Not in Love

RUE

“There are two main reasons I called this meeting,” Florence Kline said, and if she was in the grip of even a tenth of the panic her employees seemed to be experiencing, no one would have been able to guess.

Then again, Florence was like that. Steel nerved. Yes-can-do. Indomitable. A rising tide. I’d never seen her doubt herself, and no private equity firm could force her to start.

“The first is to reassure all of you that your jobs are safe.”

Murmurs of relief scrambled around the room like ants in sugar, but many remained unconvinced.

“There are no plans of reshuffling. I am still the CEO of this company, the board remains unchanged, and so does your employment situation. If you’re not pocketing printer ink, you can expect your professional life to remain constant.”

That had most people laughing. And it was, in a nutshell, the reason Florence Kline had built a successful company in just a few years. Being the inventor of a promising biofuel made her an outstanding scientist, but Florence was more than that. Florence was a leader.

As well as one of my closest friends. Which meant that I knew her tells well enough to doubt most of the words currently flowing out of her mouth.

“Second: the representatives from Harkness, our new lender, are not enemies. Harkness has a long history of uplifting tech and healthcare startups, and that’s why they’re here. Their objective is, of course, to conduct due diligence and make sure that their financial interests are met, but our work—your work—has always been impeccable. They’ll be setting up meetings with some of you, and you should make them your priority. And I want to make sure that you recognize them if you see them around: Dr. Minami Oka, Dr. Sullivan Jensen, Mr. Eli Killgore, and Mr. Conor…”

“Rue?” Tisha asked in a low whisper.

I didn’t reply, but she continued anyway.

“That driver’s license you sent last night?”

I nodded. The floor beneath my feet was gone, dropped to the core of the earth. I was sliding right through it, and nothing was going to break my fall.

“The pic of that guy…his face.”

I nodded again. It was, undeniably, a memorable face. Striking. Attractive, I’d told him, meaning it. Short, wavy—no, curly hair, just this side of too wild. Square jaw. Strong, aquiline nose that sat somewhere between the Roman and Greek civilizations, deep in the Adriatic. Long vowels and the occasional dropped consonant.

“And his name. Killgore.”

I’d teased him about that, and it had felt like a first. Joking around with people required a degree of ease that usually took me decades to reach, but with Eli it had been simple, for no reason that I could discern.

He was just some ordinary man, and last night he’d exuded the same energy he did now: nice guy, radically unafraid, fundamentally comfortable with himself and others. He’d kept it well into our car ride, that unsettling calm. Meanwhile, I’d been barely able to tear my eyes from him, my hands shaking as I stepped into the circle of his warm, woodsy scent to write my number on his palm.

“That man on the stage. It’s him, right?”

I nodded one last time, unable to speak.

“Okay. Yeah. Wow.” Tisha made to massage her eyes, then remembered her elaborate makeup. “That’s quite a…I believe the scientific word for it is ‘coinkydink.’ ”

Is it? Could it be? Acid rose in my throat, because I wasn’t sure coincidences of this magnitude existed. Had Eli known who I was? Where I worked? I stared, hoping an answer would appear on his face. He was wearing glasses today. Dark rimmed. The most ridiculous of Clark Kent’s disguises.

“I can’t believe they sent four lender representatives,” Jay said, breaking through the fog in my brain.

I turned to him, dazed. “Is that weird?”

“They don’t even own us yet, do they? It seems like a lot of resources to expend on a company they haven’t even acquired, but”—he shrugged—“what do I know? I’m just a humble country lab technician.”

“You were born in Lisbon and have a master’s degree from NYU,” Tisha pointed out. “Maybe they just like to travel together, entourage-style. Share an omelet chef and a CVS card.”

“Are the four…are they all employed by the private equity?” I asked.

“I just looked up the Harkness website—they are the founding partners. I understand that they want to send someone to check on whether the covenants are being met—”

“The what now?” Tisha sounded done with this fucking day. I could vigorously relate.

“You know, those promises you make when you sign a contract? They give us the money; in exchange we deliver a partridge in a pear tree? Why are the partners here, though? Why not send a VP? Is Kline that big a deal for them? It just sounds a bit sus.”

Tisha and I exchanged a long, heavy glance.

“We need to talk to Florence,” I whispered. “In private.”

“Do you still have the keys to her office? From her birthday, when we stuffed it with those ‘you’re old as shit’ balloons?”

I stood. “I do.”

“Great. Jay, see you later.”

“If I don’t get fired, and lose my visa, and end up deported out of the country.”

“Yeah.” Tisha waved him goodbye. “Try not to walk into the sea, okay?”

We left the room just as Florence invited everyone to keep calm and return to their workplaces.

