“I asked you both to come here because I need a favor.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Willa noticed Van frown. Why was she so grouchy all the time? It was a good thing Willa was an optimist, because otherwise she would’ve started to take Van’s behavior personally.

“Sure, Heather. What do you need?” Heather and Michael had rescued her from a depressing-as-all-hell summer in Stanford, so she’d be willing to do anything for them.

“With Tegan leaving early to get back to San Diego for her new job, I’m going to have to fill in as rec director too. There’s not a whole lot of time for me to plan out and prepare for all the programming for the final session like I usually would. I’ve got a few ideas scribbled down for some of the activities, but I need some help coming up with the rest and you two have the lightest duties for the next several weeks. We’ve got Aquitaine Research and Consulting coming, and they’ve requested an eighties theme, which I am only too happy to provide. I mean, come on. Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Dirty Dancing?”

Yes. Even though Willa had entirely missed the eighties, she still had a nostalgia for it. Come to think of it, maybe that was why. All the best stuff had already been cherry-picked by the time she got to it, so she didn’t have to suffer through the worst of it. Like shoulder pads, mullets, and super-high-cut leotards. Shiver.

“Neon, crimping your hair, stirrup pants, ‘Thriller,’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? I am on it.”

She and Heather high-fived each other and then turned to Van expectantly. Her arms were crossed over that crazy attractive vest of hers, and she looked at them over her round-rimmed glasses before making a tentative offer. “Empire Strikes Back? Goonies? Ghostbusters?”

Heather punched Van in the shoulder. “Yes! That’s the spirit. See? I knew I could count on the two of you. This is going to be great.”

Then Heather launched into instructions and hints, the things they would need, a rough budget. Meanwhile, all Willa could think was she’d be able to spend more time alongside Van. Maybe working with her on a project would let Van see she wasn’t a kid anymore and was a competent adult, more than capable of taking on a career in academia. Even if she didn’t, it would still be fun.

She’d always loved how Van’s mind worked, because it didn’t appear to operate the same way as anyone else’s. Which was sometimes a problem—how could she find anything in her office, never mind in their cabin? But when it wasn’t mystifying or frustrating, it was delightful. And useful. Exhibit A: the Wi-Fi in their cabin when the rest of the camp had none.

While Willa thought pretty squarely in the box—or in the court, as things may be—Van would look at the box, toss it over her shoulder, and declare she liked pyramids better. Because why the hell not? Then she’d solve the problem. Probably that’s what had landed her that post-doc and her current tenure-track position.

Before Heather could get too carried away, Willa interrupted. “Can you write some of this stuff down and email it to us? I have to run to a lesson, and I’m sure Van’s got some work to do.”

Van shot her a grateful look, and pleasure nestled between Willa’s ribs. She may not be Van’s favorite person, but she at least knew enough about her to know leaving her alone with planning-mode Heather was a bad idea. Nate had sometimes had to run interference between Van and their parents. Willa had always known growing up that Van liked her family, but so much chattering and togetherness could throw her for a loop. Heather was more like the Carters than she was like Van, and leaving them in the same room to work on something so unstructured could go badly. Van would get overwhelmed and come off as rude, Heather would get frustrated, and this project she was so looking forward to would start off on the wrong foot.

Willa would make a good go-between for the two of them. Talking at Van was not a good way to communicate with her; the written word fared much better, and if you were going to talk, it helped to have your talking points organized. Heather was more of a dream-it-up-and-then-figure-it-out type.

Now that she’d done her good deed for the day, it was time to do her job.

* * *

Van scowled after Willa’s retreating form. That damnably short skirt swirled around her thighs as she walked, her blonde hair bouncing in a too-perfect ponytail. Woman was like a goddamn shampoo commercial come to life.

But she couldn’t stand around glowering; she needed to get out of there before Heather launched into more planning ideas. So she waved an awkward salute and mumbled something about having enough of the surveys from last session returned to start compiling the data and generating the report.

Downstairs in her office, she picked up her BB8 bouncy ball and threw it against the wall, catching it as it came back at her. She’d have to find a way to get through the next month of having to work so closely with a woman she found so maddeningly attractive, but whom she wouldn’t touch. The activities planning would be a good distraction, even if the eighties weren’t her strong suit. There was at least some good fodder for geeking out to.

Plus, she’d looked up Aquitaine, as she had all the other companies hosting weeks at Camp Firefly Falls, and they were actually pretty cool, as consulting firms went. They did predictive analytics and had a surprisingly female-heavy staff. If Van hadn’t been so dead-set on academics since she’d first set foot on a college campus, Aquitaine would’ve been the type of place she could see herself working.

Innovative; germane to a much larger segment of the population than the miniscule number of people who studied the physics of protein folding; and, she would imagine, better paying. Plus, depending on the project, their employees probably got to work on more than one assignment at a time and in multiple industries. No fucking grant applications. Or, if there were, a support staff to write them for you.

No use dwelling on that. Aquitaine was coming to Firefly Falls for a corporate retreat, not to do job interviews, and even if they had been coming to recruit, Van had a job. The job she’d always wanted. The job she was going to have for the rest of her life.

That thought should have made her happy. Job security was awesome, and Willa had been right when she’d said tenure-track positions were becoming fewer and farther between. Van had busted her ass to get here and attaining that kind of life goal should’ve made her ecstatic. How many people could say they’d attained their biggest dream by the time they were thirty?

She caught BB-8 again as he bounced off the wall and looked in his camera. “Then why do I feel so bleak?”

It was her imagination, but she could practically hear the thing make a sad bloop. Yep, that was about right.

