The Theory of Attraction by Delphine Dryden Page B

follow up with, “And you?” He remained noncommittal about the movie, and while he may not have charmed anybody he didn’t piss anybody off. But mostly he focused on me. Ordering for me, as he’d said he would. Nigiri, and we shared a fried banana dessert that was actually much better than I’d expected. I let him be in control, because I was curious to see what he’d do.
    When he offered me the last bite of our dessert on his fork, Athena kicked me under the table. But by that point I was too enthralled to even think about responding to her. Or allowing her to pull me into the bathroom for a conversation, as she seemed bent on doing. I wallowed instead in the glow of Ivan’s regard, fake though it might be. I took the last bite of fried banana, wishing it meant more than it did.
    The trouble was, Ivan still hadn’t given any definitive sign that he was interested in something other than playing a role to practice his social skills. He’d even warned me off. Sort of. And he hadn’t batted an eye at the cleavage on display in the borrowed shirt. Or at my ass. Or even at my feet, though I’d gotten a real nail salon pedicure for once and was wearing extremely cute sandals.
    Of course, it was perverse in the first place that I wanted him looking at my boobs, ass or other body parts. Mostly I hated it when guys did that. Maybe it was just that Ivan never did it, so that was what I ended up adopting as the objective standard for whether or not he was interested. Because I knew I had nice enough assets in those areas, if not quite Athena-standard, and I wasn’t that cynical about using them to good advantage on occasion.
    But he wasn’t looking. And after we left the restaurant and the company of the others, he’d said very little else to me on the ride to his office. Aloof, that was Ivan. And damned if that didn’t make me all the more determined to get under his skin. Or at least into his pants.
    “So, was the call about some big breakthrough or anything?” I asked, kicking my heels idly against the leg of the table on which I’d perched to watch him work.
    “Kind of,” he said, to my surprise. He even smiled a little bit, though his eyes never left the image on the computer monitor in front of him. “We finished our planning and preliminary scale-model testing for the station-mounted parabolic reflector, and that means we can move on to designing the full-size prototype. Paulo wanted me to double-check an equation before he sends the grant reporting in.”
    “Wow. You mean you actually finished a project stage?” I knew enough about his field to know how rare an occurrence that was in the constantly evolving design process of all things space-related. “Closure?”
    “Closure,” Ivan confirmed. “At least of this phase.”
    “Well. Congratulations.”
    “Thank you.”
    He typed in a few more things, stared at a few more incomprehensible images on the screen, and then started closing it all down again, apparently satisfied with what he’d seen.
    “Is it always this cold in here? My office is so hot all the time.” Even in my cold-theater clothes, I felt a distinct chill in the darkened lab.
    “Yes. But just like in the movie theater, it would be comfortably warm if you were more appropriately dressed.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Your shirt doesn’t make sense,” he said, sounding annoyed. “It covers your elbows, but it leaves your forearms and most of your sternum completely bare. It must have extremely poor heat-retention properties.” He started toward the door and I followed, then had to wait as he went back to turn his desk lamp off. The room was still bathed in the eerie glow of dozens of LEDs, and the steady red glare of the exit sign.
    I took a few moments to process what he’d said about the shirt. I wasn’t even sure how to classify it. Nobody could possibly be that obtuse. Could they?
    “But it looks good,” I pointed out.
    Even in the faint light I could spot the tension