Limits

LIMITS

Steph Campbell

Liz Reinhardt

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Published by Silver Strand Books

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Cover design by: Todd Maloy

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 201
3 Steph Campbell & Liz Reinhardt

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All rights reserved.

ISBN
:
1489576479 

ISBN-13:

978-1489576477

1 ADAM

“Hell hath no fury like a yeast sample scorned.” I bang my head on the countertop and my lab assistant, Cody, pats my back and takes a sip of coffee so thick, it’s practically syrup.

“Shakespeare? This shit is getting tragic quick.” Cody looks over my shoulder and sucks his breath through his teeth. “Holy hell.”

“Yes.” I knock my forehead on the cold, cruel laminate again and appreciate Cody’s brutal honesty.

I need to hear this. I need to accept that my dreams of a PhD are slipping through my fingers fast. I can always go back to Israel and apply to school there.

I imagine the smug look on my father’s face when I show up for dinner, still jet-lagged, my tail firmly between my legs. I imagine how he’ll scoff at my failed attempts to be independent, to pursue my own dream while I “turn my back on my homeland.”

“I’m so completely screwed,” I mutter, staring into the petri dishes like just looking at them hard enough can make those damn protein changes I need to see happen. Need so badly, it starts a monster headache deep in my skull.

Cody claps a hand on my shoulder and takes another long sip from his Dr. Who mug. “Dr. Gibson knows you worked your ass off on these trays. She’ll give you an extension,” he assures me from behind the blue TARDIS.

And she will. I know that without having to ask. Dr. Gibson is all mile-long legs and shiny hair and way into open relationships with younger men who work in her lab. I’ve managed to appease her interest with stories about my time in the Israeli army without actually sheet hopping, and it’s always earned me a decent extension before. But even debasing my moral code and spending a long, sweaty night with my superior couldn’t get me out of this mess.

“She’s fine with giving me another extension. It’s my visa.”

Why? Why was I such a slacker when it came to keeping my paperwork up to date? Why did I try the patience of my foreign studies liaison so many times? Maybe because I was so sure I could get those damn yeasts to work, to back up what I had hypothesized and help me do more than just complete my thesis.

I wanted my name in the journals.

I wanted to fly into my hometown and have my aunts carry around extra copies of a random science publication they’d never even known existed before, so they could hand it out to neighbors who would say, “Adam Abramowitz went to the USA with nothing and came back a famous scientist!”

I wanted to sit at the head of the table while my father scowled into his soup and feel a surge of cocky pride I wouldn’t
quite
be able to keep off my face.

“Fuck,” Cody says, pulling the word out with the same level of doom that’s rioting in my brain. “You could always see if Dr. Cougar wants you to put a ring on it. Green card marriage to a brilliant, hot older woman?”

I shudder. “Even if I was that desperate, she’s married. To Dr. Ellison in comparative lit.”

“Comparative lit?” Cody scoffs. “No wonder she cheats on the poor bastard. Is that seriously a major? Pathetic.”

“I hear you,” I agree, but for once, my heart isn’t into mocking the liberal arts. And that’s how I realize my depression is complete.

“Well, at least you can go back to Israel and work with your dad, right?” Cody’s trying. I should appreciate it. He’s way more of a friend than any other lab rat I’ve ever worked with before, and that could be because Cody actually has a grasp on things like social customs and empathy. He is the rare scientist with a fairly raging social life.

He’s also the most brilliant slacker I’ve ever met, and his intense optimism boggles my mind daily.

“Sure.” I get up and start to toss the petri dishes back in the fridge with much less care than I usually bother to take. “I think I’m gonna call it a day.”

“Uh, dude. Did you forget?” Cody shakes his head and laughs. “I’ll tell you what, man. I don’t care if you’re working on the cure for cancer: forgetting your Tuesday appointment is a crying fucking shame. I’m on the verge of revoking your man card.” He holds up his hands quickly. “Unless girls don’t do it for you. Which is totally cool.”

