The Touch That Unearthed Me

Chapter 5

By Friday morning, my body had decided sleep was optional.

I woke up feeling like I had drunk three espressos and then tried to lie still. My muscles hummed with a restless tension that had nothing to do with caffeine and everything to do with the time printed in my brain.

Sixteen hundred hours.

Artifacts lab.

Dr Gray.

I went through the motions of my morning like I was inhabiting someone else. Shower, clothes, toast I barely tasted. My notes for another class lay open on the table, but my eyes kept slipping toward the clock.

Talia caught me staring at it when we met outside the humanities building.

“You look like you’re waiting for an execution,” she said, hooking her arm through mine.

“Some would argue that learning lab protocol is a kind of death,” I said.

She snorted. “You are not that worried about lab protocol.”

“Maybe I am a little,” I said.

“You’re worried about him,” she corrected.

I did not bother denying it. Not today.

“Do you think he will be different in the lab?” I asked. The question came out before I could call it back.

“Colder,” she said thoughtfully. “Or worse. Warmer but pretending not to be.”

I exhaled slowly. “That is not helpful.”

“It was not meant to be,” she said. “Text me when it is over.”

When it is over. Like a storm.

The day crawled. Each class took three times longer than it should have. I sat through a lecture on burial practice and heard none of it, even though it was exactly the kind of thing that usually lit up my brain. Every time I checked my phone I felt pathetic, but the hours still moved.

By mid-afternoon my stomach had tied itself into so many knots I gave up on the idea of lunch. I went back to my apartment instead, changed into black jeans and a dark sweater, and swapped my usual boots for sturdier ones with thicker soles. Lab appropriate. Neutral. If I could not control my pulse, at least I could control my footwear.

I checked my email one more time. Nothing new.

You are being ridiculous, I told myself.

I grabbed my notebook and left before I could talk myself out of going at all.

The artifacts lab was at the end of the staff-only corridor, past the stores and the tiny office where Lou sometimes hid to avoid school groups. The door stood slightly open, a sliver of brighter light spilling into the hallway.

A small knot of students had already gathered outside. I recognized a few faces from Methods: Reed, two girls who always sat together on the left, a tall guy whose name I could never remember but who laughed too loudly at everything.

Of course it was a group. I knew that. I had read the email. I had had the entire twenty-four hours required to adjust my expectations... but somehow, my body still reacted with a little pulse of disappointment as I joined them.

“Hey, Hawthorne,” Reed said. “Ready for show-and-tell?”

“Thrilling,” I said. “I can barely contain myself.”

He grinned. “Relax. It is just lab work, not a blood sacrifice.”

The door opened fully then, and whatever reply I might have made died in my throat.

Dr Lucien Gray stood in the doorway, sleeves rolled back, lab coat open over a dark shirt. The white made his hair and eyes look darker, his presence sharper. For a second, the corridor seemed to narrow around him.

“Come in,” he said.

His voice was the same as always. Calm. Precise. But my pulse still jumped at the sound of it.

We filed past him, into the lab.

The room was long and bright, lit by overhead strips and a row of high windows blurred with rain. Steel benches ran in two lines, each one equipped with trays, gloves, soft brushes, calipers, and small lamps. At the far end, half shrouded in shadow, stood a separate table with something covered in white cloth.

My eyes snagged on it before I pulled them away.

Of course I knew what it was. Or what I thought it was. The awareness of it sat at the back of my mind like an extra presence in the room.

“Find a place,” Dr Gray said, closing the door behind us. “Do not crowd the sinks.”

I took a spot at the end of the left-hand bench. Reed took the space beside me uninvited. The two girls settled opposite. More students filtered in, until there were about fifteen of us in total.

It felt both too full and not full enough.

Dr Gray walked to the front of the room, the white coat moving with him. He picked up a clipboard, glanced down at it, then looked up.

“In this lab,” he said, “I assume you can all read, listen, and follow basic instructions. I do not repeat myself often. If you do not understand, ask.”

His gaze travelled over us. When it reached me, it paused. Not long. A breath. Then moved on.

My fingers tightened around my pen. Stupid reaction. Embarrassing reaction. Unavoidable.

“Today is simply an introductory session,” he continued. “We will begin with basic handling protocol and preliminary recording procedures. Some of you have already had exposure to practical work. Some of you have not. We will assume you all know nothing and build up from there.”

