SIX MONTHS LATER
Erin Monaghan
“You want rosemary for the potatoes, right?”
Stretching onto her toes, a ratty sleep shirt riding up her bare thighs, Erin craned her neck over Grant’s pot on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. She plucked a sprig and crushed it between her palms, inhaling the sharp, fresh fragrance while she swayed to the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love”
playing on the radio. “He’s much happier in this eastern light. He’s putting out new shoots, even in the winter.”
“Yes, please.”
Ethan tapped his spatula against a sizzling cast iron pan on the stovetop and pinched the rosemary from her palm to sprinkle over their egg-and-potato scramble.
She passed him their plates. “We could have Martina and Tomasz over for dinner to use up more of the harvest. Garlic artichokes or penne pasta in a lemon goat cheese sauce would both be good with rosemary. But we’d need to clear some space around the table. Find the other chairs, too.”
“There’s one in the bathroom.”
He dropped a nubbin of scramble into Bunsen’s bowl as he stepped over a box of kitchen utensils, then threaded past the golden retriever and through a neat maze of packing material to a dining nook set between the kitchen and living room.
“Right. I was standing on it to hang the shower curtain.”
Nodding at a cluster of printed panels from PhD Comics, XKCD, and a sudoku sheet tacked on the refrigerator, she grabbed a carton of oat milk, snagged a takeout box of cream cheese danishes from the Palo Alto Cafe off the counter, and followed him to the table, where a pair of steaming mugs were waiting. “What about the other chair?”
“By the front door. There’s mail on it. New address confirmations and coupons.”
“Changing locations already generates so much waste. Adding flyers that no one wants to the mix is just rude.”
But she smiled while she propped up her feet on a crate of art supplies and took her first sip of milky coffee.
They’d moved into an older rental on Waverley Street in Palo Alto’s Midtown neighborhood just last weekend. Its bathroom tiles clashed between 1950s Pepto Bismol pink and 1970s avocado green, the dishwasher didn’t work, and the second bedroom had no closet. It was perfect.
They already had plans to convert the spare room into a studio and office, where she’d write and he’d alternately draw or fill orders from Bannister’s website. They’d hang Erin’s posters and her framed paper abstract (it was a trophy) beside Ethan’s SVLAC beam tree, “Hunger,”
and his other original pieces—black and white, but also a few newer drawings inked in the blues, reds, and golds of their afternoons spent running along Crissy Field East Beach by the Golden Gate Bridge—over dents in the living room’s drywall. They’d clean up the yard—maybe put Grant in the ground and build a bicycle shed—and she didn’t mind flicking soapy water at Ethan while they did the dishes, even if it meant that they got distracted… very, very distracted… and left their plates to soak overnight…
“Ready?”
Ethan plonked a bottle onto the table between their plates: Trader Joe’s Habanero Hot Sauce. Right. They’d picked up the spiciest condiment available during their recent trip to the grocery store. Now it was time to test their metal against the Scoville Scale. And against each other, obviously.
Good: she was hungry.
“Yes.”
Licking her lips, she reduced the volume on the radio, then reached for the oat milk carton and stared him down while she poured out a tall glass for him. She added just a splash in her own glass. She nodded at the habanero sauce and their jigger, tucked her loose hair behind her ears, and picked up her fork. “Are you?”
He returned her stare, measuring sauce into the stainless steel cup and then dolloping equal portions onto their respective breakfast plates. She tried not to wince at the amount. He noticed her cringe, of course. His grin widened. “You can still—”
“No stalling.”
She set the stopwatch on her phone. Then she took a bite: eggs, potatoes, rosemary, and olive oil in a cocoon of warm, smoky flavor. She pushed aside her oat milk to plant her elbows on the table and continued to hold his gaze. The seconds ticked up on her screen. She bit into her danish before lifting her fork again, swallowing, smiling, confident—and the warmth exploded. No warning, no gradual escalation from glow to heat to inferno, just a pleasant tingle and then suddenly a combustion on a cosmic scale, numbing the roof of her mouth, burning her cheeks—
She dropped her fork. And hiccupped.
“Ah!”
Ethan laughed. Or choked. Tears glazed his eyes as he gulped through his own pained mouthful. “It j-just—”
“—and all at—hic—once—”
“Milk?”
She exhaled another fiery wheeze, sweating and coughing but undeterred, laughing back at him. “Y-you first.”
“No. I’m f—”
But he couldn’t finish his sentence.
