Chapter Nine
Erin woke up the next morning to the sun on her face. She was comfortably warm and well rested, which didn't happen for her often. She snuggled back into the warm body behind her, intending on staying in bed all day, but the arm around her tightened, letting her know that Zack was awake already. She turned to face him, burying her have in his shoulder with a sigh.
Sooner or later she would have to start thinking about her feelings towards Zack instead of just ignoring them. She had been the one to make the stipulation about feelings, which had mostly been for herself because she knew that in the past she tended to develop an attachment to people who showed her affection of any kind. It hadn't seemed to have worked very well.
She moved her hands around his back until she was hugging him to her, then kissed the part of his neck that was right in from of her. He shivered and she grinned.
"You are unusually affectionate this morning," he said, his voice still rough from sleep. Their mornings were usually a little hurried because one or both of them had to be at work so they didn't have too much free time to spend cuddling in the morning.
"Well I think I promised sex last night and I don't want to go back on my word," she said, her voice muffled as she kissed up to his jaw. His arms tightened around her again, pulling her closer to him. She twisted her leg up to wrap around his. Sometime during the night he had shed his work clothes that she was sure he had still been wearing when she had fallen asleep.
"Erin," Zack said, pushing her back from him a little, his voice clearer. "Yesterday when you were upset because of the body-"
"Do you really want to talk about that right now?" She asked, raising one eyebrow. His boxers were thin and she could easily feel how excited he was.
"Yes, it's important," he said. The tone of his voice made her lean back to look at him again.
"Okay," she said. "Continue, please."
"Well I was thinking about it and I have come to realise that the reason you were upset is because you needed comfort from a friend and I didn't agree to come over until after you offered sex which must have given you the impression that I only wanted to spend time with you if sex was included," he said all of this very quickly, as though he thought she would get angry at the accusation. "This led me to realise that you must think that you owe me sex because of our agreement."
It took her a moment to realise he was finished, and then another minute before she could form words to reply to that.
"I... Thought you were bad at reading emotional situations," she said, not agreeing or disagreeing. He sighed and rested back in the pillow.
"I just wanted to clarify that I am your friend, and if you need a friend to talk to, I might not understand, but you don't have to bribe me with sexual acts," he said.
"Zack," she said slowly, considering telling him about her half formed feelings. "You're a really good friend," she said, changing her mind. "Besides, I enjoy having sex with you so it's not really a bribe."
"I dot want you to be upset," he said. She smiled, but didn't reply, instead she rolled over until she was above him, then leaned down to kiss him.
"Erin, I think your phone is ringing," Zack called from the living room. Erin was still in her bedroom getting dressed. She glanced at the clock above her dressed and frowned. The only person calling her at seven thirty in the morning would be her mother.
She considered ignoring it, but with the note and the phone call, maybe her mother was trying to make amends or something.
"Hello?" She asked, flipping the phone open without checking the number.
"Erin? It's Angela," Angela said. Erin raised an eyebrow.
"Hey," she said. "What's up?"
"Do you know where Zack is by any chance," Angela asked, her voice suspicious.
"I might," Erin said, glancing over at Zack. "Why?"
"Well usually when someone who has never been late to work is over an hour late and not at home with no excuse, we start to wonder," she said, her voice dry. Erin glanced over at her microwave clock, frowning when she saw that that one said it was almost ten. She looked back to Zack with apologetic eyes.
"He'll be there in fifteen minutes," she said. "Sorry Ang."
"No worries, Brennan is napping in her office, she's been here all night so she hasn't noticed he's late yet," Angela said, and Erin could hear the teasing in her voice. She hung up, not bothering to say bye.
"So," she said, ringing her hands a little. "The clock in my bedroom is dead, it's not 7:30."
"What time is it?" Zack asked, pulling his shoes on.
"Almost ten," she said, sliding her sandals on. "You're late for work, that was Angela calling."
"I've never been late to work before," he said, though his voice wasn't stressed as hers would have been if she were late. "I can't say I dislike the experience so far." Erin chuckled.
"Do you need to stop at home on the way?" She asked, grabbing her keys. She didn't have anything extra to work on in her department so she would just come home after dropping him off.
