Abstraction ➳ Owen Grady

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A LOUD KNOCK resounded through her hotel room. Alysanne saved the open word document and set her laptop on the small balcony table. It was late. Almost midnight. She unlocked the door and opened it to find Owen Grady standing in her doorway. It had been well over a week since the two had last seen one another. "Owen," she breathed, a mixture of feelings welling up in her gut.

He frowned at seeing how red her eyes were. "Is this a bad time?" He asked. She quickly shook her head and stepped aside, ushering him into the room. It was in disarray. There were papers everywhere, the bed was unmade, and a pile of dirty (or maybe they were clean) clothes sat piled up at the foot of the bed. "I'm -ah, just finishing up a report for Claire." As if suddenly aware of the horrific state of her room, she pushed papers aside, throwing them onto her desk. A flush of color from embarrassment came to her cheeks. "Sorry for the mess."

He shook his head, amused by her flustery panic. "I brought pizza?" He held up the box, having nearly forgotten the reason he had trekked across the resort.

In the morning, an empty pizza box laid on the floor, a laptop screen was still alight on the balcony table, and Alysanne Sattler lay nearly on top of Owen Grady with his arm loosely around her waist. She couldn't will herself to get out of bed just yet, so instead, she shifted closer to him and let out a quiet, contented sigh.

✹✹✹

It was unexpected, to say the least, but her phone began buzzing violently on the scratched bamboo and wood bar at Margaritaville. It was Sally Sattler. Alysanne picked up her phone and pressed the green button. "Hi mam!" she called when her mother's face focused in. Before she could get up and leave to speak outside the busy restaurant Owen leaned over too, wearing a lopsided smile. "Hi mam!" he echoed. Ally frowned for a moment, deciding it would be inappropriate to push him off the barstool. Instead, she rolled her eyes, elbowing him in the ribs as she stood to take the call outside.

She wouldn't have even needed to see her mom's expression to know that she was smirking. "Ally, who was that?" Came the question in a coy tone that made her want to hang up that very second. That was the problem with the Sally and Ellie Sattler, the two of them were constantly heckling her about settling down, finding Mr. Right and all that other kind of bullshit. Ally pinched the bridge of her nose. "That was Owen," she replied, a hint of annoyance coming through, "he's the raptor trainer, here."

"Are you two-," she began to ask, hopeful that the answer would finally be yes, but Alysanne shook her head. "No!" the forceful nature of the exclamation almost made it seem like the opposite was true, "No, mam."

"He's very nice looking," her mother mused; an offhand comment that made Ally roll her eyes. "I know. I'm not blind," she retorted with a soft scoff.

"I was just calling to check on you. Haven't heard anything from you," Sally said but Ally shrugged, never really having been one for phone calls, "I'm good, work's good. Everything's good." Sally Sattler smiled, but the phone shook her in her hand and resulted in a blurry image, that had been one of the side-effects of the chemo. "How's home? How are you?"

"Everyone's fine." She answered, nodding. "I'm fine, just getting old." There was a moment's pause. "Are you coming home for Christmas?" It was only then that Ally realized that it was November already, only three weeks before Christmas. Jurassic World didn't close though, it was open three-hundred and sixty-five days a year, rain or shine. It was hard to believe that over a year had gone by since she accepted the research position. "I -I don't know yet."

"Well if you do just let me know," she smiled, "I love you."

Ally blew a kiss toward the phone, "Love you too, mam."

✹✹✹

She really couldn't remember the exact conversation they were having when he asked or the exact question that made it sound different than any other time he'd asked for a bite of food at the resort. All she knew was that a flush of color had rushed up to his cheeks and hers as well. There were butterflies in her stomach. "Are you asking me on a date?" Alysanne smiled. She wondered it if would ruin everything if she told him she'd never been on a date before.

"Maybe?" he said, shrugging, but then he scratched the back of his neck, she had noticed he did that whenever he was anxious or worried about something. "Yeah?" Ally's smile grew wider. "I'm down," she announced, almost surprised by how easily she had said it.

Owen glanced at her with one of his brows quirked upward. "What?" Ally asked, laughing at the stunned expression that had formed on his freckled face. "That's not really the kind of answer I was expecting," he confessed, still flushed.

Ally nudged him in the side, looking up at him. That broke him from his boyish antics. "I like being around you, Owen." She wondered if her time on Isla Nublar would have lasted this long if she hadn't bumped into Owen Grady on her first night in Margaritaville. He was fun to be around and the time they spent together was never boring. "I like you." She must have sounded inept with that admission.

"I -ah," he stumbled over the words and went back to scratching the back of his neck, "I like you too."

  ✹✹✹ 

Alysanne had been perched within her favorite tree in the Gyrosphere Valley when Owen found her during his lunch break. He clambered up the tree and onto one of the branches next to Ally, dropping a bag with a de-crusted PB&J sandwich into her lap. She gave him a smile of thanks in return, forgetting a lunch was a terrible habit she'd had since high school.

A small sharp jolt shook the tree, startling Ally to the point where her field notebook fell from her knee and to the ground below. She looked over at Owen, "Did you feel that?"

"Feel what?" Owen asked, his brows furrowed at the sudden question.

"Nothing," she uttered, shaking her head. He gave a look, one that she knew meant he was expecting an explanation for the sudden question. Ally sighed, "It felt like an earthquake." It sounded ridiculous saying it aloud, but she had studied dig sites along active faults and the tremor of an earthquake was almost unmistakable.

Owen cracked a smile and nudged her shoulder. "Or maybe it was a twenty-three-ton dinosaur," he supplemented, "or the wind". The only problem with that statement was that today on the plains there wasn't an Apatosaurus or Brachiosaurs in sight. It was just herds of Gallimimus and Parasaurolophus. And the weather had been mild for the autumn, so she let the thought slip out of her mind for now.

When her shift was done that evening and she and Owen went their separate ways, Ally turned toward the park's control center, having examined several bedrock exposures along the way.

Alysanne pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration. None of the workers had ever noted anything resembling an earthquake, after all, the earth seemed to shake every time one of the fully grown Apatosaurus took a step in the valley. Even so, a basic profile of the exposed rock outcrops around the island revealed its andesitic nature, intermixed with layers of pale rhyolitic ash. They had built the theme park on a volcanic island, not once, but twice. "Does this island have any seismometers?"

Dylan Lester shook his head, not looking up from his tablet. He was the resident geologic engineer on the island, yet Dr. Sattler doubted his qualifications for the position after speaking with him on several occasions. This time would prove to be no different. "No, why do you ask?"

She gritted her teeth together at the lack of consideration to take natural disasters into account of the park's behalf. "I'm requesting that we get a network of them around the island." It would ease her mind and could, in the worse situation, prove to be a valuable tool.

"What?" Dylan asked, finally looking up from the game on his tablet. He pushed his glasses back up his nose and frowned. Ally crossed her arms. "This is a volcanic island and we do not know if and how active it is. Seismic activity is our best predictor of volcanism. I suggest we work on having a network installed around the island for the sake of the twenty-thousand tourists that are regularly on the island."