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She’s still in bed when he gets in. Yeah, fine, it’s only eleven am, he was only working the morning today, but he’s pretty sure Organised Claire would have jogged twice round the park with her heart rate at a steady ninety and then filled in twenty health and safety violation citations by this time. She used to write his in red ink. (“It’s to remind you of what your blood will look like painting the paddock floor after you slip off that filthy walkway.”)
New Claire doesn’t give a shit about exercise. Or dishes, he notes, ruefully looking at the sink.
“Ok sweetheart, rise and shine. Your sister is on her way, kids and all.”
He can tell she’s awake by the subtle shifting under the cover and the disappearance of a few strands of red off the pillow, but she doesn’t respond. Fine. Whatever. He sits down, not quite on her leg and takes off his boots. He’s the laid back one in this relationship anyway. (If it’s a relationship. Maybe she just lives in his house and eats his food and has hot sex with him. He’s had relationships like that before, just not with him as the freeload-ee.)
“Fine, stay there. Just gonna be clipping my toenails out here anyway. So long. So fungal. S’why the girls respected me. I had claws like them.”
“Fungal? Ugh, tell me you’re joking.”
“There’s the disgusted face I missed. I dunno, this look fungal to you?” He waves his foot in her face and her nose wrinkles like he’s making her smell decade old cheese. They’re really not that bad.
“No, just…rustic. Tell me you didn’t wake me up to smell your feet. That’s a new low.”
“You know me, always reaching for the floor.”
“Don’t I know it?” She says, but there’s not much malice in it. She rolls over and stares up at the ceiling. “Do I really have to get out of bed?”
“Well, your sister said she’s getting in at one. I guess I can leave you alone and the kids can wake you up instead? I hear Gray’s started memorizing facts about wolves now, so…” The look on Claire’s face is at least something like amusement. “Well, it’s not dinosaurs.” She crawls out of bed and into the bathroom. Her hair is crazy, which is something he likes about New Claire. He’s never given all that much thought to hair. Well, there’s blonde, brunette, redhead, maybe a little subdivision into curly or straight, but how it got like that was never up there in his list of things to care about. Apparently the razor sharp edges of Organised Claire’s style took about an hour of upkeep a day (“more, when it’s humid. Of course we had stylists in the hotel on the…really? You cut your own hair??”). Now she has permanent bedhead.
He is distracted from thoughts of bedhead by a rattle on the floor. It’s her cellphone, vibrating and trying to disappear down one of the cracks in the floorboards. He rescues it and dumps it on the pillow, but not before noticing the thirty missed calls. Only ten of them are from her sister, that wouldn’t be weird, the rest are numbers she doesn’t have saved, which is.
“You really need to get that shower fixed.” There it is. There’s Organised Claire. Lurking under the tousled red hair and slightly shabby towel. The weird thing is, when she comes out, he likes it. He will mock her for her lists relentlessly, if (when) she starts making them again, but he wants them back, and that’s the uncomfortable truth. He has a laid back girl who doesn’t care about laundry, but what he really wants is his ruthless bitch. He’s blaming too many Star Wars viewings and a nascent longing to be Han Solo. If you want to be Han, you need your Princess Leia. That (and he will never admit this, even under torture) is probably the reason he asked her out in the first place. The past six months have been like if Princess Leia got fired from the rebellion and spent Return of the Jedi sitting in the back of the Millennium Falcon eating pop tarts and watching Space YouTube.
“I don’t know. Maybe I like the unpredictability. Hot or cold, what will it be today?”
“Well, today it’s ‘rinse your shampoo off in the sink’ because the water cut out.”
“Well, tool kit’s in the garage. S’not like you need to be at work or anything.” He’s trying to make her mad. If she calls him a scruffy nerf herder he’ll be done for. He’ll never win an argument again (She won’t. She hasn’t seen Star Wars, and now he can’t show it to her because she’ll see the vest on Han and she’ll know.)
“No. I don’t.” She clams up and he realises that might not have been the thing to push on.
