he’d learned them well enough to record them, loop the recording, and play the words back to himself over and over.
She tapped her screen, and her own recording ended. “Thank you, Marcus. It was kind of you to talk to me.”
“My pleasure, Vika. Good luck with your other interviews.” With a final flash of a vapid smile, he was finally inside the hotel and trudging toward the elevator.
After pressing the button for his floor, he leaned heavily against the wall and closed his eyes.
Soon, he was going to have to grapple with his persona. Where it chafed, how it had served him in the past, and how it served him still. Whether shedding it would be worth the consequences to his personal life and career.
But not today. Fuck, he was tired.
Back in his hotel room, the shower felt just as good as he’d hoped. Better.
Afterward, he powered on his laptop and ignored the scripts sent by his agent. Choosing his next project—one that hopefully take his career in a new direction—could wait too, as could checking his Twitter and Instagram accounts.
The only thing that definitely needed to happen before he slept for a million years: sending a direct message to Unapologetic Lavinia Stan. Or Ulsie, as he’d begun calling her, to her complete disgust. Ulsie is a good name for a cow, and only for a cow, she’d written. But she hadn’t told him to stop, and he hadn’t. The nickname, one he alone used, pleased him more than it should.
He logged onto the Lavineas server he’d helped create several years ago for the use of the lively, talented, ever-supportive Aeneas/Lavinia fanfic community. On AO3, he still occasionally dabbled in Aeneas/Dido fanfic, but less and less often these days. Especially once Ulsie had become the primary beta and proofreader for all Book!AeneasWouldNever’s stories.
She lived in California, and she’d still be at work. She wouldn’t be able to respond immediately to his messages. If he didn’t DM her tonight, though, he wouldn’t have her response first thing in the morning, and he needed that. More and more as each week passed.
Soon, so very soon, he and Ulsie would be back in the same time zone. The same state.
Not that proximity mattered, since they’d never meet in person.
Only it did matter. Somehow, it did.
Two
Dirt. More dirt.
This particular dirt would tell a story, though, if April listened hard enough.
She squinted at the site’s final soil core through her prescription safety glasses, comparing the different shades of brown to her color chart, then noted the sample’s water content, soil plasticity and consistency, grain size and shape, and all the other relevant data on her field form.
No discoloration. No particular odor either, which didn’t surprise her. Solvents would emit a sweet smell, and fuels would smell like—well, fuel. Hydrocarbons. But lead would simply smell like dirt. So would arsenic.
After wiping her gloved hand on the thigh of her jeans, she jotted down her findings.
Normally, she’d be talking to her assistant sampler, Bashir, about their most egregious coworkers or maybe their most recent reality-show binge-watches. But by this point in the afternoon, they were both too tired to make idle conversation, so she finished logging the sample silently while he filled out the label for the glass sample jar and completed the chain-of-custody form.
After she filled the jar with soil and wiped her hand on her jeans again, she labeled the container, slipped it into a zip-top bag, and placed it in the ice-filled cooler. One last signature to confirm she was handing off the sample to the waiting lab courier, and they were done for the day. Thank God.
“That’s it?” Bashir asked.
“That’s it.” As they watched the courier leave with the cooler, she blew out a breath. “I can take care of cleanup, if you want to relax for a few minutes.”
He shook his head. “I’ll help.”
Other than their thirty-minute lunch break, they’d been on task and focused since seven that morning, almost nine hours ago. Her feet hurt in her dusty safety boots, her exposed skin stung from too much sun exposure, dehydration had her head throbbing inside her hard hat, and she was ready for a good, long shower back at the hotel.
Her cheek also itched, probably from a stray smear of dirt. Which was unfortunate, because soil-to-skin contact was, in technical terminology, an exposure pathway. Or, as April would put it, a fucking bad idea.
Uncapping her water bottle, she wet a stray paper towel and swiped until her cheek felt clean again.
“You