He spoke for ten minutes about safety, about gloves and masks, about the importance of not contaminating samples, about respecting the fact that everything on the table in front of us had outlived at least five, and in many cases twelve, successive generations.

His voice filled the lab easily without being loud. It seemed to thread itself through the clinks and rustles as we pulled on gloves and adjusted lamps.

“Ms Hawthorne,” he said suddenly. “Explain why we do not use ordinary pens for initial labeling.”

My head snapped up. “Ink can bleed or fade over time,” I said, thankful I had actually read the course reader the night before. “Archival pens are designed to be stable and non-acidic. They do not damage tags or alter samples if there is contact.”

“Good,” he said. “And what is the secondary reason?”

I hesitated. Then it clicked. “If a tag is damaged, the original notation can sometimes be restored. Ballpoint impressions are harder to recover than proper marker strokes.”

“Better,” he said. There was the faintest hint of satisfaction in his eyes. “Pay attention. That is how you keep from losing context.”

Reed shot me a sideways glance. “Teacher’s favorite,” he muttered under his breath.

Heat crawled up my neck. I kept my eyes on the tray in front of me.

We spent the next half hour working on small practice fragments: bits of tile, pottery sherds, and some replica bone sourced from a teaching collection. It should have been boring. Usually I would have found the quiet, methodical work soothing.

Today I was painfully aware of the space he occupied.

He moved among us, correcting grips, adjusting lamps, occasionally taking a brush or a bag into his own hands to show the proper angle. Every time he passed me I had to force myself to keep breathing normally.

At one point he stopped near my bench. Reed was fumbling with a tag, his thick gloves making the fine motor work clumsy. Dr Gray took the marker from his hand, corrected the angle, then handed it back with a curt nod. “Slow down. You will make fewer mistakes.”

Then he shifted slightly.

He now stood at my back.

I stared at the fragment in front of me. It was a simple thing, a small piece of ceramic with part of a glaze pattern still visible. My gloves creaked softly as I turned it between gloved fingers.

“Your non-dominant hand,” he said quietly, “is doing too much.”

I swallowed. “Sorry.”

“Do not apologize,” he said. “Adjust.”

He stepped closer. I felt the warmth of him at my shoulder before I saw his hand.

He did not touch my skin, only the glove. His fingers closed lightly around my wrist, guiding it. “Support here,” he said, his voice lower now, meant only for me. “Let the work rest against the table, not your joints. You will last longer that way.”

My breath caught. There was nothing inappropriate in the contact. Nothing objectively wrong. It was instructional. Professional. Necessary.

It still felt like my entire nervous system had just turned to static.

“Better,” he said, adjusting the angle of my other hand. His thumb brushed the inside of my wrist for a second. Just a second. Enough to send a bright, sharp line of awareness up my arm.

He must have felt my pulse jump. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.

Then he withdrew, his expression smooth again, and moved on to the next student.

I could not have said what the fragment in front of me looked like for the next full minute.

By the time we had finished the handling exercise and our first round of basic recording sheets, my back ached, and my brain felt overfull. The lab smelled like dust and latex and faintly of his cologne, something subtle and clean.

Lucien glanced at the clock, then clapped his hands once. “That will do for today,” he said. “Clean your stations. Make sure everything is labeled clearly and left exactly where you found it. There will be assessed work next week. For now, I expect you to practice recording as much as you can.”

Chairs scraped. Gloves snapped off. Voices rose as people loosened, already slipping back into normal student mode. Reed nudged me with his elbow.

“See?” he said. “No bloodshed.”

“Not yet,” I said.

He grinned and went to dump his used gloves.

I wiped down my part of the bench, disposed of my masks, and packed my notebook away. When I finally straightened, most of the others were already headed out the door.

“Ms Hawthorne,” Dr Gray said.

He had not raised his voice, but it cut cleanly through the low chatter.

I looked up. He stood near the front table, one hand resting lightly on the white cloth covering the object there.

“Stay a moment,” he said.

My heart executed a small, traitorous leap. “Yes, Professor.”

Reed glanced back at me with the kind of curiosity that made me want to disappear into the floor.

When the last student had left, the room went strangely quiet. The hum of the lights and the faint rattle of the rain against the high windows seemed louder without voices to hide behind.

Dr Gray waited until the door clicked shut. Then, with a slow, unhurried motion, he lifted the edge of the cloth.