Van shook herself out of some of her melancholy and got back to work. She had social media posts to schedule, analytics to look at, and a newsletter template to revamp. She wanted to get all that done by lunch so she could deal with some of the nonsense from UVA before dinner. The UVA stuff she didn’t want to do in her office because it would likely involve throwing things and swearing profusely.

It ended up taking her longer than expected, but by the time she and Heather had done their weekly check-in while chowing down on some of Meg’s paella at lunch, she still felt pretty good. Good enough to head back to the cabin and face the bullshit. Willa would still be giving lessons, so she’d have the place to herself and could pitch fits to her heart’s content. Except when she passed the tennis court, no one was there.

Maybe her last lesson had run late and she was still at lunch? It was possible. Or maybe she was helping someone else out with another activity? Willa was good about stuff like that. But no, when Van stepped into the cabin, there was Willa sitting on her bed, a coffee table book spread across her lap.

She looked up when she heard Van come in and smiled. It made Van want to smile back, but she couldn’t quite make the shape with her face. “Hey. My lesson cancelled, so I came back here. I’ll be out of your hair in an hour.”

“You’re not—” Really unfortunate visions of Willa’s fingers running through her short-cropped hair made her close her eyes. “You’re not in the way. You live here too.”

Willa went back to flipping through the book on her lap, her hair in ridiculously adorable French braid pigtails today. There was no way Van was going to get started on stuff that would make her into a rage monster while Willa was here. If Nate had lectured her for ignoring Willa, she could only imagine what he would do if she scared his beloved baby sister. And actually, here was a chance to show she was not, in fact, ignoring Willa, because her efforts thus far had been less than stellar. Every time she even tried, she lost her nerve, because all she could see were the dominoes of her getting involved with Willa, her messing things up with Willa, and her inevitable demise when either Nate killed her or she lost his friendship and became so despondent she lost the will to live. But if this was what Nate wanted…

“What are you looking at?”

“Oh, this?” Willa closed the book but kept her page with a finger and turned it up so Van could see. It was a book about caverns of North America with a picture of a limestone cave on the front, a person standing in it for scale. The place was huge and pretty in a strange way. “My parents sent it to me when I declared my major. Because they’re dorks like that.”

Yes, the Carters were dorky, but in a sweet way. Van’s parents had barely made it to her graduation. Van gestured to a spot next to Willa on the bed. “Mind if I sit?”

Willa’s pale brows went up, but she said, “Sure,” and patted the space right beside her. When Van sat down, Willa opened the book to the page she’d been looking at. It was a picture of some cave formations, and the caption said it was an image from Lehman Cave in Great Basin National Park.

“Have you been there?”

Willa traced the formation with her finger and got this dreamy look on her face. “Yeah, it’s incredible. We went when I was in high school, and I think that was the first inkling I had that I liked geology. Well, technically, speleology, but whatever.”

Van eyed the picture again, squinting and trying not to think about how sexy it had been when Willa said “speleology.” Unf. “You know, I can never remember which ones are stalactites and which ones are stalagmites.”

“Neither can most people. The trick my mom taught me was stalagmites were on the ground, so you might trip over them.”

“Yeah, but if they were on the ceiling, then they might fall on you.”

Willa gave her a withering look, and she was almost sorry, but she couldn’t help herself. “You’re the worst.”

Yeah, there was no way around that, so Van didn’t even attempt to argue. “Basically.”

“Another trick is stalagmites have a G, so they’re on the ground, and stalactites have a C, so they’re on the ceiling.”

Given enough time, Van could probably figure out a way to ruin that mnemonic for Willa too, but she wouldn’t. Not right now, anyway. Which was a wise decision, because completely unbidden, Willa started talking about rocks, more specifically speleothems. Showed Van pictures of cave popcorn, draperies, helictites, and soda straws. When she got to one particular picture, her eyes practically gleamed.

“These are shields. This is what my dissertation is on. We have a good idea of how most of the formations occur, but shields are still a mystery. Aren’t they cool?”

Van had to concede yes, they were pretty cool, but the wonder that brightened Willa’s face concerned her some. Partly because she recognized it from her own early days of grad school, and look where that had gotten her.

“Yeah, but you know if you become a professor, you’re not going to spend all of your time climbing around in caves and taking cool pictures, right? That most of it is paperwork and annoying undergrads? There’s lots of boring ass shit that has to be done that takes up way more time than the fun stuff.”

Willa blinked at her, blue eyes wide, and then shrugged. “I know, but there’s crap that comes with every job. I still feel like this is better than most.”

That was true, but academia had a certain mystique, a polish to it that drew people in with its shiny promises of tenure and the glamour of sabbaticals, the glory of having your name next to the next big discovery in your field. Once you got there, though, the gleam tended to wear off. She wanted Willa to make her choice with eyes wide open, not make the same mistake she had.

“Well, it’s also worse in some ways, so think hard before you invest so many years of your life walking down that road. It’s hard to turn back.”

Willa opened her mouth to say something else, but then maybe thought better of it. “I’ve got to get ready for my next lesson, but I’ll see you tonight? We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“Yep, see you tonight.”

Van watched Willa gather up her things and tie on her sneakers. She wanted to grab Willa’s blonde braids and force her to listen to a lecture on being careful about going into academia. It had made Van so unhappy, and that was the last thing she wanted to happen to Willa.

Willa’s happiness mattered to her—and her dedication to geology surprised and delighted Van—and she wouldn’t want to see the bounce that was in her step as she walked out the door to her lesson become a dull trudge toward university bureaucracy and politics. Much as she was trudging toward her laptop now.