Page 28 of Don't Bite the Botanist
Ethan let out a much more manly shout of joy that hopefully drowned out the loud grumbling from his stomach and dove for a pastry. In his haste to snatch up a flaky croissant, he nearly lost the damn towel a second time.
“Fuck me,” he moaned after sinking his teeth into the soft buttery treat. The garbage the hospital staff had the audacity to call food had done nothing to welcome him back to the land of the living.
Tressa raised an eyebrow, and his blush returned in full force.
“Uh, sorry,” he muttered. “I just meant this is really delicious.”
“Well, good to know the standard for pleasing you starts somewhere around tasty pastry. I look forward to seeing where we can go from there.” She gave him a wicked grin.
Holy shit, this woman was testing his resolve.
She must have seen the torment on his face because she just laughed and set the tray on the dresser before plopping onto the freshly made bed. The level of bounce from the cushy mattress drew his eyes to the way her breasts jiggled in the tight lavender tank top she’d thrown on. It was a step above her silk PJs in terms of temptation, but she’d paired it with a short, white tennis skirt that exposed far too much bronze skin for him to focus, so the outfit was more or less a lateral move.
“Relax, Science Boy,” she said, tucking her legs up underneath her. “I’m just teasing.”
“Science Boy?” he grumbled after swallowing another bite. “Not to bethatguy, but you do know I have a Doctorate in Botany and a Masters in both Microbiology and Bioorganic Chemistry, right?”
Tressa tapped her chin for a second. “Hmm… Should I call you Doctor Science, then?”
Ethan groaned. “How about not?”
“I have to call you something,” she protested. Then her eyes positively lit up with mischief, and Ethan braced himself.
“I got it!” she shouted. “Your last name is Ambrose. Amb. Rose. You have a rose tattoo on your ass, and you’re literally a rose doctor! Dr. Rose is the perfect nickname for you!”
Despite how proud of herself Tressa seemed, Ethan couldn’t help but cringe at the reduction of his life’s work down to a silly moniker. “Or you could just call me Ethan, like the rest of the world does. Please don’t tell me you’re one of those people who thinks everyone needs a nickname?”
She shrugged. “Why not? I think they’re cute. And who doesn’t want a little fun to lighten up their day?”
He shoved the rest of the croissant in his mouth to buy time to formulate a response. He didn’t want her to think he was a complete stick in the mud, but he couldn’t deny the truth. “To be honest, that’s not a big part of my life.”
“Fun? You don’t do fun? Come on, Ethan,” she said, giving him a dubious look. “Life is too precious to be so miserable all the time.”
The last bit of pastry soured in his mouth, but he choked it down. “I guess I’ve just been through a lot in my life, and my ability to be so carefree vanished somewhere along the way.”
Tressa’s smile flickered, then reappeared with less sincerity. “We’ve all been through a lot, Ethan,” she replied calmly, regarding him with rich brown eyes that were filled with the remnants of an old pain hidden but not forgotten. “I’ve been through more than you could possibly know, and while I can’t change the past, I can choose how it affects my present. I can crumble under the suckiness and let it define me, or I can give it the middle finger and choose happiness instead.”
There was a strange hesitancy to her words, as if she’d said them many times but didn’t necessarily believe them herself.
“You do know it’s not that easy, right?” he said, trying and failing to keep the bite out of his tone. Just because she wanted to bury hertrauma in a field of dandelions didn’t mean he had to indulge her. “Some of us can’t just choose to be happy.”
She studied him for a long moment. “Not right away, no,” she admitted, her perky persona fading away into something more honest and genuine. “But eventually the wounds start to heal, and you decide how you want to move forward. You can let whatever you went through shape you into something dark and tormented, or you can step into the light and declare in a loud voice that you are more than the awful things that have happened to you.”
Her words drew him closer to the bed, and his hands gripped the towel tighter so he wouldn’t reach out and drag her into his arms. “I take it awful things have happened to you?”
“You have no idea, Ethan,” she said quietly, her gaze dropping to her lap where she absently picked at her cuticles.
“Was it also a vampire?”
Tressa flinched, then let out a sigh that carried far too much weight for someone as young as her. “Yes and no,” she replied. “I do have a vampire to thank for my place here at the compound, but my life was… difficult even before that.”
Ethan nodded, realizing he might have bitten off more than he could chew with his desire to see what Tressa hid from the world. For as much as he’d been through, he still had no idea how to console another human being.
“So, you said you painted that?” he asked, stepping away from her and gesturing toward the art piece.
“I did,” she replied, and he could have sworn he saw a flash of relief on her face before her standard smile snapped back into place, the heaviness of their conversation set aside for another day.
“It’s Fiji, right?” He ran his fingers over the vibrant blues and greens. “Was that home for you?”