“You were the—hic—one who mentioned—”
Groaning, he waved her off to brace his palms against the tabletop. Bunsen whined and nudged his arm. “Ugh, no—buddy, you don’t want this—”
Her stopwatch showed that they’d been suffering for thirty-two seconds. Maybe if she lasted a whole minute without crying off, she could claim victory? She swallowed and swallowed, begging the time to tick faster while Bunsen continued to nose at Ethan’s flannel pajama bottoms. When she’d counted forty-eight excruciating moments, however, a video call from Martina chimed onto her screen.
“Thank God.”
She flashed her phone at Ethan through her sweat and tears. “Incoming—”
“Marti—? Better—hic—answer her.”
“T-truce?”
“—yes.”
He inhaled his oat milk with a grateful gasp.
Erin didn’t protest when he filled up the splash in her glass to the brim. The heat dissipated from her scorched tongue, her hiccups subsiding by degrees while she drank. The relief was too sweet for principled defiance. This time, at least. She wiped her mouth and caught Martina’s call on the last ring.
“Morning, Mar—”
“You’re crying.”
Martina ignored her wave and greeting. She crossed her arms. “What did you do this time?”
“Uh.”
She dabbed at her cheeks with a napkin from their stash of takeout utensils, sniffing against the residual burn in her nose. “We had that new Trader Joe’s hot sauce with breakfast. We were seeing who could tolerate it for the longest time, and things got a little—”
“—heated.”
Still red-faced, Ethan angled himself into the video frame with their evil habanero bottle, then shifted over to wrap a distracting forearm around Erin’s waist, fingers tracing the freckles on her stomach and the scalloped hem of her starry bralette through her shirt. “Hi, Martina.”
Martina rolled her eyes. “I was right about both of you all along. You really are two of the stupidest, stubbornest smart people I know.”
“Wait—you know people who are more stupid, stubborn, and smart than we are?”
Instantly refocused, Erin pivoted in her seat to trade affronted looks with Ethan. “We have competition!”
“Oh my God… Before this goes off the rails, I have a question for you.”
“We weren’t going to go off the—”
“You absolutely were. So: can we reschedule today’s Pilates class and dress shopping to next weekend? I had a shift change in the hutch operator schedule, and there’s also a Menlo Park city council meeting about a new dog park ordinance.”
“Bunsen says yes, of course.”
She patted the golden retriever with her free hand; the other was creeping up Ethan’s neck, twisting and tugging lightly at his overgrown hair. “I’ll see if Kai and Ashley are free for coffee. Anyhow, there’s plenty of time before Chase and Isabel’s wedding.”
“Next summer. Too soon,”
from Ethan.
“You’ll be begging for the date when you see the piece I’ve picked out for her, though,”
Martina told him. “If your jaw isn’t on the floor—if everyone’s jaws aren’t on the floor—”
“Martina. What are you—”
“It’s gorgeous, and you can even make your entrance on a bicycle if you want to. So you’ll love it. Jaw, floor.”
“Hmm.”
Ethan leaned into Erin’s paralyzed touch on his neck while she tried and failed to find a retort for Martina’s sass. “You could wear this shirt you have on now, and you’d still have everyone staring. Because you’ll be there with me. And… you’re you.”
Martina’s next eyeroll was almost audible. She might as well have been mouthing popcorn. “Right. Anyway—Ethan, how’s NASA Ames? If you can share any top-secret information.”
“Different from SVLAC.”
He propped Erin’s phone against the oat milk carton and handed his empty plate to her, which she stacked on hers and ferried to the sink, out of Bunsen’s covetous reach. The retriever followed her into the kitchen and sat on her feet. “Most of my work involves quantum computing for the Hermes II project. The shuttles and probes are projected to reach the Moon, and eventually beyond Mars. They could even enter orbit around Jupiter in the next century. Of course, anything I do now will be prehistoric by that time and my department can’t publish our research because the technicalities are classified, but I like it. The work is interesting, even if it’s not quantum units and holometers. I might still go back to that field someday and I have ideas for improvements to the instrument and its integration with Erin’s federal research, but for now, I just… it’s good to take some distance from it. To recalibrate. To breathe. And I can do that at NASA. Like I said, the work is interesting—but more importantly, the people are good.”
“There’s that adage about leaving managers, not jobs, right? I’m glad it’s going well—but only Dr. Ethan Meyer would consider NASA a sabbatical. Next question’s for Erin, though: are any of these classified technicalities showing up in your latest story? Anonymized, of course.”
“I might have sneaked a look at some calculations over his shoulder.”
Unrepentant, she squirted soap onto her sponge. “I have to take what I can get, since I can’t barge into his office anymore for sabotage and secret-stealing. The commute to Moffett Federal Airfield is just too far.”
“Isn’t that in Mountain View?”
“Too far,”
she repeated with a sarcastic, rueful sigh. “He used to be just across the hall.”
“Now you never see him.”
