14
His week was… difficult.
Ethan had copied and pasted a paper—with its hundreds of theoretical and numerical footnotes—on lab-generated black hole models into a shared virtual document to assess its research potential for their project, and every time he opened it to make comments on the temperatures and methods required to cool atoms for use as quantum simulators, every time he drafted equations to calculate the necessary strength of an electromagnet to manipulate those experimental particles, Erin Monaghan’s cursor was inline beside his.
It was aggravating.
But he couldn’t deny that it was Erin who’d learned of the paper’s existence prior to its publication in Physical Review Research. She’d leveraged her network of astrophysicists to connect with an astronomy associate at Sonnenborgh Observatory, who knew a researcher from the University of Amsterdam whose work was relevant to their own strain of proposed inquiry into the quantum gravity paradox. This was Dr. Liesbeth Tuinstra, whose studies centered on tuning the ease with which electrons hopped along one-dimensional chains of atoms, which caused certain physical properties to vanish and effectively created lab-generated models of a black hole’s event horizon—including Stephen Hawking’s theorized thermal radiation—by interfering with the wave-like nature of the electrons.
So, yes, he acknowledged her contributions to their work. She was always in his—their—document, however. Watching him think. Not that she wasn’t analyzing how they might replicate aspects of Tuinstra’s research by using ultracold atoms to facilitate greater experimental control over the black hole model and its matter, too.
But still.
He skipped his cursor down a line. Hers followed. As did his desk.
“Stop doing that.”
He stepped back from his screen and rubbed a hand over his neck while his desk locked in its height. Blink, blink went Erin’s cursor. He had to admit that she’d made impressive use of the resources at her disposal, galvanizing her network to identify crucial work on their topic before it was publicly available—but it was his own expertise with atomic manipulation that would put their ideas into practice.
Req. temperature of atoms: 0 degrees, he noted now in the document’s margin.
Kelvin? came her question.
Standard International unit of thermodynamic temperature, he commented back.
Impossible to create conditions of absolute zero, she replied. Particles stop moving. Anyhow, we need them to be mobile for manipulation.
Laser cooling can chill atoms to 10 microkelvins, he answered. Functionally 0 kelvins, but some mobility remains.
An ellipsis dotted beneath his explanation, bubbling, stopping, and bubbling again. Then:
I hadn’t considered using lasers to cool matter instead of heat it. That works?
Yes.
I’ll stop researching cooling techniques and consult with Nadine about materials for optical lenses before she leaves. See? Time management.
Her cursor left the page before he could retort.
He frowned. But rather than leaving his office for a steadying cup of coffee, he reached for his sudoku calendar, inked his numbers, sketched a hurried constellation on a sticky note—a single dot of pigment caught under his thumbnail, but would anyone really notice such a tiny blemish?—then opened his manager’s preferred report template to draft proposals for hardware and literature review libraries. He submitted the document well in advance of Dr. Kramer’s deadline, even though its materials section was more theoretical than concrete: too busy transitioning into the power and bureaucracy of her deputy supervisory role for the Relativistic Mechanics group, or celebrating Fong’s departure over Sprinkles cupcakes and a Cowgirl Creamery cheese platter, Erin hadn’t contributed her recommendations by the earlier due date he’d set.
Dr. Kramer observed the materials shortcoming, of course.
“Well, Meyer?”
“Monaghan didn’t provide—”
“Did Monaghan submit this proposal?”
“No… I did.”
But during Wednesday’s work block, when they’d debated laser angles from opposite ends of the conference table, exchanging more virtual comments than live ones, had he actually told her of his intention to submit the plan early? He stood alone in Dr. Kramer’s office now, late on Thursday afternoon and under a stream of cold air venting from the ceiling before his supervisor’s immaculate, glass-topped desk.
Tap, went one of Dr. Kramer’s fingers.
“I’ll have a progress report by the end of next week,”
he promised before the finger could descend a second time.
A nod, anticipating his assurance. “You’ll provide value, Meyer.”
“Yes.”
When he walked back past the bullpen to his own desk, Erin’s cubicle was dark, but a message from her was waiting on his screen.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
I reviewed our optics needs with Nadine. She had some insights on materials, and I’ve finished drafting my recommendations. Let’s discuss before submitting the charter tomorrow.
He cursed under his breath.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
I submitted it today.
Instantly, her profile icon went live.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
I said I was going to talk to Nadine about materials.
A screenshot of their earlier exchange zipped into the conversation. The data was irrefutable.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
Yes. I made an error.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
You did.