I sigh. “Genevieve. Damn it,” I mutter under my breath. “I’m into girls. I love them. But that one? She’s cool, but she’s
such
a pain in the ass.”

“A gorgeous pain the ass.” He raises his eyebrows and lets out a long, low whistle. “I can’t believe that girl is as much trouble as you pretend. Did you see that little top she had on last week? Was it even a shirt? It was kind of a sexy bra with some see-through cloth hanging off of it. Damn.” He rubs his hands and smiles appreciatively. “How do you get to tutor sexy Genevieve Rodriguez and I get nerdy Samuel McKenna?”

I’m really close to telling Cody we should switch, just to keep the banter up. And I know I should laugh along. He’s trying to make me forget everything I’ve been worried about.

But I feel...kind of pissed. Maybe even more than
kind of
pissed.

“Maybe it’s a good thing you’re stuck with Sam,” I growl. “Genevieve needs all the damn help she can get. The girl refuses to focus on mastering differentials, and if I spent all my time ogling her tits, she’d never graduate.”

When I’m done with my little tirade, there’s a stretch of silence so deep, it leaves me embarrassed. But Cody doesn’t seem upset at all.

In fact, he’s laughing.

“So I guess you
did
notice her little top. Nice. I’ve seen the way she looks at you, man. I’m not about to horn in.” Cody has a smug look on his face that pricks at my usually level temper. “Much as I’d like to. Damn.”

“The way she looks at me? Like I’m an annoying teacher who wants her to get her work done? Trust me, Genevieve doesn’t mince words. She’s told me what an uptight douche she thinks I am the very first day we met. Her words, by the way. Not mine.”

And I’m glad she said them. Because—I can’t lie—I was drooling the first day she walked in. I knew my chances were bad to start with: nerds like me do not score gorgeous chicks like Genevieve Rodriguez. But she set me straight right away and now we have a good thing going: I tutor her, she sometimes pays attention, we have a friendly-ish vibe, and it works.

Other than the times when I slip up and forget that it’s never going to be more than platonic. Luckily, she’s got a killer sense of humor on top of being drop-dead gorgeous, so I’ve never put my foot too far down my throat.

“How cute.” Cody pats me on the back as he leaves the lab. “It’s like when a girl pushes you off the swings on the playground, man. She thinks you’re dreamy!”

“Fuck off, Cody!” I call, shaking my head, as his snickers recede down the long hallway.

In a few minutes, Genevieve will be here, ten minutes late on the dot. It’s so irritating. Why is she always exactly ten minutes late? Why not just come at the arranged time? When I mentioned this to her once, like a reasonable person, her answer was, “Why don’t you just change the appointment time, Adam?”

Why doesn’t she stop making my already shitty life shittier?

Ten minutes after our scheduled appointment hour, I hear her heels clicking down the hall. She’s holding a huge box in her arms, and I can see that she’s about to trip over the FedEx package Cody and I both ignored all day. I jump over the counter, crash past some stools, and make it to the door just as her toe catches on the package.

I throw my arms around her tiny waist, but she bends one ankle at a funny angle, and the box crashes to the floor with a flop.

“Shit! Are you okay?” I need to get her off her feet, so I scoop her in my arms and carry her to the rolling chair in the corner, my mind spinning, my heart trapped in my throat. “Let me see your ankle.”

“It’s fine,” she winces as my hand travels down the smooth length of her calf to her tiny ankle.

She’s got great legs. I have completely accepted that she’s just a girl I tutor, but there’s no way I can deny what amazing legs she has. And these ankles? The scientist in me knows that her bones and muscles are perfectly capable of supporting her body weight. But the man in me wonders how such tiny joints can support the weight of a full human.

Even if the human is probably a hundred twenty pounds drenched.

“Does this hurt?” I turn her ankle right, then left, gently.

“It just feels bruised,” she says, her big gray eyes looking into mine. “You’re kind of sexy when you’re playing the knight in shining armor, Professor.”

