“So,” he echoed.
“I’ll start with the obvious question. How did this happen?”
This.
Scramble its letters:shit.
He must’ve said that out loud, because she nodded. Eyes averted, she took another bite of ice cream. “You called meForsterin the experimental hall tonight. But did you already know?”
“What?” He froze mid-scoop. “No.”
“No?”
“I play sudoku, not poker. I’m not a good liar. If I’d known before—I didn’t. Not until you said that you had plans tonight and mentioned someone namedBannister… It could’ve been another person with that name, though.”
“It wasn’t.”
“No.”
“But you…” she frowned, digging one metal-capped toe into the pavement, “…you’re good enough with data—well, not mine—that I thought maybe I’d told you too much about myself. Enough that you’d run the numbers and realized who Forster was. WhoI… I was wondering during my ride if I’d been making a fool of myself with you at the lab.”
“Only with your research.”
“With my—excuse you?” She elbowed him, her chin snapping up in standard outrage.
Not standard: the small smear of marionberry juice dotting the corner of her mouth…
“Ouch,” was his delayed retort. He plunged his spoon back into his sherbet instead of hammering home his point about relativistic mechanics.
She didn’t apologize. But she didn’t continue their usual arguments, either. Instead, after a beat, “So: you didn’t know. I didn’t know. But now we both know. What… what do we do with this information?”
“We’ve been rivals for years,” he said. Just a fact.
“And we know what happened.”
Bannister, Forster, the kiss.Rash, painful, glorious—
“We have data,” she continued. “But the question is always:why?”
Right.
He breathed. Blood diverted back to his head. Because that was the root of all scientific inquiry:why?Facts were facts. It was the ability to explain them that brought publication and recognition, however.
And resolution.
“We have a fairly complete data set. Weeks of messages and years of rivalry.” A quick glance showed her twisting her cone between her fingers, picking at its flaky edges. He added, “We could try to answer the question.”
“Do you want to?”
“Don’t you? Aren’t you curious? Aren’t you—” but a crumble of waffle broke off under her thumb while he spoke. Melting ice cream began to seep out, threatening her sweater and jeans.
“Oops—”
He didn’t watch her swipe her tongue up the cone to catch the habanero drips. Instead, he cleared his throat, crossed his legs, recited the periodic table of elements, and stared at an advertisement for plant-based lamb kebabs at Oren’s Hummus across the street, counting, counting, cold and precise and sweating under his collar and his belt—
“You forgot to say the ninety-ninth element.Einsteinium.” Erin flapped a napkin into his face a minute later.
Had he been working through the periodic table verbally?
