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His eyes widened as he realised what he was looking at. “Holy shit. Is that the bottle you pissed in?”
“It has to be,” I said, looking around. There was no other litter anywhere, and it was the same brand. “Look at the teeth marks.” I could stick my index finger through the holes.
Tully took the bottle, like it was the best thing he’d ever seen. “He drank your electrolytes...” Then he laughed. “Oh my god, it’s Gatorade! Get it? Gator-ade. Except it’s Croc-ade.”
I sighed. “That’s not funny.”
He clearly thought it was hilarious. “I’m keeping this,” he said.
“I urinated in it!”
He held it out and shook it. “There’s no piss in it now. The croc drank it all.”
I rolled my eyes, obviously not going to win here at all, and got in the Jeep. “Can we please go now?”
He took the roof off the Jeep so everything could dry out a little and we drove for a while, the track now noticeably different. The craters and holes were filled with water and it was slower going, and it wasn’t until we got back on the larger track—I still wouldn’t call it a road—that I could stop holding onto the grab bar long enough to rummage through our gear for some fruit.
I handed him an apple, which he took with a grin. “Thanks.”
I ate half mine in just a few bites, not realising how hungry I was. “I’m really looking forward to a shower. I feel gross.”
“You look just fine to me,” he said, his hair tousled in the breeze, his carefree smile and kind eyes making my heart stutter. He ate the rest of his apple before tossing the core out of the Jeep. “What?” he asked at my questioning stare. “It’ll feed the birds or plant a tree.”
So I finished my apple and did the same, earning me a grin from Tully.
“You know,” he said over the wind and the engine. “We should probably shower together. Conserve the water consumption.”
“Given it’s the wet season and it dumps a truckload of water every afternoon, I doubt the shower tank will run out of water.”
He laughed. “Can’t be too careful.”
* * *
Back at the camp,we lifted the walls of the bunker to let some air in, then we unloaded the Jeep. Tully checked for any snakes or frogs, and I made us some coffee and set my gear up.
We made a good team.
Which was a first for me, because I rarely worked well with anyone else. Well, I liked it just fine. Usually it was the other person who didn’t like working with me. I was toopedanticor acontrol freak. Which, as I’d told my boss when he’d requested a meeting with me to discuss this problem, was honestly them admitting their standards weren’t high enough.
I wasn’t looking forward to going back...
“What’s up?” Tully asked. He sipped his coffee. “You just sighed twice in thirty seconds.”
I made a third just for good measure. “Nothing. Just... I’m not looking forward to returning to my office in Melbourne.”
He nodded to my gear on the table. “But you have all this new data.”
“And it’s good.” I put my cup down. “Well, I’m hoping what we collected yesterday is great. I need...”
“You need to justify the expense of you coming here,” he finished for me.
“Yes. But I also need to prove that I’m capable and that I do take the science of this very seriously. It’s not just about me being fascinated by lightning because... because of what happened.” I breathed in deep and let it out slowly. “I need to prove that I’m better than them. Iambetter than them. Just because I’m not in their little clique, and because I don’t sit at the cool kid’s table. I’m sick of that bullshit. I want to take this data back to them and say, ‘hey, look at what you can actually do if you took your head out of your arse.’”
Tully laughed, his eyes wide in surprise. “I’d like to see that.”
“I am serious about this. I want to further the field and understand what I can, in hopes of reducing the likelihood of strike fatalities. Of course, that’s a priority. But there’s more to it than that.”
“It’s personal to you,” he said quietly. He reached over and took my hand. “They’ll never understand that. They’ll never understand you. So don’t let them. And that cool club cliquey shit is high school all over again. Fuck that shit. And fuck them.”
