“What are you going to say? And no pressure, but if I didn’t have this city council hearing at eight tomorrow morning—I swear, they keep planning for times when they hope the public can’t attend—there’s no possible experiment any physicist might run that could keep me in my control room when you two are—”
“Popcorn. I know.”
“You could pack Oracle Park.”
“Or just the Modern Physics parking lot.” Shaking her head, she extracted her notebook from beneath a sudoku booklet andThis Is How You Lose the Time Waron her bedside table.
“Who would’ve thought that a slab of asphalt would be your final frontier? Go conquer it, Dr. Monaghan,” and their call ended with a wink.
Wasthis her final frontier, though?
Either way, there was something good waiting for her tomorrow. She knew it. And she began to write. By one o’clock, she had what she needed. The single scribbled page required no revisions. It was messy and rambling and a little illogical, definitely over-dramatic—but right now, so was she. It was…honest. It was perfect. She trusted herself.
She clicked off her light and smiled.
Something good today.
She was in the parking lot again when Ethan pulled into his spot on Thursday morning: sneakers, helmet hair, pink graphic STEMinist t-shirt. She didn’t wrench open his door, however, or throw herself into his passenger seat to take refuge behind the protections of tinted glass and sun visors. Despite the adrenaline thrumming in her stomach and up her spine, she clutched her backpack in full view of the Modern Physics main doors and waited for him on the curb.
“Erin?” Exhaling her name with hushed urgency, he was beside her in a breath.
She seized his vest, violently. “What the hell did you do?”
“What?”
“The journal reinstated my paper for publication last night—just hours after Dr. Sams pulled it from the lineup to investigate me for data fraud.Hours!Before anyone even knew about the accusation. No review committee works that fast. And don’t claim that Dr. Kramer decided to forgive me for speaking truth to power, either, so that means you must’ve done—I don’t know—something, and thank you, but if you’ve damaged your career so that I—”
He didn’t deny it. Whateveritwas. Instead, Ethan smiled into her tirade, softened into her grip.
“—s-so that I…” She faltered, caught off guard by his calm, and stopped.
“What did I do?” His fingers lifted to her cheek, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and lingered with the lightest pressure against her skin. “I gave Dr. Kramer an ultimatum: he’d retract his allegation about your paper, or I’d update all the holometer numbers used in our own publications, then contact the journals and claim thathe’d committed scientific misconduct. He’s never touched my data or analyses. He couldn’t reconstruct them. He couldn’t refute my claim without admitting that all the work on quantum units that he’s published under his name is mine—that while he hasn’t committed data fraud with me like he did with Dr. Anders, he plagiarized my research. My ideas.Allof them.”
“If he hadn’t complied, you’d have—”
“Been implicated in his misconduct by association. I know. I wouldn’t be forfeiting my theories, though. Or the results of any new research that I’ll do. He would. He had more to lose than I did.”
“But you…” She twisted her fingers tighter into his fleece. “You still risked your career when you didn’t have to.”
“No. I did have to.” SVLAC’s shuttle bus growled into the parking lot and he nodded toward it, at its disembarking interns with Leah Haddad in the lead, then turned back to her, so earnest when he continued, “They need someone like you. To help them work the copy machine, to open opportunities and advocate for them, to see their potential when they don’t—or can’t—see it themselves. So I had to make my gamble with Dr. Kramer. Not just for me. For you. For all the ways you’ll keep challenging my research and my field. Challenging my thinking. Challengingme. And for this cohort. The next one, too. Because I…Ineeded someone like you. And…”
“…and?”
When Leah waved a greeting, she returned it without breaking their gaze. She ignored Sandra O’Connor-Young’s curious eyebrows while her colleague walked toward their office building.Let them have their popcorn.Warmth and wanting stirred, building under his light touch, his pause, his breath, his serious smile.
“And what?”
He opened his left hand. “And I think I still do.”
Oh.
Ink saturated his palm. Lines and curves and angles twined through his fingers, over his knuckles, down his wrist. Vanishing up his forearm under his sleeve were grids and graphs, binary pulsars and constellations—Canis Major galloping, leaving Bunsen-like paw prints in its wake, and in the cradle of his hand: Cassiopeia. The stars were her own freckles.
“Do you see?” Then risk-averse, cautious, bold, smiling Ethan said, “Thiswas a gamble worth making. I just wish I’d understood that sooner, because I know we agreed to finish our quantum gravity research year first—you insisted that we couldn’t afford distractions, and you were—are—right—but this future is worth waiting for. I want this, and more. I have for a long time. With you, I want to draw in color.”
He wanted to draw in color?
Well, she wantedeverything.
