And maybe, maybe what that tells me is that he’s important to me, too. It tells me that there is a when, there is a what, and I want him to be in my life.
And that scares me most of all.
* * *
JAY
* * *
The day after I give Em the letter, I bury myself in everything I can find.
This is why I find myself hovering over my poor graduate students. I provide four separate (yet equally valid) solutions for one of the problems I give them. One uses Feynman diagrams, even though they haven’t covered Feynman diagrams in any of their classes.
Work expands to cover all bruises. I wonder if Em’s read my letter. What she thinks. I don’t let myself wonder too long. Looking at my phone leaves me with a hollow, empty feeling, so I don’t look.
I’m still in my office at nine at night. Everyone reasonable has left; the hall is dark outside my door. I’m not tired enough to go home yet. If I’m tired enough, I won’t dream about her.
Dreams suck. In my dream last night, we sat in a dark room. We talked—or rather, she talked. She asked me questions I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t, not wouldn’t—in my dream, I felt like I was gagged. I tried to find words, but my throat wouldn’t work. My mouth struggled against cotton. Nothing I wanted to say came out.
So today I work, because working is as close as I can come to answering her. I’m trying not to think about Maria, and I’m failing miserably.
I think of her as I draw a quantum circuit. I sketch in a controlled-NOT gate and try not to remember two months ago, when I was drawing gates and exchanging rapid-fire messages. I imagine her every time my email pings, every time my phone buzzes with a notification.
I hear the squeak of one of the metal fire doors down the hall, and I have to tell myself that it’s not her. There have been people in the hall all day, and they haven’t been her.
The automatic lights turn on, banishing the darkness with cold, clinical fluorescence. I hear footsteps and the sharp click of heels against tile. I shut my eyes and look upward. The image in my head is...not one I think I will ever be able to dispel.
Anyone could be here wearing heels. Karen, one of my colleagues, could be stopping by her office after going out to dinner.
The association between heels and Em is permanently, distractingly embedded in my brain.
The footsteps stop near my door.
I shut my eyes.
It won’t be Em. It isn’t Em. It can’t be Em. The building is locked and she doesn’t have access. But whoever it is doesn’t move. I wait a minute. Then two. Then I give in. I shut my laptop and go to the door.
It is Maria. Even illuminated in the dim fluorescent lights of the hall, she’s striking. Tonight she’s wearing a skirt that comes just past her knees, and—of course—heels. Shorter heels, this time—an inch of shiny blue, and then the long expanse of her legs.
Her legs are so fucking perfect. I can almost feel them against the palm of my hand. I can imagine them wrapped around me, with her perched on the edge of my desk...
She sees me standing there, and at that exact moment, the energy-saving, motion-sensing lights give up. There’s a click, and we’re plunged into darkness. The only light in the hall trickles from behind me.
It’s too much like my dreams. I speak, just to make sure that I can.
“Maria.” My voice sounds as dark as the hall.
She doesn’t move, and so the lights don’t turn on.
“Hi.” Her voice sounds like velvet. “You’re still here. Rachel let me in. I told her Gabe needed me to give you something. I hope that’s okay.”
“It’s okay.”
I can only see her silhouette, the dark shadow of her. Those legs. That slight lift to her chin.
“Rachel said you talked to her. About what happened that night in November. That you…were sorry, and were working on things.”
Repeating that I’m trying is unnecessary. It’s beyond the point now.
“Em,” I say instead. “It’s good to…”
See her? I can’t, not really. Hear from her? She’s said basically nothing. But it’s still good to be around her.
She exhales. “I need to know. Is this it? If I say no, we’re done, do we just…not even talk to each other again?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s pretty much how it works. If you don’t want to talk to me again, then yes, we don’t talk to each other again.”
“Were we even friends?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not up for a metaphysical discussion on the nature of friendship. If you can’t figure out that we were friends on your own, we probably weren’t.”
She takes a step toward me, something I sense—the click of her heels, the breath of disturbed air in the hall—more than I see.
“Jay being an asshole,” she says, “that, I can forgive. But you.” She says that word as if she’s still trying to reconcile me with…me. “You, you knew me. And you kept pushing me away. No names, no numbers. You wouldn’t even admit we were flirting with each other.”
I exhale. “I know. I’m busy, and that tends to fuck up relationships. I’m not perfect. I’m still working things out.”
She takes another step toward me, and now I can resolve a hint of her features in the darkness. Dark pits where her eyes must be. The curve of her nose. The play of shadow across brown skin.
“You shoved me away.” Her voice shakes. “How do I know you won’t again?”
“I don’t know.” My hands clench at my sides. “I’m still getting to the point where I can forgive myself. How am I supposed to tell you how to do it?”
It’s harder to talk now that I can see her. Now that she’s close enough that the back of my mind is calculating the diffusion of room-temperature air. I’m wondering how many of the molecules she breathes are reaching my lungs.
The chances of any one molecule crossing that gap are miniscule. But there are a lot of molecules.
“Aren’t we a pair.” She shakes her head. Her hair moves slightly, and I feel a slight breath of air—Em’s molecules—wafting over me. “All this brain power, and we can’t close these last inches between us.”