"Yes please," he said. "I need to change my clothes."
"You should just keep some here," she said absentmindedly. "I mean, just in case you need them."
"I agree," he said and she was glad he didn't read into the words as a normal person might have done.
Erin spent the rest of the weekend and all of the next week rotating between trying to further decipher the tablets, and teaching the new, very hyper intern how to translate hieroglyphs to english. Zack's lab had apparently gotten another body to work on for the case, and she avoided the area as much as possible, partly because of the body, and partly because whenever she was around, Hodgins made snide innuendos about Zack's late day which he didn't understand and she would have to explain later.
They finished the case near the end of the week. Apparently the club owner was some big crime boss or something. Erin found the whole case much less interesting that the mummified remains of the first body had been.
The next weekend she spent a lot of time with Zack at his place, and she noticed that when he didn't have a case to work on, he was much more attentive to her. She, on the other hand, was very distracted. Now that she had acknowledged to herself, at least sort of, that she liked Zack as more than a friend, her heart began flipping over whenever he touched her, and her mind was clouded with indecision about whether to tell him or not. She was pretty sure that, if she presented the problem in the right way, he would be willing to continue their current arrangement, but she wasn't sure she wanted that or not. She had been doing her best not to think about the whole situation because if she actually came to a decision, that would make it real.
Sure, she had dated people in the past, but those had been people that she would never have to see again if it went badly. Even if Zack didn't stay at the Jeffersonian when he got his degree, chances were he would stay close by. Washington had a lot of high quality institutes that he could work at. And he was her best friend. Pretty much her only friend, actually. She didn't want to ruin that. Especially not if this was just a crush that would fade after a few months. That had happened to her before.
She would give it a couple months, she decided. That way if these feeling went away, everything could just stay the same. If they weren't gone by Christmas, she would have to tell him and see what she wanted to do.
"What are you thinking about?" Zack asked, his voice curious as he looked down at her. They had been laying in bed after a very satisfying, educational, couple hours, and her body felt very soft and relaxed, curled into Zack's side with her head resting on his shoulder. Her mind blanked for a moment at the question, not sure what to say.
"Nothing that matters right now," she settled on.
"You looked like you were thinking very hard. Your brow was drawn and you were frowning," he said, his voice matter of fact. She smiled but curled farther into him.
"I was thinking about my plans for Christmas," she said. It wasn't completely a lie. "What are you doing?"
"On Christmas Eve when Dr. Brennan takes her vacation I will go back home to Michigan and spend Christmas with my family," he said. "What will you do?"
"I'm not sure," she said. "I might go see my sister in Missouri. I haven't seen her in almost two years."
"Why so long?" He asked, and she was momentarily distracted by the feeling of his fingers ghosting up and down her back.
"Well, she's in the air force so she doesn't get a lot of time off," Erin said. "And I've been kinda busy with work and finishing my dissertation."
"And your family isn't very close," he said, the words making a statement, not a question. She considered arguing the point, but he was right. Over the almost three months they had been in this arrangement, Erin had noticed that Zack's parents called him every Saturday evening, and at least one of his siblings would call during the week, sometimes more than one. Her mothers last note had been an apology, of sorts, but underlaying the apology were little snippets that called Erin immature, selfish, and invited her to apologize to her mother, which she would not do.
On the other hand, Zack had been present for the one time her mother had stopped over, and had been present for two or three notes. Other than that, she was sure he had never even heard anything about her sister until today, and she wasn't sure she had ever mentioned her father to him.
She didn't dislike her father like she did her mother, but he did pretty much whatever her mom told him to. Erin had almost nothing in common with her dad, so they didn't have much to talk about anyway.
"No, we aren't close," she said after a moment, then sighed and moved to get out of bed. She collected her clothed from the floor of his room and pulled them on quickly, ignoring the slight chill in the air that seeped in from outside. "What do you want for dinner? We can order out or I can try to make something but you don't have a lot of food here."
"We could go out to a restaurant," Zack said, making Erin freeze, her shirt in her hands. "Angela said that we should go out to dinner together."
