stars on the ceiling

by depressedbarbie

Summary:

“So how would this have all gone? Theoretically?” he asks, eyes narrowed as he paces for a moment, before he stops back where he started. “You just…would’ve what? Straight jacketed me into a coma and sent me to space?”

“No, Jesus,” she says quietly, feels the hurt settle across her chest, “I would’ve asked you. I would’ve sat you down and asked you.”

He half laughs, disbelieving. “And what then? If I’d said no?”

or: he was always the back-up plan. one year after launch, she finally tells him.

i.

Grace lands in Paris at sunrise on a Thursday morning in June, five days before Eva’s birthday. 

He blinks awake as the plane touches down with a thud, adjusts to the harsh light and peers out the window. The flight attendant speaks overhead in rapid fire French, which after a few moments he decides to drown out with his headphones; nothing playing, just dulling the noise. He yawns, runs a hand through his hair and tries to shake the vague, burgeoning jet lag from his brain. He notices his sweater has fallen from his lap onto the floor over the course of the night, in front of the woman next to him. He retrieves it with an apologetic smile, and is greeted with something of an eye roll in return. Which feels uncalled for, frankly, but he ignores it. One of many things he’s not yet totally used to again, back in the real world: seat 48G on a commercial flight. He winces inwardly at that thought. There are not many people he can say that out loud to without sounding completely unbearable. Luckily, he supposes, he’s here to see one of them. 

Soon they deplane, and he finds himself in the back of an overpriced taxi not too long after, AC a half-hearted suggestion rather than anything approaching effective. It’s only been a few months since he’s been here, but Paris feels so different in the cloying summer heat. He thinks about the fall, the first tentative trip he’d taken here when she was still trying the city on for size, her greeting him with an awkward hug over the glovebox of her car; he thinks about the winter, Christmas markets where he’d wrapped her in his coat when the wind picked up; and then he thinks about this perfect past spring, watching her smoke a hundred cigarettes over bottles of sancerre at cafe tables on cobblestones, something settling between them both. Something defrosting in this new, treacly, warm, normal. It’s hard to mark time in the same way in southern California, his home now since he reluctantly took the NASA job - his bungalow in Pasadena is splashed in hot daytime sun and a cool evening breeze all twelve months of the year; memories bleeding together into one, yellow-drenched haze. But in Paris, it’s easier. A cold nose, a hot sleepless night, a sudden bloom of green. He never understood why people seemed to love the change of seasons so much until he met her. 

He’s not even meant to be here: they’re not scheduled to see each other again until much later this summer. But two weeks ago, when she’d left LA with the first light on a Sunday morning, he’d wrapped his arms tight around her and realized he didn’t want to wait so long. Realized a lot, actually, as he kissed her goodbye. Realized that he maybe wanted to stop waiting altogether. 

“Happy birthday,” she’d murmured, body warm against his until she pulled away, “this was fun.”

“Mm,” he’d said against her lips, half asleep. She’d tasted like toothpaste and smelled like his soap. Her sweater, warm against his bare skin, was fresh from his laundry. “Thank you for coming. Best present ever.”

She’d hummed a laugh, buried it into his neck for a moment. He’d remembered, out of nowhere, the first time she’d done that. They were drunk in a hotel room in New York and he’d run his fingers through her hair and she’d made him promise not to kiss her again until the mission was complete. It’s one of the only things they’d ever truly, spectacularly, failed at. 

“Well, you better get me something good for mine,” she’d said, and then she’d kissed him goodbye and left. 

When he woke up properly in the mid-morning sun, he’d decided to take it as a challenge. 

A fortnight later, here he is. Historically, he’s never been very good at grand gestures, or serious leaps of faith, or relationships in general, really. But he wants this with her more than he wants self-preservation. It was an oddly easy thing to realize. He just hopes she likes surprises, and dismisses the five-odd years of data that would suggest otherwise as bad science.

The cab makes its way through the outskirts of the city and then the 19th arrondissement before he begins to slowly, vaguely recognise things, which must mean he’s made it to the 11th. A coffee shop she’d taken him to once raises its shutters for the morning, the bookstore with the blue trim has a new window display, a man sweeps the sidewalk outside the store he’d bought her peonies from the first time he’d come to stay. So many little moments they’ve collected over the last year, out here in the bright mess of the real world, so different to the ones from before - stolen nights on deck, strange hotel rooms, tiptoed and hushed. He loves the memory of those as well, the many furtive beginnings of this whole thing, but they had always come with something else. A tinge of guilt, a pang of impermanence. This is something else entirely. The feeling in his chest the first time he kissed her on the street could’ve reheated the goddamned sun.