He could imagine her eye flashing in triumph—
Dr. Erin Monaghan
Which is unexpected and annoying. But gratifying. And it was just a first draft hypothesis for the project. Did Dr. Kramer have feedback?
The image faded from his brain, replaced by a pixelated buzz of confusion. Was that all she had to say?
Dr. Ethan Meyer
No feedback.
A check mark appeared beneath his reply.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
But we should review your materials analysis tomorrow before we meet with the MEC hutch engineers.
He sent an invitation for a work block the next afternoon at three o’clock, tapping on his phone while he elbowed through the Modern Physics doors, into a slap of heat, and out to his car. While he inspected his wheel wells for rattlesnakes dozing on the tires’ hot rubber, Erin declined his time and sent a new invitation for five minutes after the hour.
He shook his head, and stepped into a lump of turkey feces.
Bunsen would be happy. He switched to his texts with Forster and shared the golden retriever’s good news.
He watched his step better on Friday when he pulled into the parking lot—and he watched himself in the kitchenette when he retrieved his daily dose of caffeine, too, glancing over his shoulder, listening for Erin’s steel-toed work boots. A fresh carton of oat milk was open in the refrigerator, but she wasn’t using it. Since she wasn’t in the bullpen, either, he bypassed his usual email routine and opened Thursday’s messages.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
3:05 p.m. for the materials analysis?
Dr. Erin Monaghan
Scheduled yesterday.
He rapped a pen against his sudoku grid.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
You’re not at your desk.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
No. With Leah in the media room.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
Why?
Dr. Erin Monaghan
I’m printing out a MEC hutch blueprint. Since we’ve gotten approval to use the space while it’s waiting on upgrades to the laser enclosure, we should have a copy to diagram our cable and optics layout. And Leah was trying to replace the laminator cartridges.
She was right that a hard copy of the Matter in Extreme Conditions blueprint would be easier to mark up than a digital one, but he closed their messages without replying. She knew she’d made a smart decision. She didn’t need him to tell her that.
What she did need, however, was, “…a material for the experimental optics that reflects well but won’t get hot near the lasers.”
Seated across from him in the Sidewinder conference room with the sleeves of a taupe sweater pushed up over her wrists, Erin swiveled her blueprint on the table and poked a sticky note standing in for the proposed placement of their lasers in the hutch.
“Correct.”
He dragged the Mylar paper over to his side of the table, until she caught its corner under her elbow. “Glass isn’t an option—”
“—since it insulates and retains too much heat.”
“Plastic will melt under laser exposure. Most things will. Which means that using lasers to cool the atoms might not work for repeat experiments.”
He ripped off another sticky note from its pad with more force than necessary, then shuffled through a profusion of materials between them—reference texts, or drafted diagrams displaying clusters of cables, vacuum chamber layouts, and the placement of electromagnets and detectors for data readouts—while searching for Tuinstra’s list of research components and his own prior materials analysis for Dr. Kramer. “We’ll have to use a… a different method…”
Erin blinked. Her elbow slipped off the contested blueprint. Her eyebrows edged above her glasses. “Did you just admit to needing to course-correct for your research plans? After you’d already confessed to making an error with the project charter?”
“What?”
Heat rose into his ears. “And you never have to edit your ideas?”
“All the time. I just didn’t think that you, that Dr. Ethan Meyer…”
She pushed her lenses back up her nose, but sent them sliding down again almost immediately with a shake of her head. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth; if he’d meant to protest her emphatic use of his title, he didn’t. “Never mind. What about using liquid helium to chill the particles?”
“Check the price before you commit. Helium needs to be cooled to four kelvins before it liquifies.”
She rolled her eyes and released her lip—though the dents of her teeth remained. She moved her laptop into view, tabbing over from a forum site and closing out a JSTOR article to access their funding authorization from the Department of Energy. She highlighted a line of zeros. “I think we can afford it.”
She was right.
He returned to a problem that she hadn’t solved. “Dr. Tuinstra used crystalline optics, but noted the need for an improvement in reflectivity for future research iterations. We could try—”
“—an organic synthetic polymer?”
“Yes. How did you know what I was—”
“LIGO uses mirrors too. Anyhow,”
she extracted the analysis document that he’d been searching for in the chaos, “here’s your rundown on using synthetic polymers for the holometer’s lenses, before you ended up with glass. You identified the polymer as a better overall material—greater experimental flexibility, heat resistant, extremely reflective, easy to clean—except that you needed to build the device inexpensively. Off-the-shelf glass was cheaper. Right?”