It had all started with fermentation. Which, admittedly, was a less-than-enthralling topic—even for someone like me, with a relentless passion for chemical engineering and an unwieldy interest in the production of ethanol. Still, a couple of boring chemical reactions had changed the trajectory of food microbiology, and Florence Kline was the person who got credit for that.

Less than a decade earlier, Florence had been a professor at UT Austin with a really, really good idea for how to perfect a process that could cheaply convert food waste into biofuels on a mass scale. Because she was a faculty member, UT’s labs had been at her disposal, but Florence had known that any sort of discovery made on campus grounds, using campus resources, would end in the university owning the resulting patent. And Florence was not about that.

So she’d rented lab space at a nearby facility. She’d done her own work. She’d filed her own patent, and founded her own company. Others had trickled in later: private grants, angel investors, venture capitalists, a handful, then dozens, then hundreds of employees. The company had expanded, perfected Florence’s revolutionary tech, and brought it to market.

Then, about four years ago, I’d jumped on board.

Florence and I both lived in Austin at the time, but by a fluke of fate we first met in Chicago, at the annual conference of the Society for Food Technology. I was dutifully standing by my poster, wearing a frumpy cardigan and a pair of Tisha’s slacks that dug too tightly into my waist, and was bored out of my mind.

Alone.

The academic networking game required a healthy number of interpersonal graces, of which I had none. In fact, by the time I reached grad school, I’d been set in my ways for over a decade—ways that entailed concealing my shyness, self-consciousness, and general inability to offer rewarding social interactions to another human being, mostly behind a standoffish facade. But people were hard—to read, to understand, to please. At some point in my youth, without quite meaning to do so, I’d gone from being incapable of carrying out a conversation to coming across as though I did not want to be approached for conversation, not ever, not by anyone and not under any circumstances. I still remembered the day in middle school when the realization dawned on me: If people perceived me as aloof and detached, then they would want to keep their distance. And if they kept their distance, then they wouldn’t notice how nervous and blundering and inadequate I was.

A net win, in my humble opinion. A form of masking, in my therapist’s professional one. She thought I was hiding my real self and squashing down my feelings like jumbo marshmallows, but it had been so damn long, I wasn’t so sure there was anything to hide inside me. The disconnect I constantly felt toward the rest of the world was unlikely to go anywhere, and whether it was real or not, it shrouded me with a comforting sense of security.

It did, however, have some downsides. For instance, people weren’t exactly lining up to hang out with me, which in Chicago had made for a fairly solitary, tedious conference. It didn’t help that I’d firmly refused to change my presentation title (“A Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry Investigation of the Effect of Three Polysaccharide-Based Coatings on the Minimization of Postharvest Loss of Horticultural Crops”) to my adviser’s preferred “Three Microbes in a Trench Coat: Using Polysaccharides to Keep Your Produce Fresher, Longer,” or my coauthor’s suggestion, “Take a Coat, It’ll Last Longer,” or Tisha’s appalling “If You Liked It, Then You Should Have Put a Coat on It.”

I knew that science communication was an important job, crucial to building public trust and informing a wide array of policies, but it wasn’t my job. I had no talent for enticing people to care about my work: either they saw its value, or they were wrong.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority appeared to be wrong. I’d been dozing off from boredom and considering ducking out early when a woman stopped by my poster. She was much shorter, and yet imposing. Because of her assertive air, or maybe just the sheer mass of her red curls.

“Tell me more about this microbial coating,” she said. Her voice was deep, older than her looks. She asked many pertinent questions, was impressed at all the right parts, and once I was done with my spiel she said, “This is a brilliant study.”

I already knew that, so I wasn’t particularly flattered, but I thanked her anyway.

“You’re welcome. My name is—”

“Florence Kline.”

Florence smiled. “Right. I keep forgetting that we’re wearing name tags, and…” She looked down at herself, where there was no lanyard. No tag. No name. Then back up to me. “How did you know?”

“I’ve read up on you. Well, on your patent saga.”

“My patent saga.”

I had no idea whether Florence’s case had been legitimately high profile or just felt so because of the circles in which I moved, but the facts were simple: Despite the incontrovertible proof that she had independently developed the biofuel tech, UT still claimed ownership of her (very lucrative) patent. Lawyers had gotten involved, which would have heavily tilted the scale in favor of the university, but Florence had been able to turn things around by bringing the matter to the media.

I was no PR strategist, but it was obvious that the framing had been brilliant: a woman, a female scientist, was being stripped of her life’s work and intellectual property by some greedy Texas bureaucrats. The news had picked up steam, and UT had backtracked faster than a yo-yo.