That voice, smoky and sweet at once, would put me under a spell if I let it. Luckily, she pulls some typical Genevieve crap and jerks me out of my stupidity.

She lifts that long left leg and rolls her ankle back and forth, making her ridiculous glittery shoe catch the light and sparkle.

“I don’t even
care
if I broke my ankle. These shoes are worth it.” Her smile is bordering on vacant, and it snaps my patience.

Why does she
do
that? Why does she play dumb when she’s anything but? I want so badly to tell her that she’s not doing herself any favors with that act, but dammit, it’s not my place.

“You could have broken your neck wearing those, Genevieve. You could have been seriously hurt. What the hell were you thinking?”

I mean to give her a sensible lecture, to make sure she understands why her actions need to be rethought. But as usual, it all comes out in biting snaps, and I hate that. Why the hell can’t I keep my temper around this girl?

She rolls her head back and twirls in the chair, her shiny hair flying all around. “Unlike you, Professor, I know when to turn my brain off and stop thinking so I can have some fun once in
a while.” She points the toe of one ridiculous shoe my way. “You should try it sometime.”

“How about we try getting you through differentials before you flunk?” I suggest, pointing to her backpack. “Did you get my outline? I emailed it after our last session and never heard back from you.”

“Oh.” She purses her lips. “School email?”

I nod, as she scrunches up her nose and shakes her head. “I’m sorry. You know I never check that one. Why can’t you send it to my normal email address?” She flashes me a wide smile that she is confident will do the trick.

I count backwards from ten in Hebrew. “Because, as your tutor, emailing your school email
is
normal, Genevieve. And [email protected] doesn’t cause me any pain to type. [email protected]? Brain cells die every time I even think about that username.”

Genevieve tilts her head to one side, so all her long, dark hair hangs down in a curtain. “Do you
try
to be this boring all the time? Like, is it work, or does it just come to you organically?”

“This conversation is adorable, but can we get to work?” I tap my pen on her backpack and ignore the fact that,
yes
, I noticed how short and tight and totally hot her outfit is.

I need to change my thought process and fast.

She’s just a student I tutor, like any other student I tutor. If Sammy McKenna were assigned to me tomorrow instead of her, it wouldn’t make any difference at all.

Sometimes, I tell myself bullshit just to see if my brain will buy it and believe. It almost never works, and this time is no exception.

“Aye, aye, cap’n!” she quips with a little salute, then looks back at the box she dropped. She runs over with these wobbly, mincing steps, nearly falling a second time because those idiotic heels are defying all basic laws of gravity. She should be falling on her ass...hard.

I wouldn’t want to see her hurt, but a little wipeout might remind her that there’s way more to life than fancy shoes and get her to focus on making the most of her education. She turns around, holding the open box out to me.

“What the hell are they?” I ask, looking at a box filled with crumbs and thick smears of icing.

“Cupcakes!” she cries, looking down into the box like she’s confused that I don’t see what she does. She shrugs. “Or, they
were
cupcakes. But the awesome thing about desserts is, even when they’re completely smushed, they always taste delicious.” She sticks one finger into the sugary mess and holds a glob of icing-coated cake out to me. “I baked!”

I’m suddenly facing a huge problem.

I’ve never thought about what I would do if I was staring down the prospect of licking icing off of Genevieve’s fingers. But that problem morphs into a second, more pressing problem: now that the idea of licking icing off Genevieve’s finger has popped into my brain, it’s suddenly being crushed out by images of licking icing off...

Genevieve.

All of her.

Those mile-long legs, the tits pressed high in that corset of a top and jiggling with every step, her long, graceful neck, the dip of belly button that shows whenever she stretches over to grab a pencil from my side of the table or get a notebook out of her bag.

I swallow hard and shake my head. “Not sanitary, Genevieve.”

“I swear I washed my hands,” she teases, her grin a challenge. Making me squirm is one of her favorite pastimes, and it’s ridiculously easy for her to do. Something about her just gets under my skin, and it’s like I’m in a constant state of unease around her.