The vessel beneath was larger than I had imagined. About the size of a small pumpkin, rounded with a narrower neck, the surface coated in a dull, aged slip that might once have been red. The seal at the mouth was dark, almost black, a kind of packed material that did not quite look like wax or clay.

My breath caught.

It was not elaborate. No obvious jewels, no dramatic shape. But it radiated a kind of contained presence, like a breath held too long.

“This is SB-17,” he said quietly. “The artifact recovered from beneath the chapel floor.”

“I thought it would be smaller,” I said before I could stop myself.

Something like amusement flickered across his face. “Disappointed?”

“No,” I said. My voice sounded soft even to my own ears. “Just… surprised.”

He watched me for a moment. The distance between us felt thicker now, filled with things I could not name.

“Step closer,” he said.

I did.

“Do not touch it yet,” he added. “Just look.”

I obeyed, standing at the edge of the table. Up close I could see faint marks on the surface. Not neat carved lines, not anything I recognized as writing, but shallow patterns in the clay, almost like something pressed against it while it was still damp.

“It is clay?” I asked.

“Low fired,” he said. “The seal is still under analysis. No one is yet sure what it is composed of.”

“Why is it sealed?” I murmured.

“That,” he said, “is one of the questions we hope to answer.”

The air around the vessel felt slightly cooler than the rest of the room. Or maybe I imagined that. My skin prickled anyway.

“Why show me this?” I asked, then wished I had kept that to myself. I sounded too aware of the intimacy of the moment.

“Because you are in this class,” he said simply. “You will be working near it sooner rather than later. It is important that you understand we do not know yet what it contains, or why it was hidden.”

He paused. His gaze sharpened, taking me in as if I were another artifact to be catalogued.

“And because you seem to pay attention,” he added. “Which is rarer than one might hope.”

Heat spread through my chest at the unexpected praise.

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

For a second, neither of us moved. The vessel sat between us like an extra presence, something silent and heavy and watching.

Then, very gently, he said, “Hold out your hand.”

My pulse tripped. “Why?”

“To demonstrate handling distance,” he said. “Nothing more.”

Nothing more.

I lifted my right hand, gloved fingers hovering above the curve of the vessel, not quite touching. He stepped closer, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body along my side.

He reached out and covered my wrist with his hand, adjusting the angle of my arm. His skin was warm through the glove. His grip was firm but not bruising, guiding rather than restraining.

“Not too close,” he said, his voice low near my ear. “You do not crowd an object you do not yet understand.”

My lungs forgot their job for a second. The heat of his palm at my wrist sent a slow ache curling lower in my body, embarrassing in its intensity.

Something else happened then. A faint, almost imperceptible shift in the air around the vessel. Like pressure changing before a storm. The tiny hairs along my forearm stood up under the glove.

I drew in a quick breath.

“Did you feel that?” The question slipped out before I could stop it.

He went very still.

“Feel what?” he said, but there was a new tension in his jaw.

“The air,” I said. “Like… I do not know. Like when a train is coming, and you feel it before you hear it.”

He did not answer. For a few heartbeats he simply stood there, his hand still on my wrist, both of us hovering over the sealed clay.

Then slowly, deliberately, he let go.

“That is enough for today,” he said. His voice was controlled again. Too controlled. “We will work more formally with SB-17 later in the term. For now, remember protocol. Distance. Respect.”

I lowered my hand, pulse still racing. “Yes, Professor.”

He covered the vessel again, the white cloth falling back into place like a curtain.

“You should go,” he said, not looking at me now. “You have other work to do.”

It felt like dismissal. It also felt like a reprieve. I gathered my notebook with fingers that did not quite want to cooperate and moved toward the door.

“Ms Hawthorne,” he said when I reached it.

I turned.

His expression was unreadable. Only his eyes betrayed anything, a faint sharpness that made my stomach twist.

“Review the handling protocols again this weekend,” he said. “You may find them… useful.”

The word sat between us, heavy and double-edged.

“I will,” I said. My voice sounded a little breathless. “Goodnight, Professor.”

“Goodnight,” he replied.

I stepped out into the corridor, the door closing softly behind me.

It was only once I was halfway down the hall that I realized my wrist still burned where his hand had been. And that the strange, electric awareness from the lab had followed me out, coiled low and insistent under my skin.

Whatever had just happened in that room, it was not 'nothing'.

And I knew, with a sinking, hungry certainty, that I wanted more.