“You were able to maintain ownership of what you created,” I told Florence, truthful. “I thought it was very impressive.”

“Right. Well, that’s nice.” She seemed to be wondering whether she was being patronized by a grad student nobody who was clearly wearing someone else’s too-small pants, so I didn’t mention that I would have known about Florence even sans patent scandal, because her name was brought up often in UT’s chemical engineering department, usually in the hushed tones reserved for those who were deeply resented for managing to free themselves from the ruthless academic clutches of teaching Biophysics 101 every third semester.

“You seem like a great scientist,” Florence said. “If you apply for jobs, do consider Kline.”

I thought about it for a handful of seconds, but dismissed the idea. “Biofuel is not really my area of interest.”

“What is your area of interest?”

“Shelf life extension.”

“Well, it’s pretty closely related.”

“Not as much as I’d like.” I sounded inflexible and stubborn, and I knew that. But I also knew what my endgame was, and could see no value in pretending that nonnegotiable things were up for debate.

Compromise was never my forte.

“I see. Want to stay in academia?”

“No. I’d like to do something that’s actually useful,” I said solemnly, with a self-importance I’d manage to shake off in the second half of my twenties, but whose memory will make me cringe well into my eighties.

Florence, however, laughed and handed me a card. “If you’re ever looking for an internship, a paid internship, shoot me an email. I’d be open to hearing about your project ideas.”

I had grown up poor, poor in a way that meant duct tape on skinned knees and the flavor of ketchup on toast and prayers that I’d soon stop getting so tall, because I’d reached the end of my hand-me-downs. Thanks to scholarships and my PhD stipend, I’d recently graduated from poor to broke, which was downright inebriating, but I still wasn’t the type to turn down money.

That summer, I did shoot Florence an email. And I did begin an internship at Kline, and then another, and a few more. I worked in research and development, manufacturing, quality assurance, even logistics. Above all, I worked with Florence, which turned out to be life altering in the best possible way.

Before her, all of my mentors had been men—some of them great, supportive, brilliant men who’d made me into the scientist I’d become. But Florence was different. Something closer to a friend, or a brilliant older sister who could answer my reaction kinetics questions, pat my back when my experiments didn’t work out, and later, once I’d graduated, provide me with the means to do the kind of work I wanted. I didn’t fuck with emotions, not if I could avoid it, but it didn’t take a therapist and months of navel-gazing to tease out what I felt for Florence: gratitude, admiration, love, and quite a bit of protectiveness.

Which was why I absolutely loathed the deep lines that halved her forehead when she walked into her office.

“Shit on a tit!” Florence clutched her chest, startled. After a calming breath, she eyed us with an indulgent expression: the way I’d helped myself to her orthopedic chair, and Tisha’s enthusiastic mouth shoveling of the peanut butter pretzels on her desk. “Why, don’t be shy. Make yourselves at home. Break your bread.”

“They’re not even good,” Tisha said, scarfing down two more.

Florence closed the door and smiled wryly. “Thank you for your sacrifice, then.”

“Anything for you, my liege.”

“In that case, could I bother you to key a couple of people’s cars?” She dropped her tablet on the desk and massaged her bloodshot eyes. She was young for the size of her success, barely in her forties, and tended to look even younger. Not today, though. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” It was clear that she was pleased to see us.Belonging © NôvelDram/a.Org.

“Seemed like you might be having a shit day, so we let ourselves in.” Tisha’s blinding smile displayed no shame.

“I do love a pity visit.”

“What about recon visits?” Tisha laid her chin on her hands. “Also a fan of those?”

Florence sighed. “What do you guys want to know?”

“So much. For instance, who the hell are those Harkness people, and what the hell do they want?”

Florence glanced back to make sure the door was closed. Then exhaled slowly. “Fuck me if I know.”

“Anticlimactic. And a bit less informative than I expected. Wait, I know that look. Fuck you if you know, but…?”

“What I say doesn’t leave this room.”

“Of course.”

“I’m serious. If anyone hears of this, they’ll panic—”

“Florence,” I interrupted, “who would we even tell?”

She seemed to briefly consider our lack of meaningful relationships and then nodded reluctantly. “As you know, they bought our loan. Neither the board nor I had any say in the sale, and Harkness only ever interacted with the lender. We only communicate through lawyers.” She sighed. “According to legal, the most likely case is that Harkness bought the loan because they want full control of the fermentation tech.”

“The tech is yours, though.” I scowled. “They could take the company, but not the patent, right?”

“Unfortunately, Rue, the tech is the company. More accurately, the patent is part of the collateral for the loan.” She grabbed one of the chairs and took a seat. “The problem is, whenever we borrow funds to expand our operations, we have to make certain promises.”

