Experimental Marine Biology: A Romantic Comedy (Chemistry Lessons Book 5) Read online

  Contents

  Experimental Marine Biology

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek at Fallen Star!

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Experimental Marine Biology

  “Just friends” is all Brooke and Dylan have ever been. (Except for that one night in high school, but they don’t talk about that.) Growing up, he was her protector. Her confidant. The one guy she could always trust.

  Now she’s a marine biologist working toward her PhD in California, and he’s an underwear model in New York. Dylan’s only in town for a few days, crashing on Brooke’s couch and repaying the favor by acting as her date to a friend’s wedding.

  It was totally an accident she saw him naked.

  After that, “just friends” goes out the window in favor of friends with benefits.

  It’s all going great…until it isn’t.

  Dylan’s got a ticket back to New York at the end of the week, and Brooke may have accidentally broken his heart. Can they navigate these uncharted relationship waters? Or has she tanked her oldest friendship?

  EXPERIMENTAL MARINE BIOLOGY, by RITA Award-winning author Susannah Nix, is the fifth standalone story in the Chemistry Lessons series of romances about women who work in STEM fields, and features a brand new couple with their own happy ending. The books in this series can be read in any order.

  Preface

  Dear reader,

  Although largely lighthearted, this book touches on certain subjects, including abortion, parental illness, and disordered eating, that may be difficult or unpleasant for some.

  I offer this warning so that those for whom these are sensitive subjects may make an informed decision about whether or not to proceed with the story.

  Be good to yourself,

  Susannah Nix

  Chapter One

  When Brooke Hilliard had decided to become a marine biologist, she’d never imagined it would involve so much earwax.

  That’s right. Earwax.

  Whale earwax, specifically.

  Most people didn’t know that baleen whales produced earwax like humans did. The oily gunk built up in their ear canals over time, hardening into giant, tapered plugs. Their earwax plugs looked kind of like super-gross candles, but in cross section they revealed layers that corresponded to the years of the whale’s life, and could be studied like tree rings or the ice cores that climate scientists used to look into the past.

  You could learn all kinds of things about the places a whale had been and the things it had done, just by analyzing its earwax. Information about their migration, diet, stress levels, reproduction, sexual maturity, and pollutants in their habitats—it was all there. If you knew what year the animal died, you could not only determine how old they were, but basically piece together their entire life history, year by year, like a biography.

  Just from their earwax. Imagine.

  Everyone carried memories of their past selves within them, but whales quite literally carried around a biological record of their own lives. In the same way the rings of a tree trunk could be carefully carved away to reveal an image of the young sapling it used to be, the layers of earwax that built up in a whale’s ear canal preserved snapshots of its younger self.

  It was really pretty cool, once you got past the ick factor of working with nasty old globs of earwax that had been building up inside a whale for decades. Fortunately for Brooke, she’d left all her ick factor behind in seventh grade, the first time she’d cut into a squid while her lab partner stood uselessly off to the side making retching sounds.

  Lots of kids said they wanted to be a marine biologist when they grew up. But by the time most of them reached high school biology and realized it wasn’t all cavorting with dolphins, they set their sights on another dream.

  Not Brooke. She didn’t mind the dissections or the rote memorization of biochemical processes and Latin terminology. In fact, she thrived on it. And now here she was, at the age of almost twenty-six: a marine biologist in the fourth year of her PhD program, analyzing earwax.

  “What the poxy hell are you doing here so early?”

  Brooke smiled at the sound of her lab mate’s voice and threw a glance over her shoulder. “I’m always here early. The question is, what are you doing here so early?”

  Tara Phillips sauntered into the lab and snatched something off one of tables. “Forgot my earbuds last night. Going for a run.” She was dressed in colorful, mismatched spandex and bright orange running shoes.

  “Masochist.” Brooke turned her attention back to the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay in front of her, otherwise known as an ELISA. She didn’t mind waking up early—in fact, she enjoyed being the first one in the lab every morning, so she could work without any distractions—but she despised exercise of any sort.

  Tara grinned, showing off the gap in her front teeth. “Says the person who’s in the lab working before eight a.m.” She wandered closer and peered over Brooke’s shoulder. “Whale, whale, whale, what do we have here? Are you doing another ELISA? I thought you’d finished all the data collection for the cortisol abstract.”

  “This is something else.” Brooke bit down on her lip as she concentrated on the multichannel pipette she was using to measure liquid into the wells of a microtiter plate.

  She was testing progesterone levels in the fat extracted from the different earwax layers of a single female whale, which would give her information about the animal’s reproductive history, such as when it became sexually mature and how many pregnancies it had. She’d already done the work of cutting the earwax layers apart and mixing them with solvent to extract the lipids. The hormone assay she was doing involved a lot of pipetting and a lot of steps, and required concentration because if you messed any of them up, the samples were ruined.

