8
Ethan dropped his phone again.
But he couldn’t blame Bunsen this time because the golden retriever was sloppily devouring a teeth-cleaning chew stick on the couch, and he was in the kitchen piling up a lunchtime vegetable bowl from prepared Tupperware portions of sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, and feta cheese, a glob of hummus on his knife making a slow bid for freedom toward the floor.
Plop.
Stepping over it, he cautiously reclaimed his device.
The picture was still there.
Forster’s picture.
Delicate lingerie, scallops of lace and stars skimming a woman’s bowed figure, fingers curled to cup the tiny freckles scattered across her stomach, the curve of her hip bones just visible above a denim waistband leading down out of the frame, a glass behind her reflecting two dimples set low in her back—
Static buzzed in his ears. His face burned.
What…
Why?
Who—
A new message blinked into the thread.
Forster
Oh my God. This was supposed to be for my mother.
Who sent photos of a woman in lingerie to his mother?
Skin glowing golden in the lights around her mirror, her freckled constellations begged to be drawn and mapped and observed with wonder. Was she Forster’s partner?
…and who was Forster?
Someone he liked, he reminded himself through the buzzing in his head. Someone who’d made him laugh. But now? Now, Forster was also someone he envied. Horribly, irrationally—
Ping.
Forster
She likes to weigh in on options when I’m shopping.
Forster
I’m so sorry, I really didn’t mean to send this to you.
A third typing notification bubbled and vanished. Bubbled and vanished. Bubbled. Then:
Forster
So, I guess that’s that. It’s probably obvious now that my name isn’t Aaron.
My name isn’t Aaron.
Knocked off balance again, he lurched forward against his counter. One sock went straight into the hummus. He didn’t step back.
Forster was a woman.
This woman.
Her.
He vaguely registered Bunsen padding into the kitchen to lick at his sock and the floor, chew stick abandoned. The hummus was laced with peppers; the dog might vomit up a fountain of brown sludge later. But Ethan didn’t stop him. He went on blinking at his phone until another typing notification from Forster appeared. It dissolved almost immediately.
She was waiting. For him. To say…
Something.
Hands and mind immobilized, he’d been gawking at his device for a solid three minutes without replying to her. To—that picture.
Focus.
Ethan
I understand. I work on my art under a pseudonym, too.
He didn’t mention her photo. His response pushed it up and out of view in their thread. That was good, because the shadows articulating her collarbones and the divot of her navel had left a vacuum where his brain should be. She likely didn’t want him to respond to it, anyhow. What would he even say? She was sharp and funny and beautiful, and he… wasn’t. Chase would’ve used a more explicit word for him, and he also would’ve known how to use the right words with Forster. Ethan’s own reply was stilted, awkward. If only he could answer her with nibs and ink…
This was supposed to be for my mother. She hadn’t taken the picture for a partner. It hadn’t been meant for him. But she hadn’t snapped it for another man, either.
She.
A new ellipsis blinked onto his phone. Forster was typing again. He watched her work out her answer. His last message hadn’t been a question, so this could be the conclusion of their discussion if she didn’t choose to extend it. He stared, and tried to parse meaning from her pauses, to extract data from the blank screen—because even an incorrect hypothesis was better than the fear that hitched itself to ignorance.
He wasn’t ready for their conversation to end.
He’d enjoyed Forster’s company before he’d known her gender, when she’d just been a stranger with a profound, intimate connection to his art. No, not just. Theirs was a kinship he’d never expected to share—or had even considered sharing. Not really. Let alone with anyone so innovative and insightful. Someone like… her.
But now?
His phone chirped.
Forster
It’s better to keep our personal and professional lives separate, isn’t it? Especially when they’re in such diametric contrast. Using different names is an easy way to do it.
A question.
A deep inhale unfurled through his lungs and released the tension under his sternum. Dirty socks tossed into the hamper, tabasco bottle in hand, Ethan took his lunch to the living room and settled on the couch. Saturday’s afternoon work block at his desk could wait another few minutes. Bunsen hopped up beside him, eyeing the hummus again.
He tapped the golden retriever’s nose with the abandoned chew stick. “Definitely not. Here, clean your teeth. And your breath. I can smell those peppers in your stomach already.”
Then he propped up his bare feet, took a bite of spicy chickpeas, and returned to Forster’s message.