Beyond that, they haven’t quite defined what this is, what they’re doing – what they are in this whole after. It’s been a long, and hard, and convoluted year; a reacclimation that has knocked both of them around more than either of them would care to admit. It has, up until now, felt like a needless added complication, to tarnish this with the same real world brush everything else has been tarnished with. So they’ve kept it light; a handful of trips, the highlights reel, all of the good things. It wasn’t until last time, the morning after his birthday - creeping up on him out of nowhere over a morning coffee - that he realized he wanted more. The whole thing. It was a shockingly simple thing to think. And he feels it now, circling through the sleepy morning of her neighborhood, tracing the familiar lefts and rights in his head: he never feels his blood settle more than when he’s finding his way to her.

In retrospect, that probably should’ve been a pretty big hint. Then again, for two smart people, they have never been very good at following the clues.

After a few more minutes, the cab finally pulls up outside her building. He thanks the driver - the only French he’s vaguely competent at, a please and a thank you - and then it is just him, looking up at her balcony as the sky grows brighter. 

He knows her spare key is round the back entrance, but he doesn’t need it in the end - her neighbor steps out on his way to work, and Grace slips in through the front door after him. It’s four short flights to the top floor, and then there he is - just like that, on the other side of her door. 

He takes a deep breath, and knocks.

It’s early, but he knows she’ll be awake; always is. They’ll often talk at five or six in the morning Paris time, just before he goes to bed in LA. He hears her footsteps after a moment, heart in his throat the way it used to be when he’d hear her knock at his hotel door, two quick raps and then a third.

“C’est qui?” she calls through the door, startling him out of his head. He smiles reflexively at the sound of her voice. He opens his mouth to respond, before he realises he hasn’t thought far enough ahead to have prepared a French answer to that question. 

He winces, cycles through the ten words of vocab he’s picked up, and comes up short. He supposes this is the end of the surprise.

“Uh,” he calls back, “it’s the Amazon guy? And I know, I’m speaking English, which is strange. For a French delivery guy. But I’m just, y’know. On an exchange program. It’s cool, actually, it’s a new thing they’re doing for top performers, where–”

“--Oh my god,” she says in English, and the door flies open, mercifully cutting him off. 

She stares at him for a moment, in shock. It’s so rare, to catch her off guard, to surprise her. He sort of loves the look on her face. 

“Hi,” he says, a little sheepish.

She looks at him for another long moment, then slowly she smiles, right to her eyes.

“What are you doing here?” she breathes, looking up at him, “you’re not coming here until August.”

He laughs. He is so fond of her brain. Here he is, in front of her, in decidedly-not August, and yet the plan says August, so August it must be.

“Surprise,” he says, with a low stakes attempt at a jazz hand. She laughs, disbelieving, and steps back to let him in. She’s in a thin cream sweater and her hair is damp from the shower. Her apartment smells like coffee, and the balcony door lets in the soft breeze from the street. All the things he loves. 

“No, seriously. What are you doing here?” she says again, a little laugh this time as he crosses the threshold into her hallway, like she can’t fathom his presence here. 

“Y’know,” he says with a shrug, suddenly a little self-conscious at all of it; at the gesture. He tugs at his duffel slung over his shoulder, before dropping it to the floor. “I was in the neighborhood.”

“In the neighborhood,” she echoes with a smile, regaining her bearings, and her face grows soft, somehow, “uh-huh.”

She looks down as he steps closer, as though to hide it, then reaches out to fiddle with the hem of his t-shirt gently. Then she looks back up at him. The backs of her fingers brush slightly at his skin. It makes his pulse stutter so quickly that he loses his train of thought for a moment; the way she picks right back up where they left off. So used to borrowed time and stolen moments, weeks of looking at each other over conference calls and cafeteria tables with no safe harbor for anything more. Here, it’s so quiet; it feels so wonderfully possible to have it all.

“Yeah,” he says after a moment, “more or less. Give or take the Atlantic.”

She laughs, properly this time, bright with it. 

“I called you earlier, your phone was off. I thought it was so strange,” she says, “I can’t believe it.”

“Too much?” he asks, “I know it’s early, too, sorry, I just couldn’t find a later–”

She cuts him off with a finger to his lips. Wouldn’t be the first time. 

“Come here,” she says, warm and quiet and all his, and she doesn’t need to tell him twice. 

