Page 37 of The Diamond in the Rough

I’d known that. You couldn’t work with Hart through a football season without knowing that.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” Raj apologized again. “We were doing good with books—what are you currently reading?”

It might have been awkward, but it was helping me to drag my focus back to the here and now. I swallowed, then answered him. “2312.”

“What’s with you and books with numbers for titles?” He was teasing, I could tell, but I just shrugged, smiling. “What’s it about?”

I let out a long breath, thinking. “A lot of things. But the futurism is interesting—using asteroids as means of conveyance, but sort of like solar-system cruise ships with vivariums inside. A city on Mercury that travels constantly at the edge of twilight. And it’s a mystery.”

“Who’s it by?” he asked, then sat back as the server appeared with a large plate of fries smothered in gooey pimento cheese, bacon, green onions, and jalapeños. Rajimmediately grabbed two and stuck them in his mouth, making a low thrumming sound in his throat as he chewed.

“Kim Stanley Robinson,” I replied, then took a fry for myself. The rich cheese, salt, and strong flavors of onion, jalapeño, and bacon flooded my mouth. I’d not had the loaded ones before. If Hart got fries to bring to work to share, they never had bacon, since he, Ward, and Mason couldn’t eat it, and the preferences of the majority usually overruled the rest of us, which was only fair.

But now I’d know what I was missing. I took another fry.

“Have you read theMarstrilogy?” Raj asked me before taking more fries himself.

I shook my head.

“They were interesting,” he said. “A lot of climate and ecology stuff.” He took a couple more fries, then chewed. “The only other thing of his I’ve read isYears of Rice and Salt, but that’s alternate history.”

“What kind?” I asked.

“What might have happened if almost all of Europe was wiped out in the Black Death,” came the reply, then he grinned. “A lot fewer white people, for one thing.”

I felt my cheeks flush a little. “So less imperialism?” I suggested. It was something Mason talked about a lot—imperialism. The slave trade, European exploration and expansion. Genocide.

Raj chuckled. “You’d think so, but not really. Justdifferentimperialism. It’s not like there weren’t non-white empires, after all.”

I thought about this. “China?” I guessed.

“And Indigenous North and South-central Americans, an Islamic empire—not surprising, given the prominence of the Ottomans—Japan, also not terribly surprising, and some other regions.” He smiled. “Humans are humans, nomatter what color their skin is or where they come from, at least in that book.”

I smiled back, then ate another fry. “I’ll have to read them,” I said.

“I’ll trade you forIQ84.”

7

He was looking forwardto seeing Seth Mays again. To touching him. To?—

“Shit!”I hissed, dropping the pencil I’d found on the kitchen counter that I was trying to take back to the cup on my desk.

I didnotneed or want to know anything more aboutthat.

First of all, it was none of my business. Second of all, I didn’t want to be thinking about whatever it was that person had been thinking every time Mays, a CSI who worked for the Richmond police, brought some bit of bone or scrap of bloody fabric in for Ward to touch in order to make contact with a murder victim. Third, I didn’t really want to have those kinds of thoughts in my head unless they were mine. And even then I wasn’t always all that comfortable with them.

It wasn’t like I never thought about that sort of thing. I did. I just… It was complicated for me. When you add having been locked in Tranquil Brook to the fact that I didn’t really like interacting with people… Let’s just say I didn’t date much. Or at all.

I’d once tried, at the suggestion of my former psychologist, who thought I needed to get out and meet people more, one of those friends-or-dates kinds of dating apps. I’d gone on a few dates and hadn’t enjoyed any of them.

I know that I’m not exactly an easy person to interact with. I don’t like touching things, and my social skills, well, to borrow a phrase from Mason, leave a bit to be desired. I have a hard time reading people, knowing what they’re thinking or feeling, and an even harder time coming up with the sorts of things that are considered appropriate for small talk.

Usually, anyway.

I felt like, aside from a few moments here and there, dinner with Raj Parikh had gone okay. It wasn’t a date, of course, and it wasn’t like we were now friends, but I thought we’d at least had a decent conversation, and I hadn’t spent the whole time stressing about how stupid I thought I sounded or feeling like I didn’t have anything to contribute to the conversation, which was actually pretty nice.

Most of my dates ended after a few hours, often without so much as a handshake. Except the couple that had ended with my dates being exceedingly annoyed that I wasn’t going to sleep with them. One had gotten… not violent, butpushy. Until someone else in the café where we’d met intervened. Which had not made me terribly inclined to try using that app ever again.