We finally get back into the car with Huxley driving the rest of the way home. In all honesty, I wasn’t going to fight him for the wheel, I mostly just took his spot to irritate him. Now that I had eaten I had the energy to finish up the rest of our drive. I'm not sure what gave me the confidence to say this but the question just fell out of my mouth

“Tell me something real about yourself” All that followed my request was silence. I started to scramble by saying

“So far all we have talked about is work and other normal pleasantries between colleagues and we have spent almost 6 hours together.” I took a breath

“Come on Huxley” He must have realized that I was grasping at straws and just wanted something to talk about so he started to answer

“Uh, what do you want to know?” He is giving me free rein on the question. That's surprising.

“Tell me about your family,” I say “Who does the solemn Liam Huxley go home to at the end of the day?” He looked at me up and down again before returning his eyes to the road as he answered.

“My mom and my little sister. My mother practically raised me alone since my dad left when I was little, and my 11-year-old sister is currently giving her a run for her money” I couldn’t help but smile, Huxley lived in an all-girl house AND is an older brother.

Not only that but he just opened up to me. He glanced over at me and saw the goofy grin spread across my face

“What Anderson?” he said, returning to his hash tone.

“Ugh don’t do that! Go back to the Huxley that was talking about his little sister. And I was smiling because it's cute, I couldn't picture you having a little sister” shit, did I just admit to him that I have thought about him before? Because I haven't.

“Her name is Lilliana,” he said “but we just short form it and call her Lil” I just sat there in silence grinning until Huxley threw the question back at me

“Ok your turn Anderson, tell me about your family” I can’t tell if he is just trying to be polite or is honestly curious about my home life but I answer him anyway.

“Well I am the youngest, I have 3 older brothers, Thomas, Ethan, and Nathaniel. They are in their twenties now but my Mom and Dad had a handful when we were younger.”’ I wasn’t expecting to find Huxley smiling so when I looked over and he appeared to be more intimidated than smiley I wasn't surprised.

“Ok, now what's going on with your face Huxley?” I said, gesturing to his expression.

“3 brothers… wow” that's all he said.

“They're not that scary Huxley, I doubt they will ever come into the lab so you would never have to see them anyways”

“Right” is all he responded with.

At this point, we are bordering on 1:30 am and I am more than completely wiped. I slowly lower my head down to my arm that's propped up on the middle console and close my eyes. When I opened them we were stopped at a gas station and I had a blanket wrapped around my legs and torso. Did Liam do this? I mean I know I didn’t do it so obviously, it had to be Huxley. I wasn’t ready to have another conversation with Liam, so before he got back into the van I returned to my comfortable position of balancing my head on my hand and closed my eyes. I felt Huxley slowly get into the car, trying to be as quiet as he could to not disturb me. Just as we were about to pull out of the station I felt a piece of hair dangle in front of my nose. Great, I either pretend to wake up and have to deal with more awkward conversations or spend the rest of the car ride trying not to sneeze. That's when I felt the soft brush of a finger come down and sweep the hair off my face to tuck it behind my ear. I almost stopped breathing right then and there, did Liam Huxley just touch my hair? I didn’t think he knew I existed before I came up to him this afternoon and all night it seemed as if he didn’t care to remember I did. But he just touched my forehead. As I was playing that moment over and over again in my head the lull of the car made me drift back to sleep.

“Fuck!’ is all I woke to as I felt a jarring smash to the back of the van.

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I was jerked forward and my body crashed against the front of the car.

“Shit I’m so sorry Raelyn are you ok?” What the hell just happened and why is Huxley apologizing?

It took me a moment to come to my senses but once I did I realized that the van had rear-ended as we were driving on the highway. Hold on, the steroids are in the back and we just got smashed pretty hard. I unbuckle my seatbelt and unlock the door when Huxley grabs my arm

Raelyn, are you listening to me?” He is looking at me again but instead of the judgment that he usually has plastered on his face, he looks almost scared.

“Raelyn, are you ok?” as he says that he reaches up to my forehead with the other hand and swipes his finger across my face.

As he pulls it back I register that there is blood, I must have split my head when I rammed into the front.

“I’m fine,” I tell him, mostly to get him to let go then actually meaning it.

I hop out of the car and run around to the trunk.

“Raelyn, where are you going?” I hear Huxley calling as he rounds the other side of the car to meet me at the trunk.

“Shit” is all I can get out. The doors of the trunk were smashed in and the side of the crate was cracked open letting all our supplies fall out.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” I say as I start pacing back and forth until I hear a crunch at my feet.