There’s something about getting to reach out and touch her in broad daylight, something about not looking over his shoulder or checking a locked door before he kisses her, that still makes him so content as he pulls her close that he almost can’t stand it. Her arms find their way round his neck, and his hands slip under her sweater to find her waist, and then he kisses her, slow and unhurried. He sighs into it, so happy to have her like this, little sound escaping her throat as he kisses her properly, deeper; brings a hand to cradle her face. She presses herself closer to him, kisses him back, kisses him better. Tugs at his hair a little, the way she always has. God, he wants her all the time, but there is something about a quiet, lazy Parisian morning that makes him see stars with it. Before he can think about it, his hands find her hips and he picks her up, lips on hers the whole time, and she gives a startled sort of laugh against his mouth as she wraps her legs around him, looks at him from above. 

“Now what?” she asks. She runs a thumb across his lips then presses her forehead to his, just like she always does, just like she always has. A thread from another time.

“Whatever you want,” he says. Just like he always has, just like he always does. 

***

ii.

After the mission was launched, Paris was sort of an accident. She’d found herself so completely at odds with the notion of settling down in one place that for the first six months, she’d refused: two months back in Berlin, some time in London, a stint in Amsterdam. Two weeks lying on a beach in Mallorca that made her feel actually, clinically, insane, and then a month in Madrid. There was something about being on the move that made her feel strangely at home, and in the midst of her whole life feeling completely foreign to her, she took it and ran. 

She was in Paris when Grace came to see her for the first time, and she’d settled in the city not long after. Even now, she tries not to find the correlation between the two, and mostly fails. 

They hadn’t spoken, really, in the immediate aftermath. She got off the plane from Kazakhstan with a vague pit in her stomach, turned her phone off, and slept for two weeks. After that, she started putting little pieces of her life back together, one by one: just two coffees a day, one at a time, both before noon. Breakfast, lunch and dinner; all of them, at reasonable hours. A walk around the block each evening. Remembered how to use things: washing machines, cars, her own calendar. Things that would’ve sounded so thoroughly stupid for anyone else to even have to think about, but five years was a long time to do almost nothing normally. The details had become blurry. She found herself in grocery store aisles and scrolling through television shows and on the phone to her insurance company having something approaching an out of body experience more than she cared to admit. Something about the mundanity of it all, real life in stark relief again: too bright, too sharp, something she couldn’t explain. To most people, at least.

Three months since they’d said a final, brisk goodbye in the morning chill of the steppe – rolling hills strangely beautiful behind him, once they were no longer blemished by the looming specter of the ship – Grace had finally texted her one Wednesday out of the blue.

I have to show you something, he’d said in one message, then an immediate follow up, but you have to promise not to laugh. 

She’d blinked at her phone for a long moment, seeing his name. Felt her blood change directions in her veins. She was smoking on the balcony of her rental in Marylebone, absentmindedly reading a book, the sun setting over the high street when the screen lit up. She read it over and over, felt herself smile without even meaning to. He hadn’t even said anything funny. Her heart beat out of her chest. She thought about waiting a normal amount of time to reply, then thirty seconds later decided against it, tapping out a reply before she could talk herself out of it.

I thought it was rude not to start with hello? she said, before she could overthink it. It was something he used to be fond of reminding her.

Hello, he said, and it was accompanied by a picture: a photo of himself in his kitchen, whole room full of smoke, wall charred, oven hanging open and a baking tray of unidentifiable food completely burnt up. He was doing a halfhearted thumbs up to the camera. Maybe not cooking for four years was a bad idea?

Christ, she’d replied, I should’ve never let you loose in that lab. It’s a miracle we’re still alive.

They’d traded messages back and forth for hours, that night. Then they never really stopped.

She kept her distance on purpose, initially - not just because anything larger than getting through the day felt strangely overwhelming, but for him, too. She felt she had taken enough of his life, of his time, of his brain for the last however many years. Once they’d parted ways, she felt the hangover of their whole thing so keenly; of all the closeness and all the tenderness and all the attachment that had grown between them. All of the things she buried far away. And she wanted to at least give him a choice in what happened next: if they were to become strangers, friends, something else entirely. But it felt so good to have him back, to have this back: stupid jokes and conversations that never really had to end and, as always, too many words - he always said so many fucking words. Solid and real and the person she knew best in the world, really, when she thought about it. And God, it wasn’t for a lack of trying: she had spent a lot of years fastidiously, studiously trying not to think about it. But here they were, on the other side, and he was the first person she thought of on waking up each morning. Suddenly, it wasn’t necessary to try and avoid that fact. A new muscle to flex, not having to resist it every step of the way. When he’d mentioned, lightly, that they should catch up, her first instinct had been to say no. But then, for what? No more work, no mission, none of it. Just a clear calendar and a lot of time and a man who was as kind as he was clever as he was funny as he was, annoyingly, handsome. 

