But it didn’t matter, because Dr. Daan van Buskirk from the Optics group was walking past the bullpen toward a block of Modern Physics conference rooms, while paying more attention to their conversation than to his armload of papers—and Erin swiveled back to her desk with a squeal of wheels. She opened SVLAC’s instant messaging system.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
We need to keep our distance.
He straightened, locked eyes with Van Buskirk, and pulled out his phone.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
Yes.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
We should limit interactions outside of our scheduled project hours. Messaging only?
Dr. Ethan Meyer
Agreed.
The physical effect of the static shock wore off quickly enough. The electricity of his nearness took a while longer to abate. The spark of his touch, the familiar heat in his ears and lips, when her mouth knew the taste of that warmth—
She stared at the latest news from STEMinist Online until she remembered how to inhale. But he’d shaved again this morning, and the amber musk of his aftershave lingered in her cubicle, in her hair, on her skin—and had the facilities team switched the building’s air systems from cooling to heat in July? She tried to concentrate on her forum, to distract herself with the safety of outrage. After all, the post about the seedy physicist who’d appropriated his subordinates’ work had continued to rack up fresh comments.
JustAKeysm@sh0K:Is your old supervisor still at SVLAC?
DataDominatrix:Just checked the staff page. He is. Promoted to department head, too.
JustAKeysm@sh0K:Did you report him?
DataDominatrix:What good would that do? HR exists to protect the company, not the employees. He was—is—a valuable asset. I was new, so I left. Like the others.
Thiswas new.
She shifted in her chair, jeans chafing her thighs. At least they’d agreed to keep their distance at the lab.
So she avoided Ethan for the rest of the day. Fortunately, it was now her responsibility to run the new fiscal year department meetings throughout Nadine’s maternity leave and this swallowed up most of her morning. She’d never been so grateful for the mental load of bureaucracy. Following an hour spent debating inflation-based cost of living increases with Human Resources, the disdain of the poster from STEMinist Online for that personnel department made sense. Whenever she returned to her desk to prepare for her next administrative session, however, she knew whether his door was open or closed, whether he was in meetings or working in his office. Messages sent via SVLAC’s official channel filled her desktop, laptop, and phone screens. None were from him.
He was busy.
Shewas busy.
But lunchtime found her desperate for distraction. After inhaling a salad at the cafeteria, she directed her scooter to an evergreen quadrangle between the Interdisciplinary and Classical Physics buildings, settling onto a bench in the comparative coolness of the redwoods’ shade and extracting her notebook from her backpack.
Breathe.
She began to write.
There was no more Earth to shatter with earth-shattering changes. We had already left our planet and our home far behind. But the phrase—“earth-shattering” as critical, as fateful—still held true, though the change began as something quite small, so small that only in hindsight did we see. Or hear.
The change was a silence.
There was no crinkle from dehydrated ice cream packets after dinner that day.
The words weren’t quite right. But then, her first drafts were always bad. She had to write a story before she could fix it. She’d said as much to—no.Focus. And couldn’t she let herself have this particular mess? When the time came, she’d know how to resolve it. The characters would show her the way. She had to trust them to make sense of their narrative. Trust herself.
The trouble was that right now, she didn’t trust herself at all.
How could she?
