaritas at El Coyote, a Mexic
an joint that was somewhere between a dive and a hole-in-the wall, but Zach had heard that it had the best drinks anywhere around.
He was inclined to believe that whoever had told him that was right, as he took another long swig. Half sweet, half tart, good tequila. Not that he knew good from bad tequila, but he liked it, at least.
“You haven’t told me anything about yourself,” Katrina said. She leaned back in the booth, both hands on the base of her margarita glass. Zach couldn’t help but watch as her bosom rose and fell beneath her dress, always threatening to stretch the space between the buttons but never actually succeeding.
“What’s there to tell?” Zach asked. “I go to class, I tutor other students, I go home and do my homework. Sometimes I try to find a job for the summer.”
“Start with why you’re an undergraduate at twenty-eight, maybe,” she said. “That’s got to be a story.”
Zach made a face. It was barely a story, much less a good one.
“What makes you say that?” he said. “Maybe I just fucked around until I was twenty-five.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But people don’t go from fuck-up to motivated for no reason.”
“It’s not a good story,” he warned. “If it ruins our first date, I’m blaming you.”
“If it ruins our date, then we were having a terrible date in the first place,” Katrina said.
She leaned forward, her breasts brushing the top of the table. Zach had to tear his eyes away.
“I grew up in a very, very tiny town, way in southern Utah,” he said.
“What town?”
“Obsidian.”
Katrina shrugged, and Zach laughed.
“Don’t worry, no one’s ever heard of it,” he said.
“I’ve been to southern Utah,” Katrina said. “I drove to the north rim of the Grand Canyon just last year. We went through one town that I’m almost positive was run by fundamentalist Mormons. You know, the ones who wear the prairie dresses and have ten wives.”
“Obsidian is further east,” Zach said. “Though I’m sure we’ve got some of those around.”
Katrina narrowed her eyes playfully.
“You’re not one, are you?” she asked. “Shopping for wife number four?”