  “What’s that, then?” Tara asked.

  “It’s for the graduate student award at NAMMC.” Brooke had just found out about it. The deadline was only a month away, which was a bit of a tight turnaround. But she was ahead of the game on her dissertation research, and confident she could put something together in time.

  “Bit ambitious, don’t you think?”

  That was almost exactly what her advisor had said when Brooke had asked if she’d give her a recommendation for it. She’d seemed surprised Brooke had decided to go for it, but she’d wished her luck and agreed to write the recommendation.

  “Monica Speight is submitting for it too,” Brooke told Tara.

  Monica was a year ahead of Brooke in the program and everything Brooke aspired to be. Top of her cohort, top of their research team, top of the department. She was every professor’s favorite grad student, and every undergrad’s favorite teaching assistant. She’d been picked for the top fellowship two years in a row and had more papers accepted to conferences than any other grad student in the entire college of life sciences. While everyone else was scrambling to find a postdoc position, Monica Speight woul
d probably have programs lining up to court her.

  Brooke didn’t just want to be Monica, she wanted to beat her.

  Ever since she’d entered the program, Brooke had been stuck in Monica’s shadow. No one cared that Brooke was top of her own cohort, or that she came in a close second to Monica in almost everything. There was never a chance to stand out and be recognized for her own achievements with Monica hogging all the glory.

  Just once before Monica graduated, Brooke was determined to beat her at something.

  Tara snickered. “Yeah, of course she is. That one’s never seen an award she couldn’t win. I suppose that’s why you’re going for it too? The next step in your plan to Single White Female our Monica.”

  “I’m not trying to Single White Female anyone.”

  “Come on, you two are like peas in a pod. You even look alike.”

  Brooke supposed they sort of did, if you didn’t look too closely. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium heights and builds. But where Monica’s complexion had a uniform golden glow, Brooke’s went to paleness and freckles. Lots of freckles.

  “I just want to prove I can beat her at something. It’s not a weird love-hate obsession, like with you and Mathias.”

  “Bite your tongue!” Tara shot back. “Mathias is my nemesis. It’s not a love-hate obsession, it’s hate-hate.”

  Tara and Mathias were both third years, and they’d been feuding since the moment they first laid eyes on one another.

  “Because of that one time he accidentally upset your experiment two years ago.”

  “That was no accident. He totally did it on purpose!”

  “I seriously doubt that. You should let it go.” Brooke actually thought Mathias was pretty nice. And his Norwegian accent was kind of sexy.

  “It’s not just that. He doesn’t follow the cleaning schedule unless you nag him about it, and he’s always using my pipette tips instead of refilling his own tip boxes. Plus he leaves crumbs all over the desk in the office.”

  “Why don’t you talk to him about it? Maybe if he knew it bothered you, he’d try to improve.”

  “Screw that. I’d much rather wage a silent war of passive aggression. Like with you and your bestie Monica.”

  “Fair enough,” Brooke said, knowing there was no point trying to reason with Tara. She was completely unreasonable on the subject of Mathias. There was actually a pool going among the grad students about when Tara and Mathias were finally going to bang it out. Brooke had twenty bucks on the week of October 4-10, which was coming up fast.

  “That reminds me: What’s a mansplainer’s favorite animal?”

  “A whale, actually,” Brooke answered automatically. “You told me that one last month.”

  “Dammit! I’ll have to up my game. Right! Good luck with your ELISA. I’m off on my run. Back in an hour.” Tara gave a salute on her way out the door.

  Brooke went back to working on her hormone assay. Twenty minutes later, as she was putting her samples on the plate shaker where they’d spend the next two hours, she felt her phone vibrate in the pocket of her lab coat. After disposing of her gloves, she went into the shared office next to the lab and checked her messages.

  She grinned as she saw the text from her childhood friend Dylan.

  Hey! What are you doing week after next?

  Brooke hadn’t heard from Dylan in months and hadn’t seen him in years, but it didn’t matter. They were the sort of old friends who could pick back up at a moment’s notice. Every so often, one of them would randomly reach out to the other, and they’d fall right back into talking like no time had passed at all.

  They’d always been like that: drifting in and out of each other’s orbits, but always coming back around again eventually. As reliable as the sun and the moon.

  Brooke: Nothing much. Why?

  Dylan: I’m coming to LA for a shoot! Wanna hang while I’m there?

  Dylan was an underwear model in New York City. Honest to god. It made Brooke giggle every time she thought about the fact that she was friends with a real live underwear model.