She thought about it over two gin and tonics, and then she’d said yes. He’d booked a ticket that night. 

“You know for a minute there, I thought you weren’t ever going to talk to me again,” he’d said, two weeks later in her bed. 

Well, not her bed, precisely; but the bed in the apartment she had rented for the month in Paris. It had been almost breathtakingly tense, strange when she’d picked him up from the airport a few hours earlier. They hadn’t spoken about it beforehand: what this was, what this little sojourn meant. Just saw each other for the first time in months and forgot how to do it all for a moment. 

Then they’d walked into her apartment, and she poured him a glass of water, and he put it down beside her on the bench and took her face in his hands and kissed her gently in the evening light. He used to kiss her like that when something terrible happened; when it felt like the whole project, the whole fucking world, was going to collapse in her hands. She didn’t let him do it often, back then, but when she did, it made her feel strangely, shockingly whole. It had the same effect right there in her kitchen.  

“I thought you might want some space,” she said, “I thought you might need some time.”

He nodded. He got it. He almost always did. He pressed a kiss to her temple in response. 

“You gonna live here, you think?” he asked after a moment, “in Paris?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I might go back to the ESA, I’m seeing them this week. Not properly. Just Council advisory. But it’s something to do.”

It was not for a lack of opportunity that she’d not taken a single meeting up until now. She had no desire to do the speaking circuit, no interest in professorships or board seats or any of the other bullshit flooding her inbox. But there was something she could tolerate about going back to the Agency. Knew, in passing, it would also be good protection, legally and reputationally, should any of the things various lawyers had said to her in passing came to be true. She’d declined to tell him that part. 

“That’s great,” he said, “you’ll be great. Tell them they can call me if they need a reference,” and she’d buried her face into his shoulder as she laughed. His arms came round her like magic. 

So Paris it was. She took the job - minutiae, easy, compared to before, but it was something - and signed a lease and here she was, a normal person come alive once again. No real plan, no forward thinking; she played the hand in front of her and here she was. It was the most accidental thing she’d ever done. 

But now, here he is - barely seven in the morning, an early June Thursday, coffee just brewed - and suddenly none of it feels like an accident. It feels like exactly where she’s meant to be. Here he is, in her hallway, his arms wrapped round her for the hundredth time, her heart beating like it’s the first. It turns so hot so fast she barely registers it, everything in her turning liquid the second he kisses her. He carries her into the living room, like some absurd firefighter drill she finds unreasonably attractive, until her back is against the kitchen wall, until he can lower her slowly, her feet finding the floor again. He leans in and kisses her so deep she moans against his lips, feels the way he lights up for it. His big hands, his mouth, the way he breathes her in. She pulls him closer, desperate to feel the heat of him pressed against her - never more intoxicating than when it’s unexpected like this; a relic of a time before. 

He tastes like all of the exceptions they used to make to all of their rules. The night they’d walked back to their hotel together in Singapore and could barely keep their hands to themselves, all over each other the second the elevator door closed. The two days they’d spent in Rio, where a three month stint of being so, so good – so painfully controlled, not one wayward touch between them – ended with him flushed and panting beneath her, his fingers digging into her skin. The New Year’s Eve party she’d thrown on the ship, when she’d kissed him at five in the morning because she couldn’t kiss him at midnight. He’d gone down on her for what felt like hours; she’d seen the first sunrise of the year from his bed and told herself it had to be the last as she came.

As if on cue, she feels the way he starts to touch her, hands everywhere - tentative at first, like always, until he gets his bearings and gets out of his own head. He kisses her neck, his hand at the curve of her chest, then buries his face there till she throws her head back and tugs his hair. And then there he is, sinking to his knees in that way that always makes her so fucking lightheaded, so dizzy with it. He pulls her leg over his shoulder before he even thinks to take her sweats off; his face between her legs like he needs it. He mouths at her with a moan, tongue heavy at the seam of her pants, breathes her in. She’s never known anyone who loves this as much as him, who’s so easy for it, like this. She detangles herself for a moment, just long enough to shed the layers between them, and he looks up at her, almost reverent as he pushes her gently back against the wall. He goes slower, just for a moment, his lips everywhere except for where she now wants them most. He grazes his teeth at the crease of her thigh, and she moans louder than she means to, and he hums a low laugh into her skin in return. She gets a hand in his hair, guides him closer, and that’s all it takes: the first touch of his tongue makes her fucking knees give out. He holds her in place like it’s nothing, hands at her hips, fingers kneading slowly at her skin. His tongue is rhythm-perfect; inside of her and at her clit and somehow everywhere at once, just how she likes it. It’s messy, and frantic, and so hot she could cry: she chases it like fucking crazy, wrecked little sounds he makes beneath her only making her faster, closer. She comes before she even realizes it, riding his face like it’s the last thing she’ll ever do as she goes over the edge, white-knuckling his hair to keep herself upright as it washes over her. 