"Going out for dinner would be a date," Erin said after a few seconds of silence. She pulled her shirt on and straightened it, then finger combed her hair, watching Zack out of the corner of her eye.
"I've never been out on a date," he said, and she looked at him and sighed.
"Never?" She asked. He shook his head. "Well then lets go."
"Do we need to wear nicer clothes?" He asked, gesturing to her jeans and his that were still on the floor as he stood from the bed. He eyes glanced over his form for a second, then she busied herself with pushing her hair back into a ponytail.
"No, we won't go anywhere fancy," she said.
"Have you been on a date before?" He asked, as they rode in her car to the Italian restaurant they had decided on.
"Many," she said, chuckling. "It's pretty much the same thing as just going out to dinner with anyone else, except the conversation should stay around each others interests or something like that. I don't really know how to explain it."
"So it will be a public version of the dinner we had at your house three months ago," Zack said, nodding in understanding.
"Pretty much," Erin said.
"Why did Angela say that we should go out for dinner then?" He asked.
"Because Angela likes to meddle in other people's personal lives," Erin said, chuckling.
"I have noticed that," Zack said. "How many dates have you been on?"
"I have no idea," Erin said, shaking her head. "A lot."
"How many sexual partners have you had?" He asked in the same tone.
"That is not a very good way to ask that question," Erin said, grinning in amusement. Sometimes she forgot how socially inept Zack was, but things like this reminded her.
"What is a better way to ask?" He asked, voice curious.
"I dunno," she said. "There isn't really a polite was of asking that. Maybe say 'How many people have you slept with' instead. It's a little more polite I think."
"Well then, how many people have you slept with?" He asked.
"Um, eight. No, nine," she said, thinking. "Yeah, nine sounds right. Two of them were girls."
"You have had sex with girls?" He asked, but not in a judgmental kind of way, but rather as though he were studying something. "How exactly does that work, in a physical manner?"
"I'm not going to explain it to you," she said, shifting in her seat. "If you want to know, go on the internet and find some porn to watch."
She could see that he made a face out of the corner of her eye and she chuckled. She had given him that advice once before and she was pretty sure he had probably found some really weird stuff because he hadn't brought it up again. "We're here. I'll explain more later, but lets find a publicly appropriate conversation topic for dinner."
"Okay," he said, climbing out of the car with a focused look on his face as he thought. "Is work appropriate?"
"Mine is," she said, nodding as they went inside. "I'm not sure about yours though."
"We aren't working on a case right now," he said. "We are studying some of the bodies in Limbo." She waited until they were seated before continuing their conversation.
"Limbo?" She asked, frowning.
"We have a bone storage in the basement with thousands of unidentified skeletal remains," he explained, glancing over the menu. "Limbo seems like an appropriate name for the place."
"Where are they all from?" She asked, intrigued.
"All sorts of places," he said, shrugging. "Natural disasters, mass killings, old burial sites, anywhere that generates a lot of bodies that aren't required to be identified immediately. When we don't have a case or anything else in particular to work on, we go through some of them."
"Sort of like we do with artifacts and old writings," she said, nodding in understanding. "When we don't have anything new to work on, we go through old documents and translate them to english. We have thousands of parchments and photocopies waiting in storage."
"What is written on them?" He asked, setting his menu aside.
"Many of them are family histories with names and dates as the Egyptians kept them centuries ago," she said. "Some of them are old stories, some are documentation of what was included in a tomb at the burial. The newer ones are sometimes journals or studies, those are all written with ink."
"Interesting," he said. "I didn't realize the ancient Egyptians kept a record of their history."
"It's all very fragmented, but they did a pretty good job of it," she said, nodding. They ordered their food and sat in silence for a moment as Erin tried to think of another topic that would be safe to discuss in public.
"What happened to that important study you were doing last month?" Zack asked before Erin could think of something to say.
"I'm still working on it," she said, frowning. "Sort 's a translation, but it's a bit difficult."
"Does it usually take you a long time to finish a translation?" He asked. She wasn't sure if he was actually interested or if he was just taking her suggestion about small talk over dinner. It was a lot harder for her to read his emotions in public. He had a habit of masking them off around people he didn't know.
