Paige didn’t sleep well, waking repeatedly in the night to adjust her pillows, get water, check the time, check her phone, check the Internet, wondering each time if the Australian scientist Jack King would still look like the Jack she’d known, and yes, he did.
Which made the meeting today even more stressful.
Her only hope was that Jack wouldn’t remember her. She went by a different name now, using her married name, not her maiden name. She’d changed her hair. It used to be shorter, darker, the early, choppy Rachel style made popular by Jennifer Aniston on Friends. She’d been heavier, too. There was a very good possibility he wouldn’t recognize her.
She sincerely hoped so, because thirty years ago, Jack had been a tan, muscular, twenty-five-year-old with a sexy accent and long, shaggy hair. He’d known far more about sex than she did, and she’d faked an orgasm because she was afraid she was taking too long to come.
He’d asked her if she’d faked it, too, and mortified, she’d denied it.
The memory still mortified her, and Paige grabbed a pillow and smashed it over her face, praying her new colleague wouldn’t—please, please, please—be her one-night stand. Please, God.
Paige glanced at the bedside clock. It was too early to call her youngest in New York. Ashley would be sleeping in after working late last night.
She needed to relax. She needed to sleep. Finally, just before five she did, managing to snag two more hours before finally leaving bed with the sun pouring through the blinds on her window.
It was going to be okay, she told herself, pulling on her short pink kimono robe and knotting the sash. No matter how much she dreaded today’s meeting with Dr. King and the department chairs, she’d survive it, just like she survived everything else. Paige could juggle a lot, and handle pressure, and do it with grace. She’d proven her strength more than once. At some level, it was gratifying to be the one others could depend on. She’d been that person in the family, so why shouldn’t she be that person at work?
In the kitchen she made coffee and, while it was brewing, opened her laptop to do yet another google search on her new colleague, feeling slightly obsessed at this point. Dozens and dozens of links popped up, along with photos, including a photo of Jack in the field, wearing the proverbial khakis, his skin bronzed, his brown hair still thick, still shaggy, although not quite as long as he’d worn it thirty years ago.
Heart racing, she clicked on the different links. His biography. His published articles. Photos. Awards. Speeches.
She scanned the Wikipedia page to get an overview of his career, and it was daunting. He’d earned his undergraduate degree in Melbourne, and earned his PhD from Oxford. The man had more postdoctoral fellows than anyone she’d ever met. She actually counted them—twenty-four—and the web page hadn’t been updated since 2017. God knows how many more he’d received since.
He even had a TV show on the Discovery Channel.
Paige closed the laptop, unsettled all over again A half hour later, still flustered, Paige turned on the TV and did a search for Jack’s Population Dynamics show. She might as well go in prepared for this afternoon’s meeting. She went to season one, episode one, thinking she’d watch a few minutes, maybe the one episode, but ended up watching the entire season.
It was lunchtime when she finished, and Paige turned off the TV and sat still on her couch. Wow.
He’d grown up. Nicely, too. She could see why his show was popular. Jack was engaging and charismatic. And still incredibly good-looking. As well as fit. Dr. Jack King was built—at least in season one. His muscles rippled as he hiked, dug, climbed, jumped, swam, splashed, and stripped down to shorts for a quick dip in a watering hole that may, or may not, have had a hippo in it. Adult Jack, fifty-year-old Jack, was fascinating, witty, appealing. His accent alone made her a little breathless. It shouldn’t have.
She hadn’t realized that population dynamics had traditionally been a branch of mathematical biology, a study dating back over two hundred years, but it only took Jack a few minutes explaining how population was affected by three dynamic rate functions, and she understood why math was so important to his science. Everything he did in his work was based on math and statistics.
So, why was she needed to team teach?
Why didn’t he just teach the entire course—math and science—himself?
Two hours later Paige was kicking herself as she drove north from Dana Point to Mission Viejo. She shouldn’t have watched Jack’s show, never mind the entire season one. It was one thing to binge on a thriller, but not smart to watch episode after episode starring the scientist she was supposed to work with this semester.
She was nervous and she didn’t like being nervous. She liked calm, control. But everything in her felt unsettled and undone. She was going to have to fake it today, but that wouldn’t be hard. She’d faked her way through much of life to ensure those around her were happy, secure. She’d hidden her own unhappiness during the last ten years of her marriage so that her girls didn’t have to worry, much less worry about her. Her job as the mother was to protect the girls, not the other way around. Her own mother had needed so much from her that Paige had vowed she’d be a different kind of mother, and she had been.
