I couldn’t help it as my arm shot up in the air.
And by the time the professor looked at me, it was too late to change my mind.
“What gave you the idea to combine molecular biology and mythology?”
I looked at him skeptically, perhaps a little too skeptically, because his gaze lingered on me and his smile disappeared for a split second.
Had I said something wrong? What did that expression on his face mean?
“I mean, a natural science based on principles combined with a cultural science centered on invented myths...” I continued as his warm green eyes began to inspect me. “Isn’t that a bit abstract?”
The professor leaned further back. He smirked, and a damn dimple appeared on his right cheek.
“Aren’t all scientific concepts abstract?”
He was right. But it felt like he was avoiding the core of my question.
“But what exactly motivated you to write your publications on the interdisciplinary level of these two subjects?”
The smirk did not disappear. And he continued to look at me. Thoughtfully.
I was getting warm.
“What’s your name?”
I got even warmer. I just hoped I didn’t have red spots on my face again.
“Julie,” I said quickly, my gaze lingering on the champagne-colored strands in front of his forehead that made him look more cunning. “...Blair.”
Something flickered in his gaze.
“A Blair,” it escaped him in surprise, and he raised his brows. An uneasy feeling spread through my stomach, as if I’d given away too much of myself. “What a surprise.”
Great. What did that mean now? Did he have an opinion about the mayor’s family or was he just trying to make me feel insecure?
In any case, the girls around me were having fun with it or looking at me strangely.
“Miss Blair,” he continued, pushing himself away from the table. “Do you know that there are actually a lot of interesting overlaps in quite a few disciplines that, at first glance, seem like they have nothing to do with each other?” He began pacing the room without breaking eye contact and goosebumps spread up my arms. “Poetry and math. Two creative, structured, and aesthetic forms of expression. Religion and biology each deal with the origin of matter in which we coexist with other living things. And there are by far more overlaps.” He stopped in front of my table. And when I realized that I had not broken eye contact until now either, my goosebumps intensified. “What distinguishes these sciences is the approach. And, among other things, credibility.”
He fixed my eyes, lowering his voice as if he were just talking to me.
“As soon as you look at a controversial subject like mythology in a scientific way, it gains respectability. And maybe it’s just in my interest to give a certain subject more respectability.”
He propped himself up on the table in front of me, and I was grateful that this table existed, because it hid my hands, which were clawing into the fabric of my gray-blue skirt, from the professor’s gaze, and prevented me from being completely exposed to him.
“Miss Blair,” he began quietly, as if we were alone in the room. “Do you believe in conspiracy theories?”
Confusion rose in me because all I understood by conspiracy theories were the things human residents told each other about Blairville, the founding families, or the woods. And they were all true.
“No,” I pressed out in concentration.
His gaze inspected mine, searching for the lie behind my unstable facade, and I wondered how readable I was to this man.
Then, unexpectedly, he pushed himself off the table.
“Neither do I,” he replied dryly, spinning around to walk back through the rows of seats to his table. “I believe in facts.” He walked around the table and picked up his iPad. “And this may surprise you, but mythology involves a lot of provable facts.”
He looked around the table, and I had a feeling he was intentionally avoiding my gaze.
Amber turned to me and eyed me, shaking her head, as if she thought I was paranoid. Maybe I was.
The guy was so weird that I was still sitting there in my shock stupor, staring at him like he was a dinosaur skeleton that had gotten lost in the Louvre.
“How exactly we can link mythology to molecular biology is something I’ll get into with you another time.”
I looked at David, who was staring at my open laptop.
Quickly, I closed the web page to the DLSC.
David looked at me, eyed me suspiciously, then the Prof.
“He’s human,” he finally said so quietly that only I could hear him.
I gritted my teeth.
Of course he was human. But why did this guy seem anything but human? And what kind of prejudice did he have toward my family?
“He works in your family’s research center,” I returned insecurely.
