any of her brethren since her first night—although she did give Birdie’s garden a wide berth.
“Even nicer when it’s empty like this. Once the students arrive on Friday it’ll be chaos. Enjoy the peace and quiet while you can.” Andie pulled open the door to the student union and a blast of arctic air hit them.
“God that feels nice.” Mia sighed with pleasure as she stepped into the freezing cold building. “When does the weather start to cool off around here?”
“Not for another couple months, at least.” Andie eyed Mia’s short-sleeved blouse. “Piece of advice: bring a sweater with you to class. They keep most of the lecture halls at subzero temperatures—except in the winter when they’re like a sauna. But also sometimes they like to mix it up to keep things interesting, so you never know what you’re going to get from one day to the next.”
“Noted.”
The coffee shop was deserted except for a young woman with a pink streak in her hair who was sitting at a booth staring at her phone. She jumped up and ran behind the counter when they walked in, greeting them with a smile. “Hi! What can I get you?” she asked in the Texas twang Mia was still getting used to.
Andie ordered a large iced coffee for herself. Mia considered doing the same, but she was already starting to get cold as the powerful air-conditioning chilled the sweat on her skin. She went with a hot soy latte instead.
“Have you met the rest of your department?” Andie asked when they settled into a booth with their drinks.
“When I came for my interview,” Mia said. The math office was empty today except for the chair and the admin. Most of the department wouldn’t be in until the all-university faculty and staff meeting on Thursday.
Andie sucked on her straw. “What’d you think?”
“They seem nice.” Mia shrugged. “They’re mostly older. And male.” That wasn’t unusual for her field, but the department at Bowman was a particularly antediluvian bunch.
“The forestry department’s the same. Maybe not quite as old as you guys in math, but it’s basically wall-to-wall penises.” Andie made a face. “And not in a good way.”
Mia snorted into her latte and reached for a napkin to wipe the coffee off her chin. “So you teach and work full-time as a park ranger?”
Andie explained that she taught one course a semester, plus a co-requisite lab, on forest insects and diseases. Her students did some of their lab work at Gettinger State Park, the thousand-acre forest north of town, and in exchange the university gave Andie the use of a lab to do her research for the park service.
She wasn’t actually a park ranger as Mia had assumed—the rangers were the ones who managed the state parks’ recreational operations and facilities. Andie was an ecosystems biologist, so her job consisted primarily of research and fieldwork: sample collection, data analysis, and writing environmental impact assessments.
It was fascinating, but far outside Mia’s wheelhouse. Nature was fine in theory, but in actual practice it was always either trying to bite you, give you a rash, or outright murder you.
Like spiders, for instance. The spiny, murdering bastards.
Mia had to assume Andie didn’t mind spiders and other creepy crawlies, given that she studied insects for a living. And not just in the lab—in their natural environment in the woods. Andie probably ran into spiders all the time—quite literally—and calmly begged their pardon for disturbing their habitat.
“You should come see the state park sometime,” Andie suggested. “It’s pretty gorgeous up there, especially in the fall once the temps cool down a little.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Mia replied, sipping her coffee.
The thought of wandering around in the woods with all those bugs and snakes gave her the shudders. And what about bears? Did they have bears in Texas? Or mountain lions? No thank you. She’d prefer not to take her life into her own hands for the sake of some leaf-peeping, no matter what Henry David Thoreau had to say for it.
“Thoreau’s mother brought him food and did his laundry while he was allegedly communing with nature in Walden Wood.” Mia winced, realizing too late that she’d done it again. She had a bad habit of speaking in non sequiturs. It always made sense in her head, but the problem was that other people couldn’t see what was going on in her head.
Andie tilted an eyebrow but seemed otherwise unfazed by the abrupt subject change. “He was also a self-obsessed misanthrope who considered sexuality a