Hold Me

  And yes, I get it—my response to her earlier left much to be desired. But she doesn’t address me at all. She chatters to her brother about their grandmother, who apparently lives nearby, some band they both like, and—of all things—his wedding plans.

  “No,” Gabe says bemusedly. “I don’t have a venue yet, but we’re not getting married for thirteen months. There’s plenty of time.”

  “Sorry.” Maria doesn’t sound apologetic. “But Jutta will kill me if I let you drop the ball on this one.”

  The second thing that annoys me about Maria is what she is saying. I’m not sure how serious, thoughtful Gabe ended up with a sister who is bugging him about wedding plans in one breath, then asking him about some movie in the next. She’s like a pond skater, flitting from topic to topic, scarcely touching the surface and skimming away without delving into any depth.

  I’m not participating in the conversation, and she’s already driving me nuts.

  Three: I can’t stop looking at her.

  No, it’s not that I find her overwhelmingly attractive. I stopped letting my little head do all the thinking back when I was in high school. Pretty is a dime a dozen.

  But Maria Lopez isn’t pretty to look at. Neither is the Mona Lisa, if it comes down to it. No, Maria is something far more invasive. She’s interesting to look at.

  Her nose is sharp and pronounced; her eyes are soft and smoky. Her hair is dark, except where it glints with gold and red. She’s a combination of elements that should not go together—inviting lips, forbidding eyebrows that narrow in my direction when she catches me looking at her. She draws my eye as if a graphic artist designed her for that express purpose. No matter how I try to look away, I keep turning back.

  The fourth thing that annoys me about Maria is her shoes. I’m aware the entire length of the walk to the restaurant—almost a mile—that she’s keeping up with the brisk pace that I’m setting.

  In heels. Pink heels, and not the short stubby kind either. She doesn’t complain, and she probably should. Her heels have bright silver studs in them, and they keep reflecting little flashes of light as she walks.

  And that means I keep looking down at her shoes. And her calves. And the six inches of thigh visible above her skirt. From there, it’s not hard for my gaze to slide to the shift of her hips as she’s walking, the tensing muscles of her behind.

  And fuck me, but here is number five: Gabe is a really good friend of mine, and the last thing I want is for him to realize that I keep checking out his sister’s ass.

  We finally arrive at the Italian place I’ve picked out and are shown to a table in back.

  Both Gabe and Maria head to the restroom to wash up.

  Item six: Maria’s the first one to come back. If there were any fairness to the universe, she would have taken an extra five minutes to redo her lipstick, or whatever women like her do. But no.

  She approaches the table warily. We make eye contact as if we are a pair of strange wolves, growling over who will be alpha of this restaurant.

  She sits stiff-leggedly. A spray of plastic flowers separates us. It’s not enough of a barrier.

  Here’s the seventh reason why Maria is incredibly annoying: I was really looking forward to having Gabe around for a year.

  Nobody tells you the dirty secret of academia until it’s too late. It should be obvious. In reality, you only realize what’s happening once you’re committed.

  I spent all my university years making friends—good friends—who scattered to the wind when we graduated. That’s to be expected. I made more friends when I was getting my doctoral degree. There were labmates, postdocs, some professors. There were people I met at short classes and conferences. In other words, I found my people, and then watched them disappear from my life. Multiply by the absent friends acquired during my postdoc years and more scientific conferences.

  Nobody tells you when you decide to be a scientist that you will spend the rest of your life having your forty closest friends live at a distance.

  I’m not lonely. I’m too busy to be lonely. What I am is bloody annoyed that I spent ten minutes listening to one of those friends argue with his little sister about Taylor Swift. I’m annoyed that she’s here at this table right now, and Gabe is not.

  And maybe that’s why I look at Maria—who is pretending to find the unlit candle on the table more interesting than me—and say these words: “I’ll make you a deal.”

  Her eyebrows scrunch together suspiciously. She sets the candle down. “What kind of deal?”

  “I’ll apologize to you for being a jerk earlier if you’ll stop distracting your brother.”