“We can figure it out.” I sound more certain than I am.
Underlying my back-of-the-envelope calculations—now with added nonequilibrium perturbations for the velocity of our breath—is a simple truth: I want her. I want her a lot. I want to run my hands through the silk of her hair. I want to pull her close. I want to take her home with me and…
“Stop pushing me away, you idiot.” She takes another step in.
I can see her eyes now, brown pools glinting in the dim light from my office behind us. I can see her lips, sweet and slightly open. I can see the way she’s looking at me.
“Stop thinking. Just hold me.”
I reach out and set my fingers on her cheek. She’s warm, so warm to the touch, and she doesn’t pull away. She looks up.
My fingers slide down her jaw. Her hand comes up, touches mine. But she doesn’t push me away. She pulls me closer, and I drift in.
Talk is hard. Talk requires a theoretical basis for understanding the phenomenon at issue, and this is one aspect of reality that I simply do not comprehend.
The theory of how we work together may be insoluble, but empirical study is possible. Inevitable, even. Her touch on my hand. A smell that makes me think of cupcakes—sweet and vanilla—as I bend my head to hers. Her inhale, then that sweet, slow exhale as we close the distance between our mouths.
Talk is hard; kissing is easy. It’s the easiest thing in the world to kiss her. To feel a hum of satisfaction in the back of my throat, to step even closer, to wrap my free hand around her waist and pull her in. It’s the easiest thing to brush my lips against hers, once, and then twice.
I’m not sure if I’m coaxing her or if she’s coaxing me. We’re equally wary. Equally wanting. She opens to me the way I open to her—slowly, impossibly, undeniably.
Kissing
Em is easy.
It’s been too long. The last time I made out with anyone was five months ago. At a bar. With a woman whose name I’ve since forgotten. It was what other people might call “meaningless” sex.
It wasn’t meaningless. Touch is never meaningless. It’s a need I can’t completely jettison, no matter how much I wish I could—the desire to touch and be touched. No matter how hard I try, it’s a base animalistic requirement, one that’s wired as deep as thirst or hunger, and I’m famished.
I kiss my way down her neck, pulling her close. She’s almost trembling.
“Em,” I whisper. “Maria.”
“Jay.”
We say each other’s names like they’re universal constants, things that are unchanging no matter what distance we traverse.
Our tongues are tangling, now, saying all the things that our brains can’t figure out. We shift; somehow, my back ends up against the wall, and Maria settles against me. Her legs brush mine. I’m beyond hard, and my body wants something that is impossible, because there is no way I’m taking her home tonight.
“I hate you,” she says.
“I know.”
“I wish you weren’t you.”
“I know.”
“I really, really like you.”
“I know.” I kiss her again, because words aren’t helping.
We kiss like this is the first time and the last time, all wound up in once. And maybe it is. Maybe this is the way I’ll end up saying good-bye to Em. Maybe this is it. There will be no conversation, no resolution, no farewell. Just this kiss, burning into us forever until everything we could have been to each other turns to ashes.
I angle her chin up and pull her against me.
Somehow, that slight movement, after all this time is what sets the motion sensors off. Ugly yellow-tinged light floods the hall.
She pulls back an inch, and we look into each other’s faces. “I missed you,” she says.
Most of the breath we share is nitrogen. It’s inert in human beings—we breathe it in only to expel it. She’s right. I pushed her away. I can pull her close. I don’t know how to convince her to trust me. To expect that I won’t mess up, when we both have every reason to believe I will.
But I won’t figure it out if I don’t start. “Have dinner with me tomorrow,” I say instead.
“Okay.”
It’s as easy as that. Her phone chimes, and she glances down at her watch. That’s the point when I notice that she’s wearing a Cyclone Vortex. Of course she is. Everyone has a Vortex these days. Mom would be so proud.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “My ride is leaving in five minutes and I don’t want to walk home in the dark.”
“Your ride?”
She makes a face. “This is so weird. I…long story short, my housemate is my BFF.”
“That’s not weird.”
She bites her lip and looks away. “We live about a mile from campus. I share the house with Tina and her boyfriend. I can walk or take the bus, but he has a car. So if we’re leaving at the same time, it’s easiest to carpool.”
“Where are you meeting them?”
“The parking structure a block from Soda Hall.”
“I’ll walk you, if you want.”
She looks at me. “Yes.”
She doesn’t say anything to this. I thumb through some papers in a drawer from my desk, get a messenger bag, and then shrug on a jacket. She watches me carefully.
“What the hell are we doing?” I ask as I join her in the hallway.
“I have no idea.”
“Good. We’re in this together.”
“Here.” Her hand slides into mine.
We don’t talk. We hold hands. I could say it doesn’t mean anything, but I prefer not to practice self-deception. I’m holding her hand because I want to hold her. Because I care about her. Because I’ve spent years not letting myself have expectations and dammit, I want to expect her.
We arrive in the area she’s designated, and I take a look around. “Your ride isn’t here yet.”
