Affinity

December 11, 2023

December 11, 2023

I glanced over to the clock that sat on the wall by the door as I read my last test tubes with our analyzer. My numbers started off really well, but the last assay I had done looked completely terrible, so I was probably looking at a half-day of repeats coming tomorrow... which I wasn't thrilled about. I took on a creeping headache just over the thought of having to explain this one to Grant. He wasn't one to just accept a mistake, or a bad assay, but he always felt like he needed to come to a hard conclusion about why something went the way it did. Most of the times, I tried to figure that out myself first before going to him, so that he doesn't harass me about it, but today it could have been what I ate for breakfast, for all I knew. So, as I watched my numbers fluctuate over the minute it took to read each tube, I couldn't help but pray that this last one would pull it in for me.

It was already half-past three, and I had intended on finishing this by two, so I was a little behind schedule. But, I didn't really have anything else to do today, so I wasn't mad that it was getting drawn out a little longer than it was meant to. I walked to the front of the lab and looked into our offices that were across the hall to see if Tom was at his desk. He was supposed to be running a comparison between my testing and the previous testing, but he hadn't stepped foot in the lab all day, so I was assuming that it clearly wasn't going to get done today.

I scanned the office to see who was in there, curious about where everyone was, and realized that Lindsey wasn't at her desk. She had been MIA most of the day. I knew that she was running tests downstairs before she went to lunch, but I hadn't seen her in the office, in our lab, or downstairs since. I wondered if she was maybe in a meeting, or using equipment in another lab, but I figured it would have been somewhere on her schedule. I tried to stop myself from getting too concerned before it actually started- I had a habit of doing that.

Not much had been said between us since everything happened in her car. Although nothing happened, something happened, and I was becoming increasingly more nervous that what had happened was going to drive a wedge between us.

The night it happened, I subjected my sister to hearing all about what had gone on that night. Amelia had heard the brunt of it. From how I felt when I first met her until now. She knew full and well how I felt about her, so she was very invested in what I was telling her. I'm not going to say that it's not embarrassing though, to talk like this about a married woman, but at this point I was just going to own up to it.

What had caught me off guard, however, was Lindsey's reaction to the situation. Nothing had actually happened between us. Sure, we were physically close with each other, and she started saying some odd things before Liz came out of the building, but nothing had actually happened. We didn't kiss, we didn't say anything out of the ordinary to each other, we were just there. But the fact that she was acting like this afterwards made me think that it was in fact more than just us being there together, and that she probably had just as much going on in her head as I did.

It had gotten to the point where I had begun to wish that we had just kissed, or that one of us had said something important, or anything- I wish that she had given me something. Because now, I'm stuck in this limbo of what could have been but wasn't, and not exactly sure how to deal with it. I could imagine the situation probably wasn't the easiest for her, so for now, I was just going to give her some space.

My mind wandered through a list of ideas about where she could have been all day. The testing she was doing downstairs was two hours tops, so unless something went, and kept going horribly wrong, I couldn't imagine why she would have still been down there. Grant, Liz, and Mark, the president of the department, were all in their offices, so I figured it wouldn't have been a meeting. I was just out of ideas. I thought about going downstairs to check if she was still there, but tried to remind myself that I was giving her space, so I knew that rightfully, that wasn't the best thing to do. But, I had to bring the rest of my samples down anyway, so what was one peak?