Her ears ring for what feels like minutes; she can barely get the air into her lungs. She feels the flush through her whole fucking body as he presses his lips gently to her skin, waits patiently for her to come back to earth. She laughs, finally, as he bites teasingly at her side, breath ragged. 

“Fuck,” she breathes, “Jesus, get up here.”

He obliges, comes up and kisses her, slow and languid and wanting. 

“Well,” he says, pulling away for a moment, lips at her forehead, “think the coffee’s ready, at least.”

She laughs, closes her eyes against it. It’s one of the better mornings she’s had in a long, long time.

After he kisses her back to earth, he wanders off to take a shower while she goes downstairs to get them fresh pastries for breakfast. She gets back and he’s on the balcony, drinking a cup of slightly burnt coffee, the other on the table waiting for her return. It’s hot, but the view is perfect, and it’s worth the roasting morning sun. They split a pain au chocolat and a palmier, and he tastes like sugar when he kisses her. 

“What do you want to do on this disgustingly warm day, then?” he asks. His fingers trace at her ankle, her legs dangled in his lap. She considers him for a moment, thinking about it. It is a beat too long for him, evidently. “Don’t say you,” he says before she can answer, hands up as though in surrender, “I know, I know, I get it, okay. But have some decorum.”

She half laughs, half groans into her hands. “Oh, we’re going to go to so many places without air-conditioning for that,” she says, self satisfied, “come on, time for a tour.”

She stands up, goes to turn and walk inside, but he catches her by the wrist for a moment until she comes back to him. Presses a kiss to her stomach through her shirt, looks up at her.

“I was kidding, but I also wasn’t, totally. To be clear,” he says, hands wandering, “if, you know. You want to go back to bed, instead.”

He has such a look in his eye, when he wants her. In the right light, it makes her feel just the slightest bit drunk. She clears her throat, runs a hand placatingly through his hair. This is going to be fun.

“I hate to break it to you, but I had a really, really good orgasm already this morning,” she says, can’t help but smile at the way his skin flushes like clockwork; she taps his cheek in consolation, “but maybe later. Come on. Can’t waste the day.”

He laughs, long suffering, with his forehead pressed to her hip for a moment, then stands up with a glint in his eye like he's not going to let her win. One thing she’s always liked about him, even when it would make her life annoyingly difficult: he is so, so fucking stubborn, when he wants to be.

“Well, wonderful. Great. That’s exactly what I was hoping you’d say, actually,” he says, “let me get my things.”

It’s hot, and there are tourists everywhere, and the trains are on strike, but it’s a perfect Paris day nonetheless. They make their way to the Marais, and at one point he slings an arm round her shoulders and they walk like that the rest of the way to an early lunch, to her favorite spot a few blocks back from the river. She makes him ask for the check in French and he stumbles over the whole thing but is so affable while doing it that the waiter humors him and replies in painfully slow French nonetheless, practically unheard of. It’s one of her favorite things about him, a blinding charm he is almost completely oblivious to. After lunch, they walk by the Musee Picasso and he mentions he’s never seen a painting of his in the flesh, so she insists they go in. They walk the halls slowly and drink it all in, and when they stop in front of The Kiss, he turns and looks at her with a raised eyebrow, as if to say, it would be rude not to.

“Absolutely not,” she says, without meaning it at all.

“I mean. I’m just saying,” he says, without actually saying anything.

“We’re not fifteen,” she says, and he smiles in response, turns to her properly this time.

“I don’t care,” he says. She looks down with a half laugh, then looks at him right back.

“It’s also an ugly painting,” she says, matter of fact. 

He winces, glances over his shoulder as though Pablo himself might overhear her. 

 “I don’t think you’re meant to say that here,” he says, “but also, I don’t care.”

For a moment, they’re frozen in place at some sort of impasse. Then she thinks fuck it, leans in and kisses him first, just because she can. Quick and chaste with it, takes him by surprise. She pulls back and walks into the next room without a moment’s hesitation; hears him laugh behind her as he follows. 

When they step out into the merciful afternoon breeze, she tells him she’d like him to take her to bed, now, and he says thought you’d never ask, and then he does. 

