Chapter 20
“Mom, if we don’t leave now, I’ll miss the train!”
Nora’s relationship with her mother had been infinitely better since last spring, but some things about Karen Langley hadn’t changed. Her lack of punctuality was one of them.
“Nora, darling, you worry too much.”
She didn’t say what she wanted to, something along the lines of, Because you don’t worry enough .
Mom had insisted on one last breakfast out at Nora’s favorite diner, which was thoughtful, but it had left Nora only fifteen minutes to pack her suitcase and find her train ticket before they absolutely had to be out the door. Those fifteen minutes, and another fifteen too, were gone now.
“Okay, Mom. But the train’s not going to wait and the next one isn’t until ten o’clock tonight.”
Ten minutes later, they were finally in her mother’s car.
“Don’t worry, dear. I know a shortcut. And Steven—lovely man, I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet him—bought me a radar detector for Christmas, so I can drive as fast as I like and not worry about tickets.”
Nora was pretty sure that wasn’t how radar detectors worked, and she absolutely didn’t trust her mother’s “shortcut.” But she just smiled and nodded anyway.
Somehow, they arrived at the station in one piece, and with five minutes to spare.
“I want you to enjoy yourself, Nora,” Mom said, walking ahead of her up the steps to the platform.
Nora started to point out that you were supposed to walk behind someone, so that if they tripped, you’d be able to catch them before they fell backwards.
But she thought better of it. “Perhaps you’ll find some time to see that boy you kept changing the subject about for the last two weeks. ”
Nora sighed. There was a reason she hadn’t told her mother about Ben.
She wasn’t sure what she thought about Ben herself, other than that he was very handsome, and smart, and her boss; but she knew her mother would have thoughts, and plenty to say about him—and she wasn’t at all prepared to hear it.
Daniel , the same time
Daniel was in his bedroom, checking the closet for the tenth time. There wasn’t any point; he was all packed and ready and he knew he hadn’t forgotten anything. It was just nervous energy, he supposed.
Dad was going to drive him all the way downtown, to Penn Station in an hour. He’d be back at Albion by this afternoon. Back in his dorm room. Back in the lab in Ellis Hall tomorrow morning.
Back to seeing Valerie three times a week.
He’d been thinking a lot about her over the break. Going over and over all the reasons why she wasn’t flirting with him, she wasn’t interested in him, he was just deluding himself.
Or was he? Maybe it was time to think logically about it.
He was only twenty-one, she was twenty-four .
That was a huge difference. But his birthday was in two months; he was almost twenty-two.
And he was just assuming she was twenty-four.
Maybe she had a really late birthday. Or she’d been skipped a grade as a kid.
Or she had a ton of AP credits and worked like a dog and finished undergrad in three years.
They might be almost the same age, really.
She was nearly a lawyer, and far more knowledgeable than him .
But was she really? Yes, she’d asked him to proofread a paper once, and he’d only understood about twenty percent of the words and maybe two percent of the argument.
But that didn’t mean she was smarter—just trained differently.
She lived in a world of case law and legal theory.
His world was wires, code, and logic gates.
Could she build a computer from scratch?
Configure a company-wide network? Not likely.
He was a dork who played Battletech on Saturday nights .
Yes, that was true. But she might have hobbies that most people would consider equally silly.
Maybe she was an obsessive soap opera fan.
Or she secretly loved knitting. Or anything, really.
She could be just as much of a dork as he was, in her own way.
And she might appreciate Battletech anyway—you had to think strategically as a lawyer, didn’t you?
All the things he thought were flirting were just his imagination .
But she did make a point of always sitting closer to him than she needed to.
And she touched his hand when it wasn’t at all necessary.
And she never came in the lab except when he was there.
It stretched credibility to believe those were all just coincidences.
He still wasn’t over Nora . There was no counterargument for that.
Except—his mother had sat right here on his bed a few weeks ago and told him how she’d had her heart broken, and she went out and dated before she really felt ready.
And it wasn’t like he was contemplating marriage or something.
He could go out on a date—whether with Valerie or anyone else—without it being anything more than hopefully a fun couple of hours and maybe—or not—a kiss at the end.
