awd-hub » Field Notes On My Crush
Working a lot with someone really helps you notice things about them. Small things you wouldn't notice about anybody else.
The way her glasses are just a little too big for her head, having to be pushed back up every five minutes.
The way she sighs when she puts her hair up to fight the heat.
The way two strands of hair always manage to evade being captured into her ponytail, perfectly framing her face.
The way her lips are perpetually semi-curled into a passive smile, slightly open to reveal her slight overbite.
The way she doesn't hold her pencil right, never having been taught the right way and never having the patience to learn it.
The way she slightly squints when she's trying hard to hear you over the ambient noise.
The way she gently nibbles on her pointer fingernail when she's thinking intensely about what to do next.
I used to think this was just a parabiology thing. You spend enough hours watching a thing, you start taking notes on it without meaning to; feeding patterns, vocalizations, the little tics that tell you something's about to molt or bolt or bite. It's not affection, really. It's just data. You write it down because you might need it later, and because writing it down is easier than admitting you've memorized it.
I figured I'd notice these things about anyone I sat across from for ten hours a day, five days a week, for months on end. That the noticing was a habit of the job, not a habit of the person.
I don't notice these things about Director Day. I don't notice these things about Akabi Hayk, who I've shared a wall with for nearly as long, and whose coffee order I could not tell you if you held a gun to my head.
But I do notice them about Vivian Shing.
Tonight she's noticing none of it about herself, because she's sitting cross-legged on my desk — not the chair she dragged to the side of my desk, but the desk itself, shoving my stapler out of the way with her hip like it didn't belong — eating rice out of a Foundation-issue specimen container with a fork she definitely stole from the break room.
"You're going to get in trouble," I say, not looking up from my report.
"For what?"
"Eating out of biohazard containers."
"Nuh-uh. It's not biohazard, I just labeled them biohazard so nobody steals my snacks." She points the fork at me. "Works on everyone except you, apparently."
"I don't want your rice, Viv."
"Everyone wants my rice." She eats another bite, considering. "Okay, not everyone. Vallis from the Task Force said it 'smelled aggressive.' Whatever that means."
"It means Vallis's an idiot."
"That tracks." She kicks her heel lightly against my desk drawer along to an ill-remembered rhythm. She always did this sort of fidget when her hands were full and her feet had to pick up the slack. Outside, the rain's been going since six, the downpour that makes Area-34's windows look like a fish tank. She complained about the humidity the day we got here. She still complains about it, daily, like it's the first time she's felt it.
"You know there's an empty cafeteria two doors down with an actual space for eating," I say.
"This one has you in it." She says it so carelessly. Like it doesn't cost her anything to say. Yet it costs me so much to hear. "Besides, your stupid stapler needed humbling."
"How's the hephaesium write-up coming?" I ask, mostly to make her stop kicking my drawer.
"Awful," she groans. "I have four use cases and they're all crossed out in red." She groans again and flops backward onto my desk, scattering a stack of printouts I'm going to dread re-sorting later. "Why'd they give it to me, anyway? I'm an entomologist, not a metallurgist! It feels personal."
"It's not personal."
"Everything can be personal if you want it to be," she says, upside down, her glasses threatening to fall as they slide further and further up her forehead.
We did this before. Not this, not literally this, not Area-34, not hephaesium. But this feel of it. Late nights. Somebody's desk. Somebody's report that isn't really getting done. Site-225, a few years back, before either of us had passports stamped for Costa Rica. She used to sit on the edge of my bunk instead of my desk.
I don't bring it up and neither does she. There's a version of tonight where I ask her something. Why the move to Site-37, why no warning, why I found out from a transfer memo instead of from her. And a version where she tells me, unprompted, the way people sometimes do at midnight when the rain's loud enough to cover anything that might come out wrong. Neither of those versions are happening tonight.
She slides off my desk eventually, mostly to spare my report from rice, and drags her own paperwork over so she can do it next to me instead of across from me. We work like that for a while, in silence.
She asks me how to phrase a Project Release Form without it sounding like she's giving up on the alloy entirely. I tell her she's overthinking the wording and she should just do it. She tells me that's rich, coming from someone who once spent forty minutes thinking of a name for a new canid.
"It needed a good name," I mutter.
"It just needed a name, Kat. That's all it needed."
"It deserved better than just a name."
I see her open her mouth to refute, but she stops. I see her look at me for a moment, like she's taking a note of her own, then goes back to her packet.
"Oh, I brought you something," she says a while later, sitting back up. She digs into her jacket pocket and produces a small ziplock bag. It's the ones we use for soil samples, and it's holding a very content pillbug.
"Viv!"
"It's not Boomer, Boomer's sleeping right now. This is a regular one. I found her under a planter in the courtyard." She holds the bag up to the light like she's showing off a diamond. "Watch, she does the thing." She taps the bag gently. The pillbug curls into a tight little ball. "See? Isn't that the cutest thing?"
"You scared it into doing that."
"Startled her. There's a difference."
"No, not really."
"There is if you love her." She taps the bag again, watching it curl tighter, absolutely delighted with herself. "Look at her. She's just a little marble now."
I look at the bag, then at her. She's flushed from the heat, hair coming loose at the temples. She's absolutely delighted by this bug she found under a planter, like it's the best thing that's happened to her all week. This is the thing about Viv that gets me. She makes you care about pillbugs. She makes you care about everything she does, by sheer proximity, whether you want to or not.
"I'm gonna keep her," she says, already moving the pillbug into a vivarium on her desk.
She hops off my desk to set up the vivarium for the pillbug, and I go back to my report, or I try to. The rain's softened to something steadier. The building's quiet in a soothing way. Half of the lights were off down the hall, the HVAC the only thing keeping the silence from being total.
I think about the catalogue again. I used to tell myself it was a professional habit, the same instinct that makes you log a specimen's resting heart rate even when nobody's asked for it. But specimens don't get added to on purpose. You don't go looking for new entries, like how I have with this one for months.
When I look back up, she's bent over my desk again, scribbling something into the margin of her own paperwork — a note to herself, a doodle, I can't tell — pencil held wrong, like always, gripped too high and too tight.
And there they are. The two strands of her jet-black hair. Escaped from her ponytail again, same as the day she grabbed my shoulder and called me Kitty like no time had passed at all. They were hanging right at the edges of her jaw, barely grazing her cheeks.
I reach over — she doesn't flinch, just a small pause in her pencil — and tuck both strands behind her ears. The way you'd do for anyone. The way you wouldn't do for just anyone.
She goes still. Then she looks up at me over the top of her big glasses, that same perpetual half-smile pulling a little wider, overbite and all.
Outside, the rain keeps going. Inside, for once, neither of us are in a hurry to fill the quiet.