  Technically, he didn’t just model underwear, but it was more fun to think of him as an underwear model than a shaving cream model, cologne model, wristwatch model, or any of the other myriad products he’d pimped.

  Brooke: Yes! I’d love to see you!

  Dylan: Any chance I could crash on your couch?

  Brooke: Of course! Mi casa es tu casa.

  Brooke’s phone rang a moment later. Call from Dylan Price it said on the screen, above an old prom selfie of the two of them all dressed up in formalwear and making silly faces for the camera. She’d forgotten that was the photo she’d assigned to him and smiled at the memory, feeling a rush of fondness for her oldest friend.

  She’d met Dylan when she was seven, the day her family had moved into the house across the street from his in Baton Rouge. On her first day of second grade at her new school he’d been the only kid she knew, and he’d made a point of introducing her to everyone as “my new friend Brooke.” His status as her favorite person in the world had been pretty much cemented from that moment forward, and the two of them had been inseparable through elementary school.

  Once they got to middle school, Brooke had tested into the accelerated classes, while Dylan struggled to maintain passing grades. Still, they’d managed to stay friends, even into high school, as she juggled honors classes while he got involved in track and band.

  Dylan had been a gangly nerd with glasses, braces, and acne—until the summer before their junior year, when he experienced a huge growth spurt, got his braces off, and his mom got him Proactiv and contact lenses. Almost overnight, Brooke’s sweet, dorky friend transformed into a total hottie. Girls started taking an interest in him for the first time, and he made the most of his newfound popularity, dating his way through most of the marching band’s woodwind section.

  And now he was a model whose glistening bare abs had once adorned a billboard in Times Square. Go figure. But in her head, Brooke still thought of Dylan as the kid who lived across the street and had always looked out for her.

  “You’re really coming to visit?” she said excitedly, answering his call as she sank onto a desk chair.

  “Yeah! If you’re sure you don’t mind me staying with you.” His voice was warm and resonant, and it instantly took her back to all those nights they’d spent on the phone, baring their adolescent souls to one another. It felt like a lifetime ago and also somehow only yesterday. “I’m also totally fine getting a hotel if that works better for you.”

  “Perish the thought! I happen to have a five-star couch. I’m pretty sure it’s more comfortable than most hotel beds.”

  “Cool. I figured this way we’d get to see more of each other.”

  “Yeah, it’ll be great. How long will you be here for?” She reached up to twirl the thin brown hair she’d pulled back into a ponytail.

  “A week, from Sunday to Sunday. Think you can put up with me for that long?”

  “A whole week! Wow! That’s a long photo shoot.”

  “The shoot’s only one day, but I thought I’d take the whole week, make a vacation of it. I could use a break.”

  Brooke was honored he’d want to take a whole week of vacation to hang out with her, but also a little mystified. From what she could tell from his social media, Dylan seemed to be doing really well. She would have thought he could afford to go pretty much anywhere he wanted for vacation. So why would he want to spend it crashing on her couch?

  “Is everything okay?” she asked, biting her lip.

  “Sure. Yeah. Terrific. Just working too much.”

  She’d always been able to tell when he was lying. “Really? Kinda sounds like it might be more than that.”

  He let out a soft sigh. “It’s nothing special. I’ll tell you all about it when I’m there.”

  “Deal.” It would be easier to wheedle the truth out of him in person, and they’d have plenty of time to talk through whatever he needed. Too much time,
maybe. She wasn’t sure how she was going to entertain him for a whole week.

  “How are things with you?” Dylan asked. “How’s life treating my favorite marine biologist?”

  “Good. Boring. You know.” Testing hormone levels in whale earwax couldn’t stack up to Dylan’s glamorous life in New York. Based on his social media, his life was basically an endless series of cool parties with beautiful people in elegant Manhattan apartments. Not to mention all the traveling he did. Just in the last year, he’d posted photos from Paris, Prague, Phuket, and Tulum. Brooke’s poky apartment couldn’t possibly compare, even if her complex did have a pool. “I hope I’m exciting enough for you.”

  “Excitement’s the exact opposite of what I’m looking for. All I want is to spend a nice, quiet, relaxing few days hanging out with an old friend.”

  She grinned as it hit home how much she’d missed him. “I can definitely make that happen.”

  “And maybe watching some martial arts movies. Assuming you still like martial arts movies?”

  “Always.” It had been one of their favorite things to do as kids. They’d wasted endless Saturdays watching Jackie Chan and old Bruce Lee movies on the floral couch in Dylan’s family room.

  “Good. Sounds like heaven.”

  It was funny how years could pass and their lives could go in two totally opposite directions, and yet they still managed to have a connection.

  “I’ll see you in a couple weeks, then,” Dylan said.