I try to mentally prepare myself to look down and see one of Melvin's glass bottle steroid solutions under my feet. I slowly lift my foot to reveal a sticky neon green solution that appears to already be corroding the ground and

“shit” I ripped my shoe off, apparently it also burned right through my shoe.

There is no way that steroids could do this sort of damage, so I slowly lifted my head to look at Huxley who looked like a cross between guilty and pissed.

“What the fuck is this Huxley? Is this what I didn’t need to see?” What could he be doing with something this destructive?

I know that if you inject that into a pancreatic cancer patient they sure as hell won’t get better. As I'm standing there waiting for a response from Huxley, I can smell the rubber on the sole of my shoe burning. Why is he just standing there?!

“It’s nothing Anderson, just get back into the car” When he finally decides to answer it is from inside the trunk while rifling through what was left of the crate.

“I'm not just gonna get back in the car Liam! Tell me what the hell this stuff is because I know you're not injecting cancer patients with it” Huxley stops digging around and finally looks at me with those big green eyes

“So I'm Liam now? What happened to Huxley?”

That's all he has to say for himself? I swear to god I'm going to kill this man

“This isn’t a joke, Huxley!” Now I’m shouting, I’m yelling at a man I only had a real conversation with 3 hours ago on the side of the highway at 3:00 am.

“God Anderson, can’t you just take the fucking clue and realize that the damn reason I was even sent to come with you is that Melvirn wanted me to pick up supplies for a highly confidential experiment that you are in no part allowed to be involved in? If you came alone you sure as hell would have riffled through all the samples and found a way to screw it up!” Huxley is yelling at me now?

After being a total ass all night and lying to me about why he was here in the first place, then making me feel like a total idiot who couldn’t even complete a simple task alone.

“You know what Huxley? You're an asshole. Why did I even get dragged out here in the first place?!” At this point, I am so angry and filled with emotions that I can feel that sharp pain in my nose telling me that any minute tears would start to flow down my face.

I cannot and will not cry in front of this dirtbag of a man… until he says this

“Melvirn would have wanted you to come no matter what, you're dispensable and not important enough to be needed at the lab. He wanted to make sure that there were two people at all times with the crate so that no one would mess with the samples”

Did he just call me dispensable?

Now the tears are streaming down my face, I can’t even look at Huxley anymore. Those green eyes just became one of my most hated things. Is that what everyone thought about me? I’m dispensable? I knew that I was one of the only women under the age of 30 in the lab and that the women barely get heard as it is but I thought I was at least helpful. Useful even? How did the place I thought I loved most in the world just become my biggest insecurity? Then I realized how, this man, this man who no longer deserves my courtesy of friendly conversation, no this man deserves an ego check.

“Close the fucking trunk and get back into this damn van and drive me home.” I spit out. I look him dead in the eyes, my face clear of emotion other than the remnants of tears sticking to my cheeks.

I didn’t wait for him to respond or even make a movement to follow my words. I just turned around and went back to sit in the passenger seat. As I am waiting for Huxley to get back into the car, I pull my headphones out of my work bag that I put at my feet when I originally got into the car, which feels like hours ago. I turn on my music as loud as I can to distract myself from the fact that I have another hour left of the drive which means another hour in a cramped space with Huxley. Once he finally got back into the car I had to do my best to hold back my tears, I just wanted to go home and cry into my pillows. There is no way that I'm going to go to school tomorrow seeing as I would have to be up in 4 hours and we are not even close to being home yet. I'm not going to talk to Huxley so I replay our conversation over and over because something just does not seem right. I'm probably reading into it because I can’t believe that everyone thinks I'm disposable, or maybe I don't want to believe it. If Melvirn didn’t want me to see what was in the crate then why would he send me? He is not stupid by any means and he was very adamant that I look into the crate to make sure he had everything that he ordered. Most of the scientists at LAB TECH are already spread thin working on their projects or bigger collaborated hypotheses like the wheat project, how could they possibly be working on anything else? I order all of the doctor's samples and do most if not all of his paperwork. I think I would know if there was something everyone was hiding. After about 20 minutes of contemplating and finally landing on the conclusion that it was Huxley lying to me, I established that I was going to figure out exactly what he was hiding. I could feel Huxley's eyes on me every so often and I knew he was looking at me with the same intensity that he always does. This time I wasn’t going to give in, I wasn’t going to forget everything he said just so that we could have a slightly more comfortable ride home. Not this time, this time I am standing my ground because I am not dispensable. On top of finding out what the hell he was up to, I was going to prove that I had something to offer the lab. If they won't give me the funding I will just have to work with what I got, I guess my gene mutation will come in handy during testing. Who needs a little petri dish of cells when I have flesh and blood ready to be tested?