“Tragic.”
She scattered a handful of suds toward Ethan, who popped a bubble out of the air. “Tell Martina about the time your new manager smuggled your team into the wind tunnel to fly kites.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny that I flew Dr. Ndlovu’s daughter’s kite in the Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel. But if I had…”
Smiling while he recounted the story of what he might or might not have done in the NASA Ames tunnel, Erin reached for their cast iron pan and began to scrape out the egg residue. She missed working with him on the Department of Energy’s quantum gravity project, but his relaxed sprawl in a dining chair among the boxes of the life they were building together was worth much more than her regret for the hiatus of their professional relationship and their scooter races to the cafeteria.
She would’ve given up anything for his laughter.
Easily.
Besides, she liked her replacement collaborator from the Quantum Mechanics group: a transfer from Jefferson Lab, brilliant in her field and eager to support SVLAC’s summer program to broaden the participation of young women in STEM—where Leah Haddad had agreed to talk about her experience at the lab. The former intern shadowed their quantum gravity work in the West Experimental Hall every other week (they’d installed an electromagnet in the MEC hutch and their first attempt at recreating the University of Amsterdam’s event horizon model with ultracold atoms was slated for next Wednesday), and she and Erin met for lunch at the Coupa Cafe outside Stanford’s Green Library on Saturdays once a month. Sometimes Erin’s new colleague, Sandra O’Connor-Young, or even Nadine—slowing down on her weekends now to sip a smoothie and to assess how the lab’s women were really doing—joined them; the occasional social meal was just as important as time in the experimental halls.
A network of known allies invested in each other’s success was so much more powerful than an anonymous collective. Only look at STEMinist Online! Once SnarkyQuark64 had formally identified herself as Dr. Erin Monaghan and laid out the details of Kramer’s failure to sabotage her career—highlighting his weakness in being compelled to issue a retraction for his lies about her data, holding him accountable for possibly the first time—the floodgates had opened. Non-disclosure agreements were investigated and deemed fraudulent by legal advisors, since only National Labs could compel NDAs, not rogue supervisors, and the comments under her post had swelled with threads of relief and profanity—and proof. One call to Scientific American, and an exposé was in the works.
She hoped that Kramer wouldn’t resign before the article went to press, before he could be recalled from CERN and fired from SVLAC. Blacklisted. Squashed, like a parasite. Soon, everyone would know exactly what he was. Because what good was a whisper network if no one acted on its information?
SVLAC’s grapevine had been right about her and Ethan.
The two of them had been wrong about the award results of the annual Eischer-Langhoff Grant in Physics, however. Neither had received funding; a cohort of physicists developing teleportation technology for the quantum internet at Fermilab had secured the award. So maybe it was for the best that they weren’t collaborating professionally right now, because despite their mutual support for a new and better work–life balance, they would’ve inevitably spent several weeks griping to each other about the outcome in SVLAC’s kitchenette, in their living room, in their studio… and in the shower, where, even more than on Ethan’s desk, there were interesting applications of physics and leverage to explore—
Heat swooped through her stomach. She barely managed not to drop the pan.
But anyhow, there was a strong likelihood that she wouldn’t be returning to the Hawking radiation signals in her LIGO data or requiring additional funds for the interferometer in the next year. Though she hadn’t presented even preliminary quantum gravity findings for peer review yet, the Department of Energy’s investment in the project and SVLAC’s own high profile in the field meant that her inbox was already full of requests for interviews, partnerships, and a solicitation to speak at the International Conference on Physics in Kyoto…
“—the headwind in the tunnel broke the kite’s cross spar, so we had to stop, but now Dr. Ndlovu has plans to swap in a new spar made of scrap material from the welding shop. It might be too heavy to fly, though.”
“Not in a gravity-free zone,”
Martina reminded Ethan. “The crew could have the first—”
“—kite-flying spacewalk?”
He rocked his chair back on two legs, sloshing his coffee, laughing again.
No, she didn’t regret the Eischer-Langhoff loss. Wishing the Fermilab scientists well, Erin extracted herself out from under Bunsen’s weight and returned to the call.
“You should see what happens to a frisbee next time you’re hypothetically in the tunnel,”
she told Ethan, wrapping her damp arms around his shoulders and resting her chin on his head, inhaling the warm, familiar musk of his aftershave. “You could get clearance for Bunsen, now that he has his service vest and a registration with NASA’s Human Resources department. Maybe Tomasz, too—but without the vest. Aren’t you meeting him later today for a pick-up game?”
“Damn. I was supposed to confirm the time this morning.”
He fumbled for his phone.
“How can it be a pick-up game if they’re planning it?”
Martina asked Erin over the thunk of Ethan’s chair settling back onto the floor.
