Free Jurassic Heart by Anna Martin

to my room.
    “Joseph?”
    “Yeah. Who else am I going to be fucking talking about?”
    “I think you’ve got a crush….”
    “What the fuck are you talking about, Boner?” I opened the door. My temples were starting to thump in time with my cheekbone, and I wasn’t in the mood for his bullshit.
    “I think you’ve got a crush on Hunter Joseph,” Boner repeated, more slowly this time. “I think you like him. He’s got one of those pretty, pouting faces that you always go for, and it’s all playground hairpulling and name-calling….”
    “I have a headache,” I said before he could get any further down that particular line of thought. “If you’re going to watch TV, be a considerate fucker and put it on low.”
    “Sure thing, toots.”
    I took the bathroom first, washing up and brushing my teeth and determinedly not looking at myself in the mirror as I did. When I crawled into bed, Boner washed up too and joined me, to my surprise. He didn’t curl around me, maybe appreciating I wasn’t open to his particular brand of nighttime cuddling tonight. I wanted some fucking sleep and a shit-ton of painkillers.

Chapter 7

     
    “N ICHOLAS A BRAHAM Eisenberg, what the motherfuck are you doing?”
    “Morning, Sam,” I muttered, not bothering to ask why he knew my middle name or why he had chosen to use it. I cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear and kept my eyes firmly closed while he shouted at me.
    “Are you an idiot?”
    “I try not to be.”
    “No, you’re not an idiot. You’re a fucking doctor. You hold a motherfucking PhD. So why, in the name of all that is holy, are you getting into bar fights in the early hours of the morning?”
    I switched my phone to the other ear in an attempt to save my hearing.
    “It was only one bar fight. And he provoked me,” I said petulantly.
    “Are you serious? You’re serious. Jesus H. Christ, Nicholas, you are beyond.”
    “Are you even going to ask how I am?”
    “Like hell,” Sam said. “You need to stay away from Hunter Joseph, Nick, and this time I’m not fucking with you. If anything else happens, I’ve got a gun and a shovel and believe me, I know enough about bones to figure out how to hide a body.”
    I was about to tell him he sounded like a gangster when he hung up.
    “Was that Sam?” Boner asked. He was already dressed and had gone out to get me coffee and a bun from the Tim Horton’s the next street over.
    “Who else is it likely to be?”
    “Are we going to work today?” he countered. “Come on. Get dressed.”
    I did, reluctantly pulling on my jeans and heavy work boots and wandering around the room in circles until Boner threw me a T-shirt and I pulled it on too. Took it off, turned it right way round, and put it on again.
    “Let’s hope you don’t find anything today,” Boner said. “You barely know your own name right now.”
    “Sam has just been screaming it down the phone to remind me.”
    “How kind of him.”
    I made the decision to leave my corner of the dig alone for the day, instead working with the others and doing a bit of the teaching I so loved but rarely had time for any more. I felt it was my responsibility to pass on as much as I could to the people who worked for me—especially the volunteers—and my slightly hungover postfight headache could be gently tended to while overseeing the others.
    Two of the park rangers came out to check our perimeter fence and found a small gap between posts just big enough for someone to squeeze through. That made more sense than someone trying to get over the top. The fences were pretty high and the ground very uneven from all the trenches. They offered to fix it for me, which was nice, and I left them to it.
    The police didn’t seem overly concerned about a few kicked-in trenches and a stupid action figure, and I didn’t really blame them. It was easy to brush it off, lay the responsibility for that sort of thing on teenagers, and we were working in a small town with not