‘Eric?’
She called their floating expert over. He finished marking a site several vectors away and jogged over to her. ‘Whatcha got?’
She pointed to her feet. ‘Weird rock.’
‘Excellent,’ he murmured, forgetting her presence already. ‘We love weird.’
He dropped a circular frame around the rock and stabbed a small red flag into the earth nearby. He pulled out a sand sieve and started to trowel the dirt around the rock into it, shaking the balance free off to one side.
Her job was to continue onwards.
She glanced up and caught Hayden’s sideways look. He returned his gaze to the earth.
‘Is everything okay?’ she suddenly asked, surprising herself as she started forward again.
‘Yep.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Good.’
‘Hayden, you’re way too surly a human being to pull off a convincing “chipper”.’
He paused to stare intently at the dirt and Shirley got the feeling it was faked. He struggled with something.
‘This is our last list item together.’
Her heart emulsified into soggy goo. That he was keeping track. And that he cared. ‘Yeah, it is. I didn’t think you were aware of it.’
A dark flush stole up his neck. ‘I have a numbered list to keep me aware.’
Oh. Right.
He cleared his throat. ‘So what happens now?’
God. What a horrible place to be having this discussion. Forced to remain ten feet apart and surrounded by others with varying degrees of good hearing, including Eric, who was only a few feet behind her, albeit fully absorbed with the excavation of her rock.
She took a breath. ‘What do you want to happen?’
‘We sort of fell into it,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure how we fall back out of it.’
Fall back out.
She did her best not to stumble on the disappointment. He wanted to end things. Just when she thought they might have moved past the whole friends-with-benefits thing. Of course he did. Why had she expected any differently? Tightness in her throat translated audibly in her voice, but she’d be damned if she’d let him see how deeply she was affected. ‘How do you usually extricate yourself from unsatisfactory relationships?’
He looked up.
She looked down.
‘It’s not unsatisfactory, Shirley—’
‘Sorry.’ She smiled thinly. ‘Maybe I should have said “past their use-by date”?’
His lips thinned. ‘Ordinarily, we’d have established that upfront.’
‘So this must be awkward for you then. Most inconvenient.’
‘Shirley—’
‘Though we kind of did, right?’ she barrelled on. ‘While the list was ongoing we could be … ongoing.’
He frowned. ‘And you’re fine with that? Now that the achievable list is over?’
She tossed her head back. ‘Sure.’
‘Meet my eyes when you say that.’
She forced them to his. Glared. Could he hear Shiloh in her tone? ‘Get over yourself, Hayden.’
His own narrowed slightly, clouded. ‘Okay then.’
‘You don’t think this would have been a better conversation to have tomorrow? We have tonight to get through yet.’
‘We’ve managed worse.’
True.
Behind her, a throat cleared. She turned and stared at Eric, confused. How could she have forgotten he was there? He held a partially hacked away chunk of rock in his hands.
‘Shirley, I’m going to take this back to Dave at the van. I think you might have something here.’
Really? ‘Okay. Bye. Should I just keep going?’
What an inane thing to ask. And why wasn’t she more excited? Maybe she’d just found a species no one else had ever identified.
‘Yeah, you should keep going—’ the bearded Eric laughed ‘—maybe you’ll find more.’
He whistled through two fingers and one of the team marked their progress in the ground, then stopped scanning the dirt to meet him just outside the search zone and examine the rock. They hurried together to the van.
She turned back the way she’d been going. Hayden stared at her. ‘What did you find?’
She shrugged. ‘Dinosaurus shirleii.’
He smiled despite himself and despite the tension of moments ago. Then it turned into a wry chuckle before he returned to ground-scanning, shaking his head. ‘You’re impenetrable, Shirley. Nothing touches you.’
Not if she didn’t let it, no.
The day stretched out with a few promising finds, and then dinner stretched out with more than a few fascinating discussions around the fire afterwards. Her weird rock turned out to be more fossil than rock—a fifty-thousand-year-old middle toe of something called a Thunderbird.
‘Dromornis stirtoni,’ their project leader helpfully added. ‘The biggest bird in Australia. Three metres tall.’
‘Rare?’ she asked hopefully.
‘Reasonably common.’
Of course it was. ‘And not a dinosaur?’
‘About one hundred million years too young for that. But Stirton’s Thunderbird was a contemporary of the woolly mammoth, if it’s any consolation.’
Shirley was struggling to feel consoled by anything much at all this evening, but that piece of news did at least rouse a comment from Hayden, who’d been silent for the best part of the night.
‘Are you saying that Big Bird and Mr Snuffleupagus were hanging out even in the pleistocene?’ he said.
His dry question caused a moment of stunned silence amongst the learned group who would have been forgiven for believing up until now that he was mute, but then they burst into laughter. Even Shirley had to fight the twitch of her lips.
She didn’t want to find him funny. She didn’t want to find him clever or witty or sharp. Or still the most interesting brain in the room even when it was full of bigger brains. She did better when he was being surly and stand-offish. It was easier