"It depends on the language it was written in and the quality of the original piece I have to work off of," she said. "Usually it doesn't take more than a week or two. Once I get a handle on the way the person wrote, I can go through the entire piece relatively quickly."
"So what is difficult about this one?" He asked, leaning back as the waitress set their plates of food in front of them. Erin thanked the woman and waited until she was gone to continue the conversation.
"It's… different than other works. Older. And it's written in a personal interpretation of the oldest Egyptian language we know of," she said, picking through her salad with her fork. "It's also written in code, I think. I can't get a grasp on the writing. I think that there must have been a key to it somewhere in the old palace where it was discovered, but I'm having some trouble contacting the archeologists that discovered the place and I need their photographs before I can continue working."
"Like clues at a crime scene," he said. She smiled and nodded.
"I have a theory," she said, her voice becoming lower as she leaned across the table towards him. He mirrored her actions subconsciously. "I haven't told anyone yet though because if I'm right, it would be a really big find and sometimes the people who did the actual discovering like to hover or push when you tell them it might be important and I want to make sure first."
"What's your theory?" He asked, his voice interested now.
"Well, the only word I've been able to translate accurately, probably, was the name Karanebti," she paused, but he didn't acknowledge that as something important. Not that she expected him to. "Around 2740 B.C. the pharaoh at the time was documented to have a sister named Karan. Not much was known about her except her birth and death dates recorded on the genealogy kept by someone in the household. Anyway, from what I've been able to gather, the texts I'm trying to translate are medical studies written in some sort of code. Back then, women were not allowed to do much more than care for children, especially a woman so high up. She would have been executed for doing medical studies or research, so she wrote everything in code. She hand carved everything into stone tablets. If anyone had found them at the time, they would have only been able to read nonsense. Being deemed stupid at the time was much safer than being caught studying medicine. Even many of the male healers of the time were killed because they were thought to be studying dark sorcery. It makes sense to me, but I can't figure out the code she used without the research teams pictures, or going there myself. I'm waiting for a response from the discovery team and it's been very frustrating."
"That sounds like a reasonable theory to me, but then, I don't know much about ancient Egyptian culture," Zack said, leaning back in his seat. "Surely if you told this theory to someone with more power to get you the photographs, things would move faster."
"I don't want the research to be taken away from me," she admitted. "I only just got my doctorates, and there are probably people that most would consider to be more qualified to do the work than I am."
"Why do you want to keep the project then?" He asked, and she couldn't tell what his thinking behind the question was. She frowned in thought.
"For one, if I'm wrong anything I say in the future will be easy to discredit or easily ignored. But more than that, I just want to figure this out. This woman was so oppressed, she probably lived in fear of being caught every day, but she still thought her findings important enough to carve into stone. It must have taken her weeks to finish even one tablet, months if she could only work on it in secret. She was intelligent enough to develop and write in her own code of a very loosely formed language, not to mention whatever discoveries she might have made. She deserves to be heard by someone who wants to study her, and most people in my field would only be excited about the magnitude of the find, not the history behind it."
They ate in silence for a moment.
"You talk about those writings the way that Dr. Brennan talks about bones," Zack said at last. Erin smiled.
"I'll take that as a compliment," she said. "Dr. Brennan is just… amazing. She's the kind of person that people should look up to."
"She is," he said, nodding in agreement. "So you aren't interested in the glory that comes with the find?"
"Well, maybe a little," she said, chuckling. "It would be huge for someone just starting out, but it's more than that."
"I understand," he said, setting his fork down. Her plate was still about half full of salad, but she wasn't really hungry, instead she was itching to get back to work on her project. "Aren't you going to finish your meal?" Zack asked as she set down her fork.
"Nah, I'm full," she said, pulling her wallet from her purse and grabbing the bill the waitress had left with their food.
"Shouldn't I pay, since this is a date?" Zack asked.
"Well since I suggested getting food, I'll pay," she said, grinning. "You can pay next time."
"There will be a next time?" He asked, getting to his feet. He reached for her hand to pull her out of the booth too.
