Her trio of messages sent pings against the condo’s bare walls. Bunsen twitched up from his chew stick. His panting breath and nails clicking across the hardwood were loud as he searched for the origin of the sounds. The notification of a reply from Dr. Kramer in Ethan’s inbox was louder still.
The Meyers’ house just across the bay in the Berkeley Hills was tastefully minimalist in gray and white. But his unit? Not minimalist after multiple years of living here:empty.
His log of skipped calls from Chase and his parents was full, despite how infrequently they left messages.
“We missed you on Sunday.”
“Mom’s having some people over for dinner.”
“Join us if you’re free.”
He never avoided Dr. Kramer’s emails or his work, or the late nights in service of both—nights when he sometimes traded messages about quantum physics with Tomasz Szymanski. They were cordial colleagues, yes. But not friends. And Bunsen?
He loved Bunsen. But still…
He picked up his phone.
Ethan
Even for people with family here, it’s a lonely place.
Then, before he could rationalize his way out of it:
Ethan
I’m glad we’ve met each other.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
It had taken several hours—severalmortifyinghours—after she’d shared her lingerie picture, but Erin’s pulse had finally settled down to a resting rate. She’d gotten home from the Stanford Shopping Center somehow, and didn’t seem to have crashed her bicycle or run any red lights on her way back to the apartment.Seem. She couldn’t remember any of that adrenaline-fueled retreat to safety, to privacy.
Or to relative safety and privacy.
Her picture was digital and would existforever.
She hunched over her phone in her bedroom, scrolling up through her messages with Bannister to find it again.
Fuck.
At least he didn’t seem to think less of her for her mistake. Or her identity. He’d been very normal about everything, actually. Their continued easy banter was a relief: colleges, dogs, the realities of Bay Area life.
I’m glad we’ve met each other.
Other people wouldn’t be so accepting.
She’d chosen a masculine-coded pseudonym for her creative writing, aiming to avoid the unconscious—or sometimes explicit—biases, prejudices, and penalties to which women were subjected in male-dominated fields. Like physics, science fiction was almost by definition a male-dominated space. But unlike with her research papers, which had to be searchable and attributable to Dr. Erin Monaghan for professional reasons, she could angle the biases in the sci-fi field to her advantage without real-world repercussions. So, referencing the author Edward Morgan Forster along with her own name and initials, she’d submitted her work as Aaron Forster, had been accepted as Aaron Forster, and had declined to provide an author photo for her contributor credit inGalactica Magazine. Her story would stand on its own. She wouldn’t be viewed as either an interloper in spaces where she didn’t belong, or worse: a pretty face to be sexualized and dismissed.
Bannister was doing neither.
I’m glad we’ve met each other.
She exhaled, scrolled back to the end of their thread, and sent her response.
Erin
Me too.
Then she carefully—very carefully, double-checking herself—switched over to her messages with Martina.