They get home, and they’re somehow pulling each other’s clothes off before she even realizes they’re in her room. There’s no hesitation this time. He kisses her stupid as he presses her to the bed in one smooth motion, the weight of him pressed so deliciously against her for a moment, before he pulls back a little to slip a finger inside of her, then two. It’s all it takes for her to want it so much she can’t stand it. He goes down on her again like it’s a gift, to get to do this with her; moans into her and grinds himself down against the sheets when she tells him he’s perfect at it, that he looks so good doing it; he does it again as she comes. He comes back up to meet her lips, curses softly into her neck when she tells him to fuck her, a rare and perfect thing to pull from him; he does it again when she tells him to go faster. She can feel him everywhere: inside of her, on top of her, holding her so close. All the things she loves. His breath grows ragged, his pace starts to waver as he fucks her deeper; she sees him bite his own lip to stop himself getting loud. She knows he’s so close, when he does that. She brushes two fingers across his lips and he takes them into his mouth without hesitation as he starts to come, flush high on his cheeks as he realizes what he’s doing. It’s like nothing else, the way he does that for her, does it all for her, without even thinking. She feels him so hot inside her and comes again just from the look in his eye. 

As they melt back into the real world, into each other, he presses a kiss to each of her closed eyelids and then settles with his lips at her hair, and she knows, for sure this time, that she is so, so fucked. 

Something is different: better, quieter, more real. After so many years of all the options being forbidden, they lie in front of them in multitudes now. This proper, whole, full thing, that could be all theirs, if she were to reach out and make it so.

But she can’t. So she lets him hold her, and she swallows it down. She has to swallow it down. 

Because there is, of course, the terrible thing. 

It rears its head every time they’re like this, quiet and so happy. This evening is no different.

One document, a handful of conversations, five years ago. It was one of the only things she kept under lock and key at all times – in the third safe on the ship, the one no one else knew about. She typed it out on an airgapped computer, she printed one copy, and she locked it away; like radioactive waste, like a fucking biohazard.  It was the first thing she shredded when all of her papers arrived at her door under armed guard last year, from the base. It was so scarce she could almost convince herself it didn’t exist. Except, of course, that it did. 

Plan A and B had been easy enough to establish. Public, voluntary, properly done: the six people who would be on the books and fully trained and ready to go. But Plans C and onwards were harder. Too many known contingencies and people would start to get spooked, start questioning why they were necessary. Not enough contingencies and the risk of the whole thing falling over because of one mistake, one act of God, was too high. The back up plans were therefore secret – they weren’t even meant to be controversial, really, just lists of people they could call on if needed, who’d expressed an interest already, required the least training, could get up to speed quickly should they need to. It should’ve been three simple lists, nothing more: and for a while, it started that way. She’d had pilots and engineers lining up out the door to be the third, fourth, thirtieth options. They were compiled into a desirability matrix and numbered, before being filed away for future use, if needed. Easy.

And then there was a problem. 

After almost a year of fine-tooth combing every database of even vaguely potential candidates, she had no scientists worth their time, aside from the two already here. It wasn’t enough. She needed a fail safe. Someone trained, someone young enough, someone who could do it with short notice, if needed. And yet, no one came forward. She needed a new plan.

In a moment of slight desperation somewhere into the third month of looking, under the guise of team building, she’d had them all tested. Just the core team, just in case. It was of course completely ridiculous. There were maybe twenty of them, for a one in seven thousand shot. The math made no sense, but no one argued – just got their blood drawn and went about their days, a little perturbed at this particular moment of leadership from her, but nothing more. 

It was a waste of time. And then it wasn’t.

She remembered the stutter of her pulse when she got the results back and saw his name, lit up green. She’d made the lab run it three more times. Dr Grace, her sort-of-de-facto-chief-scientist, ticking the impossible box. 

For a short moment, it was almost a relief, and then it turned into a burden right there in her hand. It was the first time she felt the distinct unease of coming to a line she had no choice but to cross. It twisted something inside of her that she has never been able to smooth out, even all this time later. 

He didn’t know she was looking for a back up. He didn’t know he was her best candidate. He didn’t agree to be Plan C. She wrote his name down anyway. Volunteer status: unclear. To be clarified only if required. She didn’t tell him a thing. She couldn’t risk him leaving. She never gave him the opportunity to say yes, say no, say anything: she wrote it down, told the few people who needed her assurances that there was a plan, and then she stuck it somewhere very, very far away.