He meant to reply with something insightful about synthetic composites. Instead, he heard himself say, “You agree with my analysis?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“Uh. No, I…”
“Obviously, I agree with your analysis. You’re disturbingly good with data! Your data, at least. It’s just your field’s application that’s wrong.”
I agree with your analysis.
Did she?
Her gaze narrowed at his silence. Suspicion. So he uncapped a pen—safe—and wrote organic synthetic polymer on his sticky note. He cleared his throat. “Because cost—it’s not a… not a barrier, now.”
“Right, but what did you just…”
She squinted at his note, her braid falling forward over her shoulder. “Oh. Polymer. You have medical-grade handwriting. Chicken scratch. Give me the pen.”
His fingers clenched around it.
“Fine.”
She reached for a drafting pencil that he’d tucked behind his ear.
He shied back on instinct.
Not far enough.
Her nails brushed his neck instead of closing around the graphite, the freckled underside of her wrist skimming his jaw so that a haze of iris and juniper flooded the airless conference room, and static zagged across his skin as if her touch were a naked wire—
Blistering arousal surged through his groin.
“Ah!”
Erin dropped her hand. Eyes wide, their startled darkness ringed in gold, her gaze flickered to the marks she’d left on his neck. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”
He didn’t answer her apology. He didn’t trust his voice not to crack. He didn’t trust himself. Shoving a random sampling of notes and his laptop into his bag, he left her at the table with his pencil in her fist. He rushed out the door to the nearest supply closet, or server room—it didn’t matter. Because: what the fuck?
Hunched over a sink in the bathroom a minute later with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, he splashed water on his face, wetting his pounding ears and hot neck. It wasn’t enough, though. He stared at the running faucet and tried to breathe. To master himself. His brain, his body. What was wrong with him? Erin had knocked into him with her backpack before, leaving him breathless in the control room. He knew the sharpness of her elbows from their scuffles by the coffee machine, too.
But she hadn’t ever… touched him.
He hadn’t wanted her hands on him. Why would he? Erin Monaghan, with her smart mouth, clever and annoying, posing her suggestion for liquid helium, and—
An adjacent faucet switched on with a spurt. He jerked upright.
“Dr. Meyer.”
Tomasz Szymanski squirted soap into his palms, lathered between his fingers, then assiduously rinsed his hands. Only then did he meet Ethan’s gaze in the mirror. “You are… ill?”
“No.”
Obviously, I agree with your analysis.
Her nails on his neck—
He doused his face again, shuddering.
“You do not have a fever? You are…”
Szymanski tapped his own forehead. “Red.”
“No.”
“Dr. Kramer is with the technicians in the IT building, preparing a private network access to the servers for his SVLAC computer while he is at CERN.”
A damp hand touched his shoulder. “He is not here.”
Dr. Kramer wasn’t the issue.
“I’m fine.”
He stepped back from his colleague’s concern, shifting his messenger bag over his belt. “But… thanks.”
Szymanski nodded without making eye contact again, and left the bathroom. All researchers should be like that. He didn’t need to be analyzed by a physicist. He needed…
Forster.
Now.
He pulled out his phone.
Ethan
I know we rescheduled our meetup for Saturday. But are you free tonight instead?
If he could finally meet her, talk with her about art and books and sudoku, if he could just see her and touch her, then Erin Monaghan’s insane hold on him would loosen. Wouldn’t it? He’d rewire his brain around her, because this mania had to be neural circuits crossing and misfiring—
Ping.
Forster
I’d like that. The Salt she couldn’t relax, despite Ethan’s unexpected apology for submitting their project charter to Kramer without her materials review. She didn’t want to forgive him. But she shouldn’t have tried to borrow his pencil today. She’d offered an apology of her own… but then he’d reared back and slammed the conference room door on her.
Pushing away her laptop, she examined the hand she’d extended. Rosy eraser residue from the pencil he kept behind his ear had caught under her nails when she’d scratched down his neck. She scrubbed her thumb against her jeans. The pressure didn’t eradicate the tingle in her fingertips from their brush against the razor-roughened skin of his throat, though, or from the unexpected softness she’d found behind his ear—
The door clicked open again.
She snatched up a journal from the table. Advances in Physics was upside down.
Checking his watch, all Ethan said was, “The West Experimental Hall. Now.”
“Fine.”
She didn’t care that he’d ignored her journal’s orientation, that he hadn’t even looked at her—not when she had the anticipation of her updated meeting with Bannister to sustain her. She could wait a few more hours for her artist.
Couldn’t she?