And if it wasn’t fun, and there was no kiss, so what? It wouldn’t be the end of the world. He would have tried. That had to count for something.
Nora , January 8
Nora was just starting to unpack when the phone rang.
“Nora? I’m glad you’re back.” It was Ben. What could be so important that it couldn’t wait until the first staff meeting of the semester next week? “Want to meet me over at Sammy’s Grille in half an hour? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
It was weird that he called her dorm room; he never did that. So it had to be urgent. “Sure. Can we make it an hour, though? I literally just got in the door five minutes ago.”
“It’s a date. See you then!” And he hung up.
Maybe it was about replacing him as editor-in-chief next year. If he was going to push for her, he’d want to tell her first, and privately. And if that was the case, she needed to look the part.
She had the skirt suit she’d bought over Thanksgiving, but that was overkill for a meal with Ben.
She’d wear it for a formal meeting with their faculty advisor, but for today?
A good, solid blouse—maybe the red one that Rachel had given her for Christmas—would do nicely.
And wasn’t red supposed to be a “power” color?
She got it out of her luggage, paired it with a conservative dark skirt, threw her coat on and headed over to the restaurant.
He was already there when she arrived, sitting at a table in the back of the restaurant.
He stood up until she sat. “I’m glad you came, Nora,” he said.
“Just to get the important business out of the way first, I ordered sweet potato fries to share, but I didn’t know if you’d want iced tea or a soda. ”
She’d prefer a milkshake, but the Green Lantern Café did them much better. “Iced tea is always safe,” she said. “So what’s the big deal? What did you need to talk to me about?”
He was staring at her; almost a searching sort of look. “I already said it on the phone. It’s a date.” Now he looked away, just for a moment. “I hope so, anyway.” He lowered his voice a little, and was there the tiniest hint of nerves there? “A date. Me and you.”
She only now paid attention to what he was wearing.
A light brown sweater that set off his eyes.
Slacks that were perfectly creased, as though he’d ironed them just before he got here.
And when he’d stood up, she’d caught a glimpse of his shoes—shined to the point that you could see your reflection in them.
He was serious. Had he been thinking about this—about her—all during Christmas break? Were the shoes new? Had he bought them just to impress her?
“Uh—I wasn’t expecting that, Ben.” But the question was, did she mind it?
He laughed. “I wanted to catch you before classes started—and the paper—and you got too busy. I even came back to campus a day early. You’re worth the $50 it cost me to change my flight.”
She wasn’t sure whether she believed him.
But even if it was a lie, it was a flattering one, and also pretty harmless. It was the kind of thing she might have said herself, once upon a time.
It was also flattering that he’d gone to all this trouble. And he was handsome. And smart. And a great editor-in-chief. And hadn’t she been thinking about him this morning—and all through Christmas break?
If she wanted to see what could happen with him, here was her chance. If she wanted it.
“Well, then, I agree. I guess this is a date.”
Daniel , exactly the same time
It was going to happen!
Quantum Networking Systems was going to fly him to Chicago, a week from tomorrow.
He’d known at Thanksgiving that they wanted him to come out—but it wasn’t finalized. It wasn’t official. There wasn’t an actual plane ticket. The whole thing could have fallen through, for any of a thousand reasons.
Now, though, it was set in stone. Not an hour ago, he’d spoken with Francine from the Human Resources department.
She confirmed the date, and all the arrangements.
His ticket would be waiting for him at the airport, they’d have a car to pick him up when he landed at Midway and take him to the hotel—which they were also paying for.
Then in the morning, another car to take him to company headquarters for the actual interview.
He hadn’t been able to think straight on the walk over to Ellis Hall; he’d nearly ran into two light posts and a tree.
And now that he was here in the lab, he couldn’t think about anything but the trip. He was lost in his own world. He was…
“Hey, Daniel, are you all right?”
It was Valerie. She looked concerned. Worried, even.
“Oh. Hi.” He knew he still had a mindless grin on his face.
“I called your name ten times. What’s wrong?”
He shook his head, tried to focus. “Nothing. Everything is good. I mean, really good. Like, amazingly good.”
She pulled over a chair from the nearest desk and sat herself next to him. “Well, I want to hear it.”
He wanted to tell it. Shout about it.