  Her head tilts slightly; the dim lights of the restaurant catch a light gold strand of her hair. “How am I distracting my brother?”

  She doesn’t even know. Her cluelessness is item eight. I hold her gaze. “This is the most important year of his life. He needs to continue to turn the last two years of his work into papers, all while impressing his current principal investigator. He needs to come up with a viable research agenda and practice defending it. Gabe has a shot at the holy grail of a tenure track job. He doesn’t need to waste his time thinking about Britney Spears.”

  It wasn’t Britney Spears. She doesn’t correct me. “You think a few minutes talking about music will kill his job prospects?”

  “Sunday dinner every week?” I hold up a finger. “A trip to Santa Monica to hear some music that you can stream for free while doing work?” A second finger. “And on top of that, you expect him to put together a full wedding? That’s not even everything I heard in the last twenty minutes. Yes, you’re distracting him.”

  Her jaw shifts and squares, but she doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m just saying, he’s not in high school anymore. You can’t act like he’s your personal chauffeur.”

  She bites her lip. “So that’s the deal you’re offering. You’ll apologize to me, and I’ll go off and do my own thing.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Okay.” She leans down and opens her purse. To my great annoyance, she takes out a mirrored compact and a tube of lipstick, which she proceeds to apply.

  “You’re not even going to answer?”

  “Mmm.” She’s like a parakeet, entranced with her own reflection. “If I have to bargain for your apology, it doesn’t really mean anything, does it?”

  I frown at her.

  “Also, what my brother and I talk about is really not your business. You don’t know me or my relationship with my brother. You don’t get a vote.”

  “I’m rather more of an expert on the academic market than you are.”

  She closes her mirror with a snap. “Congratulations.”

  “And look at you. You took a selfie with your brother. You’re a girly-girl. You care about your hair and clothes and pop culture. I’ve seen too many of my good friends struggle to get jobs. You don’t know this market.”

  “How sweet.” Her lipstick glistens, catching the light. “I’m average, and you only respect people three standard deviations above the mean. I don’t make the cut.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Sure you did, Three Sigma. Back in your lab, right as you were throwing me out.”

  I grimace.

  “This dinner must be incredibly weird for you,” she continues smoothly. “Forced social interaction with people who like popular things? Oooh. Awkward.”

  “I definitely didn’t say that.”

  I just thought it. And she heard it anyway. It’s like she heard the entire list I’ve been making in my head, because she tosses back her hair with a practiced flick that a wind machine couldn’t improve, and crosses her legs, pointing one toe of those outrageous pink heels in my direction. The posture is defiantly, femininely rude.

  “Let me help you hate me,” she says in a low, silky voice. “I also read romance novels. I watched every part of Twilight in the theater even though I was Team Jacob. If you think that girly-girl is an insult to me, you??
?re wrong. I am a girl, and I am proud of it.”

  I exhale. “I don’t have a problem with women. Just you.”

  “You know what you do have a problem with? You’re not my brother’s boss. You’re not his owner. You’re his friend. If he wants to come with me to every Britney Spears concert in the country, it’s none of your business. You don’t get to come between us. That’s not your place, now or ever. So take your ninety-nine point seventh percentile intelligence and shove it.”

  “Jesus,” says a voice behind me. It’s Gabe. He’s come up to the table. “Jay, what did you say? You made Maria mad?”

  She turns her head and tosses her hair, and…

  Fuck.

  Here’s the thing. Rationally, I know she’s pissed at me. Rationally, I know that we would never, ever, in a million years get along. Rationally, I’m aware that even if I had been nice from the beginning, I would get shot down hard if I made a play for her.

  Not that Maria is out of my league. It’s more that the very concept of a league makes no sense, because we’re not playing the same sport. I’m more of a pickup basketball kind of guy, and she’s… Well, she’s into whatever game you play with a French manicure and Louboutins. The game she’s playing sucks, the players are mean, and I want nothing to do with it or them.