She tossed away the pencil and stuffed her computer and her notes into her backpack, snagging the zipper. She hitched a strap over her arm without pausing to straighten out its metal teeth and strode for the hall. Ethan blocked the door, as he’d once blocked her in the control room. But he stepped aside before her gaping, swinging bag could catch him in the chest, before she had to squeeze past him.
“Hurry.”
“No—no harping on my time management?”
She followed him to the exit, not quite jogging after his long strides.
He veered off toward the Modern Physics parking lot in silence.
“You better not have deflated my tires again. It’ll be your fault if I’m late.”
She’d leave for Salt her exasperation rose with each rejection, and she rounded on Ethan as soon as the door swung shut behind them.
“We already decided to use a polymer. Why did you bring up glass?”
He remained by the threshold. “Off-the-shelf glass lenses will fit the standard dimensions of MEC’s optics. A successful replication of Dr. Tuinstra’s black hole model should be confirmed before resources are spent on an organic synthetic polymer.”
“Cost resourcing isn’t an issue!”
“Time, then.”
Again, he glanced at his watch.
Jerk.
“Just because you had to scrimp and build your holometer with commercial parts, since Dr. Kramer wouldn’t give you the funding for anything else—”
“Our prefabricated elements have produced successful results.”
“But for our project—”
They traded blame and research grandstanding for ten minutes. At least, Erin did. Ethan studied the frayed laces on his boots or continued marking time on his watch, mouth tightening and ears reddening at her caustic arguments but returning nothing beyond brief, factual replies. Ten minutes became fifteen. She argued against his silence through the staff shift change and over a series of muted announcements from the West Experimental Hall’s address system.
“Are you planning to use a drug store thermometer to track any rises in temperature from the event horizon?”
“What?”
“Or maybe just the Scoville Scale, to really cut costs?”
“No,”
checking his watch for a fifth time. “The Scoville Scale is for peppers, not Hawking radiation—”
Thirty-five minutes.
Fifty.
They could’ve continued for hours. She could’ve. When her own watch read five forty-eight and his dogged focus still remained on anything in the control room except for her, however, she threw up her hands.
“This is pointless.”
It was—the Scoville Scale was nonsense—and it was late. She’d be with Bannister at Salt it was strong enough to resist the electromagnetic pulses from an atomic explosion. The lab’s valuable and volatile equipment would remain secure in the event of a nuclear disaster, and if some mechanical component in the hutches imploded from an experiment gone wrong, the fallout would also be contained. What chance did her budget cell service have of penetrating?
Fifty minutes became sixty-seven.
Eighty.
“Won’t someone from MEC notify the system engineers that we’re still here?”
“There was a shift change. The fresh crew won’t know.”
He was right.
Again.
“This can’t be happening!”
She hammered at the door. But there was no one in the West Experimental Hall to hear her. No one to come, no one to help. There was only Ethan, here in the control room. Obstinate Ethan, who was sabotaging her second meeting with Bannister, just like he’d ruined her night in the Wine Room.
Ethan fucking Meyer.
“You.”
She swung around to where he’d retreated to the wall of blank monitors, his hair on end from raking his fingers through it. “You planned this, didn’t you?”
“What? No. How could I?”
“I don’t know! Somehow. You heard those announcements but didn’t say anything, and I’m—”
Late.
She should’ve been out of the experimental halls with a quantum gravity experimental setup confirmed long before the Personnel Protective System test started. But no, Ethan had had to spur her into a fight by ignoring her.
“Now I’m going to be late, and I have plans!”
She advanced on him. “I’m supposed to be—”
“Don’t.”
He backed away, up against an operator desk. His voice was gravelly. “Don’t touch me.”
“No? Or what? Don’t order me around! My professors learned that the hard way, my brothers know not to interfere unless I call them, and I’d never let you—of all people!—tell me what to do, when I wouldn’t even let Bannister—”
His hooded gaze flashed up. “Bannister?”
She cocked back her arm to prod his vest. “Don’t interrupt me!”
“Bannister.”
He caught the syllables between his teeth—and then Ethan caught her wrist. But he didn’t look at their hands, at the voltaic energy suddenly snapping between them. Instead, he looked at her. Finally: his eyes were nearly black, pupils eclipsing all light and color, yet somehow still glittering with that dangerous mica. And his grip—it wasn’t violent. Didn’t hurt. It shocked her, though: almost gentle. His lips moved, articulating the artist’s name again.
Bannister.
…fuck.
“Forster,”
he breathed—
—and then that breath was in Erin’s lungs, and his mouth was on hers.