"Definitely," she said. "This was pleasant."
"It was," he agreed.
"I'm getting concerned with your eating habits," Zack said when they were back in her car, heading back to his place.
"Why?" She asked, startled out of her line of thought about work. "I'm fine."
"What did you eat today?" Zack asked.
"You were with me the whole day, you probably remember better than I do," she said, shrugging.
"I do remember," he said. "You ate a bowl of cereal with me this morning, then skipped lunch in favor of watching a movie, and then you ordered a salad for dinner, which had very little nutritional value and you ate less than half of it."
"Why are you keeping tabs on my meals?" She asked, simultaneously feeling the need to chuckle and play it off as a joke, and get annoyed and tell him to mind his own business.
"I'm not," he said. "I just remember things like that."
"Uh huh," she said, focusing back on the road.
"You have stayed with me the entire weekend," he said, obviously not wanting to drop the subject. "On Friday I don't know what you ate for breakfast and lunch but you skipped dinner, and on Saturday you had some fruit for breakfast and a granola bar for lunch and nothing else."
"I just… don't get hungry very often," she said, shrugging. She couldn't remember if she'd stopped working for lunch on Friday, but she wasn't about to tell him that. "It's not a big deal."
"Estimating that you are about 5'7", and 24 years of age the healthy body weight for your height should be between 118 and 159 pounds," he said, glancing her over. "I estimate you to be lighter than that, maybe 115 at the most. Based off of that information you should be consuming at least 1700 calories per day, and since I happen to know that you go jogging at least three times a week, you should be consuming more than that to just maintain your current body weight."
"Why do you care how much I eat?" She asked, sighing. There was obviously no point in getting him to give up the topic. She might have tried to distract him from it, but she was tired, and she could feel a headache blooming.
"Lack of appetite could be a sign of multiple diseases or even-"
"I'm not sick," she interrupted, not wanting to hear the entire list of things that might cause lack of hunger. "I've always been a light eater."
"The lack of calorie intake can greatly weaken the muscles surrounding your lungs and heart which increases risk of heart disease and blood pressure decreases," he went on. She pulled the car up beside the wide garage and turned it off, then climbed out.
"Just drop it okay? I'm fine," she repeated. "I get a physical health check up every year like everyone else at the Jeffersonian does because it's required for our healthcare plan."
He nodded at that and was silent as he unlocked the apartment door. She frowned. Usually he would put more effort into his argument than that.
"What's really your reason, Zack?" She asked as she closed the door behind her.
"When I was in elementary school one of my sisters had an eating disorder," he began and she frowned, knowing where this was going. "She was anorexic for a long time. None of us knew until she ended up in a hospital one day."
"I'm sorry," Erin said, resting a hand on his arm.
"Well she's fine now," he said, shrugging. He didn't sound upset, and she was confused for a moment before remembering that this was Zack she was talking to. He didn't needlessly spend his emotions. "I was to understand that the topic of eating disorders, as well as mental health, are not to be talked about directly because many people find it an uncomfortable experience."
"I'm not anorexic," Erin assured him. "I just have a very high metabolism and I like to run sometimes, and once in a while I get so invested in my work or other things that I forget to stop for a meal, so now my body is used to skipping meals."
"I understand," he said, and she could hear the concern fade from his voice. She smiled. It was sort of nice to have someone care enough about her to forego a conversation topic that he thought was taboo and talk about it anyway. She hated being mothered and taken care of most of the time, but she had never had a relationship quite like the one she now had with Zack, and everything was new in it, including, apparently, her usual need to distance herself from everyone else and snap at them when they tried to tell her how to live or what to do with herself.
Thank you so much for reading :) Special thanks to my two reviewers!
Curious Katt: I'm glad you like it :) I'm pretty sure no one has reviewed so far because I posted chapters 1-7 within ten minutes of each other and chapter 8 like an hour after that. I'm glad my first review is good though, so thank you :D
Demona Evernight: Thank you :) I'm not too sure what I'm going to do for the end of this story but I have a half formed idea of what I want to happen around the Gormagon case but you won't like it. Maybe I'll come up with a better idea by the time I get to it though.