“And stop slouching. Your neck is short and you’ll end up with a hump.”
That was me. A five-foot-two inch elephant-sized Quasimodo. Why was I thinking about her so much today?
“You must have been a track star.”
I glanced sharply at Pollux.
He wasn’t looking at me, just right ahead. “For someone so short, you move fast.”
It didn’t come out as an insult, merely a statement of fact. Still, on the heels of my mother’s remembered taunts, it stung.
“Here.” I pointed to the building, but he’d already reached for the door. “Do you work here?” I asked.
He seemed familiar in the way people who navigated the landscape every day did.
“Not here.” His answer was short, and he didn’t elaborate.
The interior was warm—uncomfortably so—and dry. When I’d first arrived, the dean’s receptionist explained it was to keep any materials from becoming damp and deteriorating. “Many faculty have resources several hundred years old. Tomes passed down from one person to another. They should rightly be housed in the Bodleian, or Ashmolean Museum.” She referred to two of the places antiquities were kept. “And they would be if this was America. Things are much older here.”
I’d resisted rolling my eyes. The thousand-year-old university was old compared to Harvard, but I’d held a two-hundred thousand year-old artifact in my hands.
Old was relative.
Pollux climbed the stairs behind me, causing the hair on my neck to prickle in awareness. Just moments ago, I’d not been worried about him meaning me any harm, but it felt different now. He moved as silently here as he had outside, feet barely shuffling over the wood that never failed to creak when meeting the soles of my boots.
At the door to my office, I took a breath, turned, and faced him. My back hit the wood as I lifted my chin higher and higher. “I won’t let you steal my work.”
He frowned. Heavy, dark brows slammed together, and he narrowed his eyes. “I’m not going to steal your research.”
Something hung between us. He’d qualified that statement, “Your research.” But he might steal something.
It was utterly foolish to unlock my door and let him in, and yet… I did.
I followed him inside, noting the places where his gaze landed. On the maps of Turkey—pinned to cork boards. The maps of England, Scotland and Wales at different points in history. The post-notes I’d placed at strategic places and along the edges of maps.
And finally, on the only photograph I had framed. Other people might have pictures of family or display their degrees and honors.
Not me.
The most meaningful thing I had was a photograph I’d taken on the site in Turkey. The toes of my boots were visible. I hadn’t yet brushed away the fine grains of sand left obscuring my find.
Pollux walked to the photo and picked it up, lifting it to his face to study it.
“I knew the second I found it, it was different. The entire time we excavated, it was like I could feel it there, beneath the surface. We were supposed to work another 14 kilometers away from the coast, closer to the site Schliemann found, but I hadn’t been able to move my feet away. It was like…” I tapped my fingers over my heart, trying to find the words to describe the pulse, the thrum, the land had had.
“Power,” he whispered. “Like it was alive.”
Yes.
My breath shook as I exhaled and made my way to my desk. Dropping my bag next to my chair, I waited for him to speak.
“I read about the controversy,” he began. “It was big news where I am from.”
“Where are you from?” His accent was British, as far as I could tell.
“It doesn’t matter.” He answered in Greek, which I guessed would suffice.
“So what do you want?” I asked, also in Greek, because I didn’t want him thinking he could one-up me.