It all happened before they’d even looked twice at each other, like that. They were colleagues at best. She remembers the day she put it to paper, because she’d stepped into a meeting afterwards and he’d barely looked up from his laptop as she entered the room. She’d looked at him for a long moment, swallowed hard, and got on with the day. They’d argued about a piece of the training program and he ate a pack of gummy bears while they did it, and they’d sat at opposite ends of the communal table at dinner that night. A simpler time. 

When that shifted, some months later – is this okay?, he’d said, touched her so gently before he kissed her for the first time that she thought her heart might give out – she spent the next year looking for another answer. Maybe something had changed. Maybe someone else would come forward. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But no other plan ever materialized. The further they progressed into everything, the science moving at breakneck speed, the more unlikely it became that anyone else would catch up. So there his name had stayed: a back up to the back up, a Hail Mary to the Hail Mary, just in case. 

She had never told him. There was never the right time, never the right reason. There was technically no need for him to know unless it came down to it; they could deal with it then. She’d had to have asked him to die, yes, but if things had become that bad, maybe he’d have reached the logical conclusion himself. It was a fantasy she’d always held onto, when she’d wake up from a nightmare that everyone was dead and she needed him to go. That maybe he’d volunteer, without her needing to say a word. That maybe she’d tell him and he’d say, I understand, I’ll go. Every time he’d spoken about the crew - how brave they were, how he could never do it - she’d change the subject tightly and pretend to not have heard it.  

In the end, it all went according to plan. There was no need for any of it. She had never told him, and now here they are, and he looks at her like she hung the moon and that small part of her twists up, every time. She thinks about it constantly. When he’s asleep next to her. When he calls her baby without meaning to, and flushes to his chest. When her phone rings as the sun rises in Paris and sets in LA. Almost all of this is good, except for that. It is the ugly mark across her, that only she can see. The big untruth, threatening it all just slightly more every day.

She can’t reach out and take all the things written on his face without telling him the terrible thing - can’t let them do this without him knowing the truth. And she can’t tell him the terrible thing without fucking it all up - ruining this one, bright spot they have. So she does none of it. She sits with it for what it is, walks the line the best she can. And in lieu of a better plan, she just tries to ignore it when he looks at her like he’s going to say something too concrete, something too real. 

She doesn’t know what else to do. It’s one of the only times in her life that’s ever been true.

Later that night, she rolls over and blinks awake for a moment. He’s beside her, on his phone, blue light soft on his face.

“Jet lag?” she asks, and he starts for a moment, looks over at her.

“Yeah,” he says quietly, “sorry, did I wake you?” 

She shakes her head no, and he puts his phone down, stretches out an arm to her. She pauses for a moment, then curls into him, head on his chest. Yawns into his skin for a moment, settles against him, their legs tangled. 

“You want a tea, or anything?” she asks, and he shakes his head.

“No. Just this,” he says, like it’s the most normal thing in the world, and she can’t help but look up at him. “What?” he asks, at the look on her face.

It’s like staring - ironically - at the fucking sun. Can’t let it blind her.

“Nothing,” she murmurs, and then because she can’t fucking help herself, sometimes, “I’m just glad you’re here.”

He hums a laugh into her hair, and she falls into a restless sleep, heart in her throat. 

***

iii.

His first few days in Paris pass almost luxuriously in how leisurely they are. Everything is molasses slow, endless in how it stretches in front of them. The sun is up for sixteen hours a day. The wine bar next to her building stays open until as late as they please, after the bartender recognizes them from the last time he came to stay. Every oyster is shucked fresh and every steak is rare and every bottle of wine is chilled within an inch of its life. Everything has an almost psychedelic goodness, richness, to it. She brings him a coffee to wake up and he pours her a whiskey to wind down and it’s as though all the small, stolen moments they cobbled together for so many years have been spun together on a film reel, scene after scene. 

They settle into a rhythm: late mornings in bed, late afternoons in the heat of the city, late evenings in hours of conversation. Sometimes about nothing, but sometimes about all of the things that have threatened to swallow them both whole over the last year. That part, more than all the rest, is new. 

Initially, it happens without either of them really meaning it – she laughs when he drops his fork in a restaurant, something he did all the time in the early days before he got his sea legs, when the ship lurched; he finds the infamous Hail Mary free baseball cap in her closet and she rolls her eyes when he puts it on and leans back suggestively, hands clasped behind his head. 

“Still not really a hat guy,” she says, and he shrugs.

“Didn’t stop you the first time, if I recall,” he replies, an apologetic-but-not-really smile on his face, and he experiences the rare victory of making her blush.

