Below Zero (The STEMinist Novellas #3) by Ali Hazelwood

            “Yup. Four-wheel, all-terrain, Bluetooth module. Solar powered. Her name was Ruthie, and when I set her free at a corn maze somewhere near Atlanta, she got out in about three minutes. Scared the crap out of the children, too.”

            He is fully smiling now. He has a heart-stopping dimple on his left cheek, and . . . Okay, fine: he’s aggressively hot. Despite the red hair, or because of it. “You still have her?”

            “Nope. To celebrate, I got wasted at a bar that didn’t bother to check IDs and ended up leaving her at some University of Georgia frat house. I didn’t want to go back, because those places are scary, so I gave up on Ruthie and just built an electronic arm for my Robotics final.” I sigh and look into the mid-distance. “I’ll need a lot of therapy before I can become a mother.”

            He chuckles. The sound is low, warm, maybe even shiver-inducing. I need a second to regroup.

            I’ve settled—at some point on our five-minute walk here, probably when he pulled out a pretty effortless scowl to intimidate the security guard into letting me in despite my lack of ID—on the reason I can’t quite pin Ian down. He is, very simply, a never-before-experienced mix of cute and overwhelmingly masculine. With a complex, layered air about him. It spells simultaneously Do not piss me off because I don’t fuck around and Ma’am, let me carry those groceries for you.

            Not my usual fare, not at all. I like flirting, and I like sex, and I like hooking up with people, but I’m really, really picky about my partners. It doesn’t take a lot to turn me off someone, and I almost exclusively gravitate toward the cheerful, spontaneous, fun-loving type. I’m into extraverts who love banter and are easy to talk to, the less intense the better. Ian seems to be the diametrical opposite of that, and yet . . . And yet, even I can see how there is something fundamentally attractive about him. Would I try to pick him up at a bar? Hm. Unclear.

            Will I try to pick him up after the end of this informational interview? Hm. Also unclear. I know I say I wouldn’t, but . . . things change.

            “Okay. My question now. Mara—Mara Floyd, your cousin or something—said that you were working directly on the Curiosity team?” He nods. “But you were, what? Eighteen?”

            “Around that age, yeah.”

            “Were you an intern?”

            He pauses before shaking his head but doesn’t elaborate.

            “So you just . . . happened to be hanging out with mission control? Chilling with your space bros while they landed their remote control rover on Mars?”

            His lips twitch. “I was a team member.”

            “A team member at eighteen?” My eyebrow lifts, and he looks away.

            “I . . . graduated early.”

            “High school? Or college?”

            Silence. “Both.”

            “I see.”

            He briefly scratches the side of his neck, and there again is this feeling that he’s not quite used to being asked questions about himself. That most people take a look at him, decide that he’s just a touch too aloof and detached, and give up on figuring him out.

            I study him, more curious than ever. “So . . . were you one of those kids who was really advanced for their age and skipped half a dozen grades? And then ended up joining the workforce while still ridiculously young?” And maybe your psychosocial development was still kind of ongoing, but you were never really sharing professional or academic settings with people in your age group, just much older ones who likely avoided you and were a little intimidated by your intelligence and success, which meant being the odd man out for the entirety of your formative years and having a 401(k) before your first date?

            His eyes widen. “I . . . Yeah. Were you one, too?”

            I laugh. “Oh no. I was a total dumbass. Still am, for the most part. I just thought it might be a good guess.” It fits the persona, too. He doesn’t come across as insecure, not quite, but he’s cautious. Withdrawn.

            I lean back in my chair, feeling the thrill of having puzzled him out a little better. I’m usually not this dedicated to figuring out the backstory of everyone I meet, but Ian is just interesting.

            No. He’s fascinating.