“You can get another job, Claire. You’re great. You just need to-“
“To what? To swagger up somewhere, like you did” (and here she drops into a cocksure posture that’s too accurate to not be a little bit insulting) “and smoulder ‘I used to train raptors. Yeah. The dinosaur kind.’ and boom, there you go, new job.” She sighs and rubs at her hair with the towel. “What am I going to say? ‘Oh, my last job? Operations Manager at Jurassic World. Yes, that’s the one, with the death toll. When can I start?’”
“So you’re just giving up. You’re gonna live in my house forever? Do nothing all day for the rest of your life?”
“Yep.” She drops her towel to put on her underwear, which isn’t a very subtle way of telling his lizard hind brain that he shouldn’t complain, but you don’t always want subtle. He shuts it up. Well, he stares at her ass for a while, then shuts it up.
“Well you can’t. I want my Xbox back, for one.”
“What, so you can carry on losing at Call of Duty to thirteen year old boys? You’ve moved up the ranks considerably since I took over.”
This is true. Hurtful, but true.
“At least answer your cell. It’s vibrating so hard it’s gonna explode.”
“I know,” she says, pulling on a tank top, then taking it from him. “Your cell’s probably dead, if you haven’t gotten any calls. They found Dr. Wu this morning. Most of him, anyway.”
“Shit. Is he…?”
“Still alive. Interpol have him. They’re trying to figure out what to charge him with, I think.”
“Mad science? Megalomania? Evil genius?” Dr. Wu had gone missing when everything at the park had gone to hell. Everyone rather sadly assumed he’d been eaten, but then he was spotted in the company of some private military contractors in Guyana. Then the FBI had done some digging, and found the money trail. Then some scientists had done some sciencing he didn’t follow, and found that all the Indominus rex’s crafty tricks, like camouflage, and wanting to murder everything were all deliberate. All the reports Wu had given corporate had made it sound like they were unfortunate side effects, but the scientists all agreed there was no way that could be true.
“They’re thinking more along the lines of money laundering and tax evasion for now. None of the genetic stuff was illegal, unless he was working on US soil, which he wasn’t. InGen can sue him for misuse of company resources, but that’s about it.”
“So that’s it? Cushy tax fraud jail?”
“Well, he did lose a leg.”
“How? I thought he was last seen in Paris? They started genetically engineering deadly baguettes or something?”
“They picked him up off the coast of Isla Nublar. Clinging to the side of a sinking speedboat, apparently.”
He had to respect that. InGen and the Navies of four different countries were providing a blockade around the island. They shot anything that flew off it, but otherwise, so far, the goal was just to let everything die, of old age, if that was how it had to be. He tries not to think about that, mostly. Wu must have done something seriously badass to get past all the defences.
“They know why he went back?” He asks. “I’m guessing not to make sure Blue’s been keeping well?”
She hesitates, and he shrugs it off. They’re animals, he knows that. They tried to kill him twice. Saved them all, too, though. Evens out in the end.
“He won’t say. They want me to go down there. See if he’ll talk to me.”
“You gonna?”
She shrugs. “Maybe. Said I needed to think about it. Might be they want to talk to you too.”
“C’mon, Claire, we should go. Bet they’ll let you use a clipboard. Bet they’ll let you make a list.”
“I thought you were against itineraries on principle?” She says, archly.
“On dates. Itineraries have no place on dates. I’ll concede, maybe, they have a place in the FBI.”
“You know if we’d stuck to the itinerary we wouldn’t have missed the boat back to the island.” She sends back, pouring them both coffee and walking out onto the deck. It’s an old argument now, slipped into like a pair of comfortable jeans.
“And then we wouldn’t have spent the night on the beach. All the stars.” He stands behind her, looking out. He just about has an ocean view, it’s what makes this place worth all his danger money, dodgy plumbing and all.
“All the flies. That mosquito bite you know where.”
“We saw those turtles.” He notes, kissing her neck.
“We nearly got arrested.” She’s turned around to face him, but the look on her face is anything but mad. Kind of a shame, he likes the angry kissing. He’ll take what he can get though.
“Admit you had fun.” He says, when they part. She tastes like expensive coffee and toothpaste.
“I admit parts of the date had the potential for fun. Admit there could have been improvements.”
“Admittedly true.” He concedes, lifting her onto the deck railing and sending her coffee mug to its death five foot below in the process. “Not going to move on the board shorts though.”
Angry kissing. Eureka.