If she was careful to separate her stories from her professional life, then she probably wasn’t a writer by trade. Diametric contrast, she’d written. She lived in the Bay Area. Maybe she was a software engineer. Or a project manager. A venture capitalist. A startup CEO. Could she be at NASA Ames? But she’d already revealed more of herself today than she’d intended. That was clear. While he couldn’t forget what he knew, he could at least respect the rest of her privacy. He erased the question he’d started to type. Instead:
Ethan
Agreed. Keeping art isolated from work is good hygiene.
Bunsen burped a pungent waft of hummus.
“That’s disgusting,”
he told the dog. He scratched the retriever’s shoulders with one hand, trying not to inhale while typing a second message.
Ethan
Better hygiene than Bunsen has.
Forster
How was his walk?
Ethan
Every walk is a good walk. Even the ones where he eats things decomposing under a bush.
Forster
Especially those ones?
“She’s right, isn’t she?”
He tweaked Bunsen’s ears.
Ethan
You must’ve had a dog before.
Forster
My family’s always had herding breeds. I think that was deliberate when my brothers and I were young.
Even the concept of a dog in Karen Meyer’s house was an abomination. His mother hated dishes left in the sink, too. Against every nagging instinct, he rinsed his bowl under the faucet but didn’t wash it. Mutiny. He filled a water glass.
Ethan
Bunsen doesn’t herd people, but he does collect socks.
Then, heading back to his desk, he returned his phone to white noise, opened Dr. Kramer’s comments on Table 5, and began a second review of his own holometer spreadsheets, double-checking his assessment from earlier in the day. There was no binary switching of ones and zeros in the data. Erin hadn’t gone rogue against him here. Despite the unlikeliness of her sabotage reoccurring—maybe not so unlikely right now, since they were sharing a control room?—he still examined his exports every time, and sometimes discovered other data corruptions that required resolution from the hutch operators. He couldn’t reconcile Dr. Kramer’s implied discrepancy, however. He was writing a carefully worded response to his supervisor, asking what data Dr. Kramer was referencing for the table, when Forster sent another text.
Forster
Does the blue sock in Bunsen’s picture have a bear on it?
Ethan
Good eye. It does.
Her ellipsis appeared. To avoid staring at it, he switched back to his email.
Dr. Kramer:
Thank you for providing your edits for the Eischer-Langhoff draft.
I’ve made your requested updates (attached, changes tracked), with one exception: the data in Table 5. This data reflects the holometer’s January through mid-June exports, which are my current sets. If data for the project has been collected more recently, then the table requires amendments. What data are you referencing in your edits?
I apologize for the confusion.
—E.M.
He read the draft three times before he sent it.
The best outcome would be that he’d failed to accurately track the quantum measurement project’s data collection cycles. (Maybe Dr. Kramer had begun to collect his own data again? His increasingly busy schedule and the viruses often disrupting his exports had resulted in him largely stepping back from the day-today running of the holometer, with Ethan generating, cleaning, analyzing, modeling, and forwarding data for review instead.) If so, he’d be angry with Ethan’s questionable management of their work, but the solution would be a simple one: correct Table 5 to reference the updated sets, apologize, and never make the mistake again.
Ever.
…though what if his own data really was the most current? What if the sets referenced in Table 5 were accurate?
No.
Swallowing some water to ease the dryness in his throat, he reached for his phone, where Forster’s ellipsis had resolved into a new message.
Forster
Bad eyes, good optometrist. But anyway: blue sock, yellow bear. 510 area code. Cal Berkeley?
Ethan
You’re a writer and also a detective?
Forster
Sherlock and Watson in one. Am I right?
Ethan
Yes. My family’s from the East Bay. I graduated four years back.
Forster
Undergraduate or graduate?
Ethan
Graduate.
Forster
So you also have a PhD: permanent head damage.
He spat a mouthful of water across his desk.
Ethan
If that’s not already a panel in PhD Comics, it should be.
Ethan
And yes, I do. Like you?
Forster
Similarly injured, and also a PhD Comics reader. (I especially like the panel that converts scientific gibberish into real-world language. “Filter and gain settings varied with experimental conditions and objectives”
to “We twiddled the knobs until it worked”
is a classic.) Anyhow—for me, the damage was at Stanford, just over three years ago. But I’m not a Bay Area native. You’re a rare breed.
He mopped up the puddle beside his computer with the hem of his shirt before it seeped into his keyboard or his graph paper, smiling.