  Nothing, except… My stupid lizard brain wouldn’t mind watching her play. The light catches her hair—a high-gloss counterpoint that draws my eye—and it’s so perfect that I can’t help but wonder if she planned it.

  My teeth grind together. Maybe I could collapse reasons one through eight into this: Maria reminds me of Clio. It’s not anything so obvious as her looks—Clio was blond and about six inches shorter—so much as a vague impression. Clio had that same air of polished perfection. That same awareness in her eyes when she caught me looking. Go ahead. I can see that final message in my mind’s eye. No one cares.

  Including me. I won’t care, and I don’t want anything to do with Maria or the memories she brings up.

  I turn to Gabe. “Let’s talk particle physics.”

  He frowns at me. He glances at Maria. He shakes his head, then sits down. “Dude,” he finally says. “Don’t be mean to my sister, okay?”

  “Don’t bother,” Maria says smoothly. “He’s too busy to be reprimanded.” She glances in my direction and smiles sweetly. “And I don’t mind.”

  Striking, yes. Eye-catching, yes. And was I mean to her? I consider everything I’ve said. Yes, that was probably over the top. I have too many memories of where playing nice with girls like her gets me.

  The last thing I need at this point is to spend more time looking at her. The less we like each other, the better.

  * * *

  It’s nine at night, half an hour after I abandoned Gabe, his sister, and the world’s most painful dinner. I’m reading through my grant proposal one last time, sitting in bed in sweats, trying to pretend I’m not waiting…

  Ding. My phone chirps beside me, and I smile. Smile isn’t the right word for what I do. My whole body lights up, the way I know it shouldn’t, not for someone I’ve never met. Not for someone I’ve never seen.

  I pick up my phone and open the chat app.

  There’s a message. It’s from Em. I’m sorry. I know I promised I was going to get this post up in the next hour, but I’m not finishing it tonight.

  I don’t even hesitate before typing back. Do you need to work something out? It’s not like my grant deadline is tomorrow or anything.

  My grant deadline is tomorrow.

  I can be a sounding board, I write.

  Her response is immediate and dismissive. It’s not that at all. I need soup.

  Oh. Shit. Stop everything! We have a soup emergency here. Do you have any soup in the house?

  There’s a pause before her response comes through. Soup. In the house. I must have misheard. Did you say soup in the house?

  There’s a longer pause. It’s weird how colloquialisms play out on the internet. It’s not like she could actually mishear me; my words are right there, and they aren’t changing.

  She goes on: You are, perhaps, referring to the abomination known as soup in a can? What kind of a monster do you take me for? Soup in a can is not soup. The vegetables get soggy. The noodles turn to mush. SOUP IN A CAN IS NOT REAL SOUP, OKAY?

  I have a goofy grin on my face as I shut my laptop. I don’t take a lot of breaks; my tenure clock has effectively three years left before I have to put the final application together. I’m not about to screw around. But relationships ebb and flow differently in real life versus online. The friend I played pool with three times a week at university now posts happy birthday on my Facebook wall once a year. By contrast, Vithika Chaudhary and I never started talking quantum algorithms until six months after we ended up at a physics course in the French Alps together. Now we talk twice a wee

  and make plans to cross paths as often as two people on opposite sides of the world can.

  As for Em? I have no idea who she is.

  We found each other by accident, when Vithika forwarded me a link to her blog a few years ago. We started talking some months later when I left a comment critiquing her physics, and we somehow never stopped.

  I grin as I type. Uh. Em. I’m pretty sure canned soup is actually soup. There’s an entire series of paintings about it.

  She sends me a skull-and-crossbones emoji. FUCK WARHOL. I AM SERIOUS ABOUT SOUP.

  Whoa, I type. Em. Calm down.

  IF YOU ARE GOING TO BE FLIPPANT ABOUT SOUP, THIS CONVERSATION IS OVER.

  I know she’s joking the way I know Rayleigh scattering explains why the sky is blue: immediately and without thinking. Over the past eighteen months, I’ve come to know her pretty well.

