“Then what’s our process plan?”
“Two key items, I think.” Lobbing away her napkin, she ticked off the points on her fingers. “One: we’ll keep things strictly professional.”
“No more sabotage.”
“Yes. And two:”tick, “no more communication as Bannister and Forster. Not until—”
“Until?”
“—until we execute the Department of Energy’s quantum gravity deliverables.”
Oh.
It was a reasonable plan to manage an impossible, untenable situation.
The rules of engagement were clear, the refreshed boundaries between their professional and personal lives neatly drawn. It was all very exact. Very sudoku-like. He usually relished neatness and exactness and sudoku…
“Agreed,” he said, because what other viable answer was there?
“Good.” Her thumb returned to scratch at the seam on her cone. “Otherwise, this is how we’ll lose—”
“—the space-time war?”
A snort. “Yes—”
—and then a torrent of sludgy ice cream burst through its waffle container.
“Argh!”
Erin lunged down to suction her lips over the crack. But her eyes flickered sideways to him while she licked up the spill.
Was she laughing?
A disorienting flash of heat through his cold-numbed hands made him fumble his sherbet cup. Melted boysenberries seeped into his jeans.
Fuck.
16
Saturday.Sunday.
No new messages populated his phone’s sparse personal conversations. (He sent the usual chastising call from the Meyers about missing family dinner to voicemail.) No typing notifications appeared beneath his latest message with Forster.
With Erin.
Not that he checked their thread. Much.
What would she have said? Anyhow, they’d agreed to keep all communication professional, so she would’ve used SVLAC’s instant messaging system, not text, if she’d needed to contact him. There was no reason to monitor their discussion for a bubbling ellipsis—evidence that she was thinking of him like he was thinking of her. He triednotto think about her. He attempted to focus on sudoku, and when that didn’t help, he ran himself to exhaustion with Bunsen along a lattice of exposed trails at the Baylands Nature Preserve. He created the framework for Dr. Kramer’s status report on their quantum gravity work. He tried to distract himself, to redirect his brain into safe channels of productivity. He did. But—
The bold laughter in her eyes.
The flick of her tongue.
The taste of her mouth.
The weight of her silence.
Aaron Forster.
