Read Online Ashes and Bones by Dana Cameron - Free Book Online Page A

problems, especially when he can do it by the book.” I let us into the library, which was warm and stale and smelled of sunlight and undisturbed dust.
    “No, I mean…” She frowned, even as she reached for the index I handed her.
    “I know what you mean.”
    “Or perhaps he was just being mulishly dense? Chuck—that’s not a name. It’s a cut of beef.”
    I figured it mattered not a whit to her that his name was actually Charles Carlton Huxley III. “Chuck’s not dense, he just has a way of looking at things that isn’t always clear to the rest of us. He would have let you have the slides if you were affiliated with the department, but otherwise it wouldn’t have been fair to the rest of us, not with the start of semester around the corner.”
    “He knew you were going to lend the slides to me. That doesn’t seem commensurate with his ‘fairness.’”
    “You have to earn that brand of fairness with Chuck first.”
    We found the slides and I extracted a promise from her to return them as soon as she had copies made. “Of course. I’ll catch our slide tech before he leaves tonight.”
    And make him work late, I finished. But that was Dora’s domain and her people knew what to expect of her, and it was none of my business. We made our goodbyes, Dora promising to email me to meet her for coffee, then she swept off.
    Ten minutes later, in my office, I was trying to make sense of two conflicting entries in a field log. Meg was there too, having a fit.
    “I look like a human sacrifice waiting for the volcano,” the short, spiky-haired platinum blonde announced.
    “I’ve already told you. You look gorgeous, the dress is beautiful,” I said, not looking up from the smudged papers I was trying to decipher.
    “Don’t you think it looks a little too ritualistic ?” she asked, standing on her toes, trying to see her backside in the tiny mirror hanging from the back of my office door.
    I sighed. At first I was pleased to have the distraction of Meg showing off her wedding gown—the field notes seemed more than usually screwed up—but when after ten minutes she’d neither budged from my office nor stopped agonizing about the upcoming event, I decided she wasn’t listening to me anyway and went back to work. The problem with graduate students is that they overanalyze everything.
    “Do you think the white is too…virginal?” she asked.
    “Oh, for God’s sake, Meg!” I said, tossing my pen aside. “You’re supposed to look virginal! You’re supposed to look ritualistic! Unless you don’t want to—no one says you have to wear white these days!”
    Meg gave me the wide Bambi eyes and I knew I’d gone over a line moved a little closer by her wedding nerves.
    I sighed and tried again. “Look, that dress is fabulous on you: It’s short enough to be hip, the flapper cut and the lace are extremely elegant, and the fact that it was your great-grandmother’s is extremely good family karma. It doesn’t make your butt look big, it hints at cleavage, and Neal will be blown away. You can’t lose.”
    “My butt looks big?” Meg asked apprehensively.
    “I think you’d better change now,” I said, with all the patience I could muster through clenched teeth.
    “I’m sorry, Emma. It’s not the dress,” she said, taking the overdress off.
    No shit, I thought.
    Whoever restored the dress did a great job, but Meg was pulling the underslip off at the same time, and I rushed over to help her before she ripped it.
    Meg was most uncharacteristically on the edge of tears. “It’s just we started out so perfectly. Neal and I both knew what we wanted. Then we had to make a compromise here, another there, and now it’s just turned into something neither of us recognize. It’s a total zoo. I hate it. I don’t know what to do.”
    “Hold still.” I carefully worked the layers loose. I thought about what kind of trouble unsolicited advisors get themselvesinto. She didn’t exactly ask, but Meg was usually so