Ethan
Where’s home for you?
Forster
Home is where the dog is. So that’s the Great Lakes region in Michigan.
Ethan
Do you miss it?
Forster
Not the weather. Though I do miss my family. The Bay Area has a higher population than my whole state, but the crowds here—at least in Silicon Valley—are mostly singleton transplants.
Forster
Like me.
Forster
And it’s weird, but it doesn’t seem to matter that there are always people around, always events going on, always something to do. It can be lonely.
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—several mortifying hours—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 exist forever.
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 in Galactica 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.
Erin
Do you remember how you said that I’d had a DAY after the last SVLAC all-hands? Well, I’ve one-upped myself this afternoon.
A texting ellipsis blinked.
Martina
Uh-oh. Spill.
Erin
…I accidentally sent a semi-nude picture to a stranger.
Martina
WHAT?!
She cringed, even as she snorted out a cough of embarrassed laughter.
Erin
I know.
Martina
Explain. Now.
She did: about Bannister’s graphic in Galactica Magazine that could’ve been an illustration for her short story, her reckless outreach to him as Aaron Forster, their connection over the same sci-fi media—followed by her misdirected lingerie photo.
Wincing again, she hopped off her bed and paced along her wall of commemorative science and literary posters: Katherine Johnson calculating orbits at NASA, Chien-Shiung Wu showcasing nuclear weapons from the Manhattan Project, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in her flight suit, Marie Sk?odowska–Curie holding her Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, Anne Inez McCaffrey winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards for fiction. All of them were fully clothed…
She was almost grateful to answer the call from Martina that chimed on her screen.
“Right.”
Her friend’s voice vibrated over the speaker, and she pushed in her earbuds; Kai and Ashley seemed to be out, but their neighbors might not be. “What you’re telling me is that Dr. Erin Monaghan, who refuses to let me set her up for dinner or drinks with some very nice men, who claims that she’s always too busy to date because she’s occupied with interferometers, Department of Energy site visits, or competing with Ethan Meyer for every advantage and prestige at SVLAC—that this same Erin Monaghan has spent the past twenty-four hours texting with a mysterious artist—and has even sent him a nude picture?”
“Semi-nude! Accidentally!”
“Regardless. It’s a miracle that Adrian and Wes haven’t already strong-armed him into a wedding to preserve your honor.”
More hysterical laughter rose in her nose. She collapsed back onto the rumpled sheets hanging off her mattress. “I don’t want to think about that. Because they’d do it. Or at least threaten it. I love them to pieces, but loving them—and being loved by them—is a balancing act. Right now, you’re the only one who knows about Bannister.”
“He’s your dirty little secret.”
“No—he’s just—I admired his art. The rest was an accident. Besides, he didn’t actually say anything about my picture, so he probably doesn’t—”
Ping.
The message was from him.
Bannister
I hope this isn’t awkward. But I’m enjoying our conversation. And this seems like a fair trade.
Bannister
(New Photo Message)
“Uh…”
“What?”
“Um. Bannister just sent—”
Presumably taken earlier in the summer, the picture was of Bunsen again, the retriever flopped beside a pile of high-tide kelp near a sign for San Francisco’s Crissy Field East Beach, silhouetted against the red arches of the Golden Gate Bridge on a rare sunny day with his tongue lolling, clearly halfway through a sprint by the water.
He’d also clearly been sprinting with Bannister.
Bannister—his head cropped just out of the frame where he lounged beside Bunsen on the dunes, his camera angled to capture the dog instead of his own face.
Bannister—shirtless, a dappling of sunburn across his arms, the taut lines of his stomach flushed with sweat, sand dusting his calves, the telltale muscles of a runner creasing his thighs, golden under the spangled marine light—
Bannister—
“Erin.”
Martina’s voice. “Erin, what did he just send?”
“A… a photo.”
“Screenshot. Now.”
Click.
Martina’s phone buzzed audibly as the image dropped into their thread. Her read receipt flashed under the picture. Silence. Had she stopped breathing while she assessed it? Assessed him? Erin certainly had. Her pulse was in her throat, her cheeks flaming, the worn denim of her jeans suddenly painful against her legs.
She wanted to bury her phone and never look at it again.
She wanted to stare at the screen until her eyes watered.
She wanted to…
But then:
“Erin. Either you’ve been catfished in the most insanely niche way, or you’re the luckiest woman in the world.”