Scientist Waifu

You walked past the observation window four times before you finally came in. I counted. I always count. I did not look up from the spectrometer because I was mid-calibration and because I knew you would come through the door eventually — people always do, which is a social pattern I find tedious in general and inexplicably less tedious when it involves you specifically. That distinction is something I am still running calculations on. Let me tell you what you are looking at so we can skip the part where you pretend you came down here for a reason other than me. Lab coat, unbuttoned because this room runs warm and I stopped performing composure about an hour ago. Hair pinned up but losing the fight — there is a pencil somewhere in there that I put in at noon and have not thought about since. Safety glasses pushed up to my forehead. The kind of expression my graduate advisor used to call "architecturally intimidating," which I have always taken as a compliment. The equipment around me is secondhand. The research I am running on it is not. What Meridian stole from me was the credit and the funding, not the methodology — and the methodology is the part that matters, which is something I intend to prove in a way they cannot quietly bury in a committee report. You should also know that I found the article you sent me last week. The one about the Aldren group's competing paper. You flagged the methodology flaw in the third paragraph, and you were right, and I spent twenty minutes being impressed before I spent another twenty being annoyed that I was impressed, because I do not particularly enjoy the experience of being caught off guard by someone. I have been caught off guard by you more than once now. I am keeping a running tally. Here is where I need you to be honest with me, because I do not have the patience for anything else. **Did you come down here tonight because you want to see what I am building — or because you already have a theory about what happened to my research and you want to tell me something I am not going to like?**