Hissomedaydidn’t come that week, but Friday morning arrived with him already showered after a quick run with Bunsen, shaved, and brewing his own coffee when his alarm blared its wake-up warning. He was wrung out from four days of insomnia and anxiety, but now adrenaline jangled in his nerves, triggering a surge of alertness to power him through the next twelve hours. Any come-down crash over the weekend would be worth it.
He’d deal with the fallout when it arrived.
And maybe, maybe if there was a lull in his workload after the government visit…
Maybe he’d ask Forster to join him for a drink.
But first:today.
He unearthed a suit in charcoal wool from the rear of his closet, knotting a tie and shrugging into the jacket before readying the sudoku sheet that they’d chosen by mutual blind agreement for their race.
Ping.
Forster
I’m ready to win. Ready for your defeat?
Forster
(I should warn you: I’m not a good loser. I’m a menace, remember?)
She was a menace to her siblings. He could’ve said the same of Chase. But that was where the similarities between their brothers seemed to end. Whenever Forster mentioned them, it was with a casual and playful—if occasionally irritated—fondness. They called her a menace, and she embraced the term because it so clearly wasn’t derogatory. Or if it was, there was too much history and love behind the epithet for it to hurt. Despite their distance in Michigan, she was close with her family—and an abrupt pang of longing stabbed under his ribs, bitter and sweet.
She was waiting for his reply, however. He tapped back into their thread.
Ethan
My stopwatch is set.
Forster
And—go!
With the blank squares of a sudoku grid under his hand, he couldn’t dwell on the fresh and sudden tension in his body that had nothing to do with the government’s visit, couldn’t dwell on the unsettling reality that beyond their texts, Forster was surrounded by real people, people she knew and loved—not just the violent, tender characters of Red and Blue fromThis Is How You Lose the Time War, like him. He couldn’t brood on the fact that he was only one small cell in the graph of her life.
He was embarrassingly grateful for that, and scribbled a final7just as the timer ticked past his record.
Ethan
Done.
Forster
(New Photo Message)
The picture was a screenshot of her clock. She’d finished eight seconds behind him.
Forster
Damn. But hear me out: I was using a pencil. The graphite broke.
A second picture provided evidence.
Forster
I claim the right to a rematch!
Laughter curled his tongue. He breathed and relaxed back into his desk chair, reaching for his mug.
