The DNA of You and Me by Andrea Rothman

Author:Andrea Rothman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

No one in the lab appeared to have any inkling of what was going on between us. In public our interaction was limited to work, and in private we were careful to bolt doors and stay away from windows, and to hardly breathe. There had been talk on the floor of the head of the zebra fish lab leaving his wife for his lab technician, and gossip about the dean of admissions having sex with a graduate student in the faculty club restroom. To be seen or heard by someone in the lab would have meant a permanent stain on our standing as serious scientists, serious people.

But then Justin saw us.

On a Sunday afternoon, in early spring, he had returned from a conference and was unlocking his office door when we stepped out into the hallway from the darkroom. My lab coat was hanging in my arm and my shirt unbuttoned at the top. It must have taken me several seconds to realize someone was actually there, standing some twenty feet to our right, because when I did, by the time I caught sight of Justin staring at Aeden and me, he had turned toward the frosted pane of his office door and pushed the door open with his foot, letting himself and his carry-on through.

Minutes later he was in our bay. I had gotten into my lab coat and was setting up a digestion reaction on my bench. Aeden was sitting idly at his desk. In the past, the times Justin had shown up in our bay to inquire about the project, Aeden had made a point of ignoring him. Now he sat with his chair swiveled toward him and a hand held across his unshaven chin, watching Justin with unnerving interest, as if he were studying an animal in a zoo.

“What on earth have you been doing for the past four weeks?” Justin asked, pacing the narrow space of our bay with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the floor, as if the ruins there, the scraps of aluminum foil and discarded pipette tips, might shed light on what he’d witnessed. “When do you expect to have mice?”

“Everything is going according to plan,” I said, despite the fact that we’d fallen considerably behind schedule, my focus having shifted from the staggering number of experiments running simultaneously on my bench to the handwritten notes Aeden left for me with threadbare information of where and when to meet.

“You expect me to believe that? You should be working out of the tissue culture room by now and you’re not. For all we know the Levine lab already submitted their results.” He wasn’t looking at me. He hadn’t even attempted to make eye contact with me.

“We’re a little behind,” I admitted. “It’s no one’s fault.”

Aeden was smiling at the floor. I had a feeling he was about to say something horrible, and he did. “What is it you want to know, Justin?”

Justin stopped abruptly. “I beg your pardon?”

“Why are you here?”

“To check on your progress, why else would I be here?”

“That’s not true.

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