It didn’t last, though.
Because the next person to enter the kitchenette was Ethan Meyer.
Both her mood and her smile dropped. She squared up in front of the coffee machine, chin raised with three years of habit, instinctive vitriol already rising—but then the main doors into the Modern Physics building swung open, admitting a group of colleagues who’d carpooled together down the congested freeway from San Francisco, and she bit her tongue hard with her newer and less pleasant habit of silence.
Popcorn.
Easy, Monaghan.
Except…
Today,now, with Bannister’s messages clutched in her hand, it suddenly didn’t matter what her colleagues overheard, saw, or even said about their rivalry.
Whatever they thought, they were wrong.
Her hallucination-dream? Also wrong.
And what was right?
This.
As the coffee machine belched out a cloud of steam, as Ethan stepped toward the counter in his fleece vest, as their carpooling colleagues filed down the hall, she moved defiantly to meet him while sweeping her ponytail off her neck. Straggles of helmet hair flicked into his face, across his mouth.
“Argh—”
“Sorry, I didn’t see you there, Meyer. I was thinking about how submitting the Eischer-Langhoff grant last Friday would have pushed my email to the top of the reviewers’ inboxes today. Obviously, this—plus the citations from my sole-author paper, of course—gives my odds a boost, and it’ll be interesting to see how the award process plays out. More interesting than watching the doorway. But if you can optimize your programming for good time management this week, maybe you can use the same strategy. Minus the authorship part.”
Then she left him, a hand frozen on his cheek, unexpectedly mute.Good. She nodded a greeting to her arriving colleagues and an intern poking at a copy machine in the hallway—“Morning, Dr. Rossi and Dr. O’Connor-Young. Hi Leah, how are you?”—as she strode off to her desk, triumphant, mind already spinning with ideas for the workday ahead. Plus, an older post in the STEMinist Online forums had gained traction on Sunday with new commentary about a Fermilab scientist from the early aughts (anonymized to protect the poster, not the man) who’d allegedly published his subordinate’s research on the use of quantum effects for navigation by migrating birds under his own name; SnarkyQuark64 had thoughts to share.
It was a busy Monday. A good Monday.
She was gone, and her vicious ponytail with her.
If you can optimize your programming.
He scowled. He didn’t still have her hair in his mouth, did he?
Maybe you can use the same strategy. Minus the authorship part.
He didn’t, but his lower lip tingled, and a distracting, irritating hint of subtle sweetness continued to chafe his nose. The reason that he glowered after his rival rather than making a clever rebuttal to her dig about the grant—and he definitely would’ve made it clever, even something about her paper’s data again—was because his jaw was clenched too hard to spit out the words.
Forster would’ve known what to say.
He extracted his phone, abandoning the kitchenette and shouldering past a crowd of his coworkers in the hall, exchanging a brief nod with Szymanski by the water dispenser as he retreated to the safety of his office. Just a nod. He didn’t say anything about his run-in with Erin. Not this time. They were only colleagues. But…
Ping.
Forster
Have you ever tried sudoku? I just beat my best time!
He breathed.
Ethan
I have a daily calendar. I like the cleanliness of the numbers. It gives order to the start of my day. Better than caffeine for clearing brain fog.
Which was good, since his confrontation with Erin had left him with a stinging lip and no coffee.