“At least they’ve finally figured out that they’re friends. It took me long enough to realize that I was the problem with Kai and Ashley—they were actually trying to include me in brunches and movie nights, but I always thought I had something more important to do. Besides,”
she carried her own phone and the oat milk carton back to the kitchen, “he’d better get used to it. Wes and Adrian have plans for him.”
“Say hello to those gorgeous men for me.”
“Gross—and always. See you next weekend.”
While Ethan and Tomasz fixed a frisbee time, she ransacked one of the kitchen boxes for a drying rack—Ethan had labeled each carton with its contents—and finished their dishes, then snapped a picture of Bunsen with a dab of leftover egg balanced on his nose, which she sent to the Monaghan family thread.
Erin
Bunsen says hello to Cassie and wants her to know that he’s a very good boy who sits nicely for his treats. (Though he does counter-surf.)
Lori Monaghan’s ellipsis bubbled onto her screen.
Mom
Cassie is looking forward to meeting him at Christmas. I’ll put the treat jar up. Tell Ethan that we all say hello too, sweetheart.
Erin
I will.
Wes’s typing notification joined the chat.
Wes
How was your hot sauce competition?
Erin
Martina called, so we had to pause the clock before we summited the Scoville Scale. It’s a draw.
Wes
That’s the problem with a two-person competition. You need a third.
Erin
Not you. You got to the finals of that chili-eating contest in Beijing.
Adrian
Fine, I’ll beat you both at Christmas. Someone has to. Wes gets to pick the sauce. Da Bomb Beyond Insanity Hot Sauce, maybe? Let’s see if you can still keep up, Frizzy. Plus, trial by fire for your guy. (Also, we’re racing the Dish next time I’m in California.)
Erin
I’ll get both of you back for this!
She closed her messages and reduced her family—plus the addition of Ethan and Bunsen—to their grinning faces in Ms. Frizzle’s school bus, then fished eggshells from the sink, knotted up a biodegradable bag of compost, and stepped over to the screen door leading from the kitchen to their backyard. As she kicked into a pair of scuffs and shrugged on Ethan’s fleece vest, she warned him, “Wes and Adrian are planning a hot sauce competition for Christmas. They’re floating the idea of something with a chemical component. We’d better build up our tolerance if we want to win. And survive.”
“There’s no stopping a Monaghan with a plan, is there?”
He grabbed Bunsen’s collar when the dog made a hopeful lunge for the bag.
“Never. I should let you know that if we’re ever cornered into a duty dinner with your family, I have a very interesting plan.”
“You do.”
It wasn’t a question. He followed her out onto the porch, leaning against the doorframe while she lobbed their compost on top of a pile of brown, crackly leaves in a green waste bin. “Does your plan have anything to do with this hot sauce competition?”
“Maybe.”
She clomped back up the steps. “Plenty of hot sauces are red, and doesn’t Karen Meyer pride herself on her authentic Italian tomato salsa? I’ll run interference while you adjust your mother’s seasoning.”
“Erin, that’s—God, you really are a menace.”
He pulled her in and kissed her smug smile. “We’re a menace.”
“And geniuses.”
“Yes, and geniuses.”
“But: I’m faster than you are,”
and she ducked away. “Do you have time for a run before frisbee?”
“I’m going to lap you around Hoover Park.”
“You can try. Where are our running shoes?”
“Bunsen!”
Ethan whistled to the golden retriever. Bunsen’s tail began to thump in excitement. “Find my shoes.”
No thanks to the dog, who devolved into a blur of ecstatic barks when he saw Ethan raking Erin’s hair into a braid while she set her earbuds to Stars’ “Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It,”
they unearthed their sneakers in a box of miscellaneous hangers shoved under the dining room chair that was collecting mail by the door. Ethan clipped on Bunsen’s leash, and she sorted through their latest collection of coupons and forwarded junk from a basket under the mail slot. There was a magazine in the mix today, too.
A familiar magazine.
She tilted its technicolor cover art toward Ethan while he wrestled his shoelaces away from Bunsen. “Galactica received our new address. Look, they’re asking for artist–writer collaborations for the magazine’s anniversary issue.”
“Collaborations?”
He straightened up.
“Which we’re doing, right?”
“Yes—and whoever makes it to the park first chooses the subject. Good luck!”
He took off along Waverley Street, whooping, Bunsen galloping beside him.
“That’s not fair. I wasn’t ready!”
But she couldn’t help laughing through her own sprint down the sidewalk. Because whether or not she clinched this competition—and she was already gaining on him, would tackle him to the grass in the park in a minute, would straddle him and steal the breathless happiness from his mouth with hers—she knew:
She’d already won.