“They’ll be… Oh, there they are.” She drops my hand. “Tell me when will work for you tomorrow.”
“Seven?”
“Okay.”
The two figures I see across the way approach.
“Hey, Maria,” says a female voice.
Then…
“Oh my god,” says the man with her. “Jay?”
I freeze in place. That voice brings back too many memories. Afternoons at Cyclone, because my parents were busy and the only way Mom could make sure we were doing our homework was to have us there. My brother, wandering down the halls of Cyclone, hiding in one of the computer labs.
All our old red team/blue team games. That’s the point when I remember that Maria’s housemate—the one who lives with her—is dating a Cyclone guy. She didn’t mention that he was that Cyclone guy.
I exhale and turn. “Blake?”
He gives me a genuine smile. “Jay. What are you doing here?”
“Discovering how tiny the world is. Em, I didn’t realize that Blake was your housemate.”
“Technically, Tina is my housemate,” Maria says. “Blake is... Um.”
“By the transitive property of housematery,” I reply, “I’m pretty sure that makes Blake Reynolds your housemate, too.”
“There is no transitive property of relationships.”
“Not generally, no, but housematery is a special case.”
Our eyes meet. Maria smiles first—a shy, sweet smile, then a larger one, until we’re grinning at each other.
“Look how sweet that is,” Maria’s housemate says. “They’re flirting with math.”
I can see the slight hesitation in Maria’s smile, and I remember that we’ve been down this road before. Last time she mentioned flirting with math, I pretended it wasn’t happening.
There’s only one way to get her to believe I won’t push her away. I have to not do it. Over and over again, until she believes in me.
“In my defense,” I say, “math is pretty hot. And I only have so many tools.”
Her smile broadens. Our hands twine, briefly, warmth on warmth.
I’ve got one chance to make this work. Whatever I do, I’m not letting it go.
21
MARIA
Eating in the restaurant where I had dinner with Jay and Gabe last September is giving me the strangest sense of déjà vu.
The waitstaff even conducted us to the same table—a square thing, still sporting the same unlit candle, the same plastic flower arrangement. Instead of sitting across from Jay, though, I sit kitty-corner from him.
Our shoes brush under the tablecloth. Our hands could touch.
Jay orders the same thing that he did in September—spaghetti with marinara sauce. I order the same ravioli.
He waits until the waiter disappears with our orders before turning to me.
Last time we were here, he offered to make me a deal. He leans in, and I almost expect him to say those exact words. I’ll make you a deal.
He doesn’t, though. He just looks at me. I can feel his gaze like a physical caress. It feels like he’s trying to memorize me, which is silly, because he knows me.
A fragment of a chant flits through my head. He knows me; he knows me not. I could dismember every plastic flower in here looking for an answer to that question. All that would give me was fake green stems strewn with thorns. All too appropriate; he can still hurt me.
That’s true for anyone—friend, family, lover—at any point. But for Jay, it’s not a hypothetical. I know he can hurt me because he has.
Looking at him almost stings. I’m used to seeing my own failures in his eyes.
“So, Mr. Laser.” I wield the humor in my voice like a shield. “What’s a focused guy like you doing in a place like this?”
He looks down at his hand on the table, fingers lightly tapping next to his silverware. Then he looks back at me. The corner of his lips curve in a smile.
??
?What’s it look like?” he says. “I’m focusing.”
Oh. Everything I have flutters—my breath, my body, even my experience of sensation.
“On something that isn’t science?” Teasing is easy. “I’m shocked.”
“Turns out,” he says, “I’m tunable between four hundred and fifty nanometers and you.”
He picks up his glass of water and takes a sip.
“My,” I say primly. “What a large wavelength you have.”
He chokes, coughing on his water. Then he looks back at me, and that small smile blazes into a bonfire. He coughs again, wipes his mouth with his napkin, and glances upward. “Look what I almost missed out on by being an idiot.”
“Who are you talking to?”
“Mental note,” he says. “To the universe. Just in case I forget. Which I do not plan to do.” He puts the napkin down and sets his hands on the table, palms up.
He’s wearing a blue button-down shirt over jeans. No tie. The first two buttons at his neck are undone. I think for him this is dressing up. Just beyond his cuffs, I can see the lines of dark ink on his skin, a spill of dull black from his wrist to his palm.
It’s an invitation. For a moment, I hesitate.
But I didn’t come here to hesitate. I already care about him. He can already hurt me. I’m putting myself out here like this out of pure, unadulterated selfishness. If I’m going to get hurt, I’m taking every last drop of pleasure I can wring from the experience first.
So I reach out, set my fingertips on the edge of the geometric pattern, and ask. “What is this?”
“My little brother used to draw these really intricate designs in his school notebooks at lunch.” For the first time during dinner, his eyes shift off center.
He told me about his little brother just over a week ago. I know him, and I don’t.
“So it’s a memorial.”
“Something like that.” His voice is low. “And some day, I’ll tell you everything about my baby brother. But…maybe not today.”
No. I swallow. I put a second finger on his palm. “Fine by me.”
We don’t say anything for another few seconds.