“Of course. The covenants,” Tisha said with the tone of someone who’d appeared on god’s green earth with a genetic knowledge of the myriad facets of bankruptcy law and had not learned the word five minutes earlier, courtesy of a twenty-three-year-old lab technician. Florence gave her an approving nod, and Tisha made a show of dusting herself off.

I shook my head at her.

“Some of these covenants are straightforward—provide financial statements, noncompete, that kind of stuff. But others are…harder to interpret.”

I scratched my temple, already suspecting where this was going despite the heights of my managerial ignorance. If both parties approached a contract in good faith, muddy covenants could be resolved with a simple conversation. But if one party had ulterior motives…

“Now that Harkness owns the loan, they still don’t own the company, but they have the right to enforce those covenants. Which gives them the right to come in, snoop around, and find something to complain about. If you ask them, they’ll say they’re just making sure we’re using their capital in the best way, like good little borrowers.” Florence sank back in her chair. Her posture was exasperated, but not defeated. “This has been in the making for weeks.”

“Weeks?” Tisha’s jaw dropped. “Florence, you should have told us. We could have—”

“Done nothing, and that’s why I didn’t tell you. Legal has been fighting, but…” She shrugged.

“They are trying to take the tech away from you.” I leaned forward, a frisson of some intense emotions I couldn’t immediately name stirring inside me.

I was concerned. Or angry. Or indignant. Or all of the above.

“That seems to be the case, yes.”

“Why? Why your tech and not a million others?”

Florence widened her hands. “I’d love to spin an elaborate tale in which I once abducted Conor Harkness’s dog to traffic him to pelisse makers, and his sudden interest in Kline is just a tassel in his revenge master plan. But I think it simply has to do with the earning potential of the biofuel.”

Tisha turned to me. “Rue, did Eli mention anything about Kline when you two met last night?”

“Hang on—Eli?” Florence’s eyes widened. “You met Eli Killgore last night?”

If I’d been the fidgeting type, this would have been my time to squirm. Luckily, I’d long trained myself out of that kind of stuff. Robotic, I’d once heard another grad student whisper after I was cold-called in bio-nanotech class and neglected to display whatever the appropriate amount of distress was. Stone-cold bitch, my fellow ice skaters had said, because I was the only one not to burst into tears when our team missed the podium by a fraction of a point. “I did.”

“How?” Florence scowled. “Was it a date?”

“Ha. A date.” Tish waved her hand and ignored the narrow look I gave her. “That would imply a degree of emotional availability homegirl could only aspire to after a heart transplant.”

It was true enough. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been on a date—in fact, I was sure I had not. “We matched on an app, made plans to meet last night. Nothing physical happened.” Even if it feels like it did.

My hookups were pleasurable but ultimately insignificant parts of my life, and with the exception of Tisha, who was my built-in safe call—If you ever get abducted, I’m going to cheese grate the guy’s dick and rescue you in no time—I never discussed them. Everything Florence knew of my sex life came from Tisha’s occasional jokes, but it must have still been a pretty thorough overview, because she seemed befuddled by the idea of me going out with some guy and not getting laid. “Why not?”

“Long story. Vince is involved.”

“I see.” Unlike other men, Vince was a frequent topic of conversation among us.

“What a dick,” Tisha muttered. “I’ve let years of him parentifying you and holding you responsible for the utter fuckup your mother was slide, but now he’s cockblocking you? Not on my watch.”

“I guess a line has to be drawn,” I murmured.

“Damn right.”

“Did he say anything about me?” Florence asked, alarmed.

“Who?” I cocked my head. “Vince?”

“No, Eli. Did he say anything about Kline?”

“No. He…I don’t think he knew I worked here.” Or did he?

Florence’s eyes narrowed. She parted her lips to add something, but Tisha was faster. “Listen, Rue, when you next see him—”

“I won’t.” I remembered the blossoming heat in my chest this morning, when I found myself wondering if a man would call for what felt like the first time in decades—maybe ever. The way he’d studied me last night, as if amused by his own inability to untangle me. His warm skin when I’d kissed him on the cheek, freshly shaven and yet already stubbly. “Not now that I know what he does.”

“It might be for the best,” Florence said slowly. “But not as easy as you think.”

“Why?”

“Harkness is going to be here for a while. Contractually, they can ask to be briefed by the head of every research and development project. And they did.” Florence picked up her tablet, tapped at it several times, and then held it out to me. On it, there was a list. And on the list, there was my name.

When I looked up, Florence’s mouth was a thin line. I could read nothing in her voice as she said, “Eli Killgore will be doing some of the interviews.”