  That’s why I play along. I apologize. Clearly I have failed to take soup with the seriousness that soup deserves. All hail the mighty soup. Ave, soup. Morituri te salutant.

  I can almost feel the suspicion roiling off my phone. Three little dots appear, indicating that she’s typing. Then: What are you talking about?

  It’s not often I manage to stump her. Reading comics in my misspent youth has given me some useful ammunition. It’s what ancient gladiators would say to Caesar before they did battle. Except the soup part. It means something like, “We who are about to die salute you.” One can’t get more serious about soup than a death match in its honor.

  I can almost imagine her smiling. I detect sarcasm on your part. Whatever. I’ll circle back to this later. I have to run out for soup before the good restaurants close. I have about a two-block radius.

  What’s in two blocks? I ask, before I think better of the question.

  Pretty much everything. Chinese. Korean. Vietnamese. Thai. I am not sure which soup I will get, but there will be soup.

  I bite my lip.

  Here’s the thing. I grew up spending afternoons at Cyclone Technologies, the computer company where my mother worked. Basic online safety was drummed into me from an early age. Always use a pseudonym if you can. Never tell people who you are or where you live. Never drop clues.

  It’s a good idea for all minors; it’s an absolute necessity for a teenager messing around on a computer hooked to the network of one of the largest computer manufacturers in the world. Black-hat hackers would have loved to infect our machines.

  As an adult with a ridiculously Googleable name, I’ve learned it’s best to adhere to those rules. People discover who my parents are, and things get weird.

  Em knows me as my online pseudonym—Actual Physicist—and I know her as Em. And after eighteen months of chatting, I’ve realized that layer of pseudonymity is important. Necessary, even.

  I shake my head and type. Okay, not that I want to be crazy stalker guy, but that was a slip. If I *were* crazy stalker guy, you realize that you just told me a lot of stuff about yourself, right?

  I haven’t mentioned Em to my other friends. Or my parents. Or my colleagues. For one, I’m not sure how I would classify her. We are friends, ye
s. We flirt, yes. I talk to her a lot, because she’s fun to talk to, and I’m so busy being not-lonely that someone interesting who I’ve never met fits perfectly into my life.

  This isn’t really weird. I’ve written papers with people on the other side of the globe, people I’ve never met. I’m used to relationships that don’t involve phone conversations or the exchange of pictures. I don’t need to think of her as anything except the little avatar she uses—a globe of the earth, rotating silently in space, blue and green and brown and glowing with pulsating radioactivity.

  Shit, she says. What did I say?

  I bite my lip.

  Not to freak you out or anything, but if restaurants are just now closing, that pretty much told me you’re on the West Coast. And you’ve listed four separate ethnicities in a two-block radius, so you’re in a major urban center. So Seattle/Portland/Bay Area/LA Basin. I think for a moment, and then add: Scratch the LA Basin, because you can’t really walk anywhere in LA. Sorry, Em. I try not to think about these things. But I can’t help it. My mind just doesn’t shut up.

  This is a lie. I think about her all the time. I have a mental image of her that I cannot get rid of, no matter how many times I tell myself she’s just an avatar. Em, in my mind, is self-conscious. I suspect she’s a little hesitant in real life. She’s short, and she shies away from eye contact. She wears jeans and hoodies, and she doesn’t smile often, but when she does…

  Dammit. I wipe the image from my head.

  Thanks, she types. I didn’t even think before typing. My need for soup is dire. Please don’t sell my personal information to the Haters of the Great Zombie Schism. It would not make this day better.

  It’s the second time she’s mentioned having a rough day. I contemplate asking. That not-lonely-but-maybe part of me wants to know. My forefinger hovers over the onscreen keyboard.

  Em rarely complains, and today is no exception.

  I don’t really want to say more, because otherwise you’ll figure out that you forgot Sacramento in your list of population centers.

  Jokes are good. The last thing I want is us comparing locations or agreeing to meet. I’m too aware of the way I smile when she messages me. Starting a long-distance relationship while my tenure clock is ticking is the worst idea I can think of.