There are the fun things, but there are the other things, too. It’s an uneasy thing, to miss the work that sent three people to die. But they both do. The adrenaline, the significance, the bond: all of it was addictive, in its way, all of it hard to quit cold turkey. There is a certain dullness to life on the other side that neither of them quite expected – they were all so thoroughly burnt out by the end that all they ever spoke about, dreamt of, was home. Then they got it, and it felt so flat that it hollowed them out in its mundanity almost entirely. It’s a shockingly relieving feeling, to say it out loud to someone else who understands. Once they start, they talk about it for hours; the sun comes up on Monday morning before they’ve even tried to sleep on Sunday night. 

The only thing harder to grapple with than the past - that strange, bright time they’ll never be able to return to - is the future. It’s an odd sort of purgatory; sometimes, it feels a lot like grief. For years, it was all they lived and breathed; life and death, every day. But for the next five - maybe ten, really, if some projections go their way - life will go on, more or less, as normal. Out of all of it, that’s the thing that’s bothered him most, when he thinks about it. The whiplash of the return to normal. The surreal way the rest of the world rolls on, the sun’s slow march into death the subject of the odd viral tweet or scientific paper. To be fair, that was the whole point of the mission, of everything they did. All stones have been turned; now they wait. But it has made him - made them both, he thinks - a little insane, by inches then miles, watching the way the world just sort of staggers on. 

“Can you turn that off?” she asks him suddenly one night. 

They’re getting ready for dinner, the TV droning quietly in the background of the bedroom. He hadn’t even been paying attention, glances at the screen next to him and is greeted with the 24 hour international news. It’s a staple fascination of a slow news day across the globe, now: a where is the Hail Mary today? segment. Some two-bit physicist is doing a clumsy job explaining time dilation and the outer edge of the solar system, the ship’s current projected checkpoint, vaguely, though it’s of course more complex than a four minute package allows. The anchors nod in all the right places, and soon the same footage that has played on repeat for the last year and change starts running in a highlights reel in the split screen: the crew waving goodbye, stoic and brave; the fish eye of mission control, somber and quiet; then take off, eerily silent. Images seared into the minds of every person on earth, now.

He grabs the remote from the nightstand, flicks it off. She doesn’t say anything, just turns to her dresser and starts rifling through a messy stack of jewelry. 

“You okay?” he asks, maybe a little tentative. They’ve never really spoken about it, but she has an almost Pavlovian aversion to anything remotely related to the mission: a book in a shop window, a news article, a harmless video someone sends her. 

“Yes, of course,” she says, clipped. She turns to him, clasps an earring together. “Why?”

He tilts his head. 

“You really hate it,” he says, nodding at the now black TV screen, “all the…whatever. Commentary.”

She rolls her eyes, grabs her other earring. “I’ve always hated it,” she says, “you know that.”

He nods. “Sure,” he says, “but back then it was because it was a distraction. Or, you know, actually dangerous.”

Back then, he says, in that way they always do, to mean the biggest thing either of them will ever do. 

“Yes,” is all she says in return. 

“But it’s not really that now, right?” he asks. Isn’t sure why he pushes it, but he’s curious, he supposes. “You just want them to never talk about it again?”

She swallows, makes her face carefully blank, he sees it happen in real time. 

“No,” she says, quieter this time, “no, it’s fine. It’s good, maybe. I just don’t want to hear it.”

He clocks the imperceptible set of her shoulders as she turns away again, the little shake of her head. He used to see her do those things all the time, before going into big rooms, as she came out of them. It’s been a while, but he still knows what to look for. He walks over to her, stills her hands and just pulls her into his chest wordlessly, and she lets him do it; lets herself be held. He thinks of all the times he used to be too afraid she’d shake him off, and wishes he’d done this all of those times, too. 

“M’sorry,” he says quietly, muffled into her hair, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She shakes her head, pries herself far enough away to look up at him. Her hands rest on his chest. 

“You didn’t, it’s fine,” she says, like a reflex. Then she swallows, and the next part is quiet. “I just fucking hate thinking about them up there. You know?” 

Which, yeah, he does. He nods, tucks her hair behind her ear for something to do, a way to reach out and touch her. 

“Yeah,” he says, “I know. I get it.” 

She smiles at him, this sort of relief-stricken look for a moment, then something else that he can’t quite read flickers across her face for a moment. Then she’s back, presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. 

“I know you do,” she says, then after a moment she clears her throat, resetting herself in real time. “Okay, enough, let’s go. We’re going to be late, the next train is in seven minutes.”

She runs her fingers through her hair, takes a step back and picks up her purse, grabs her shoes. He just hums a laugh, shakes his head disbelievingly. 

“You can take the girl outta Berlin,” he says idly, and she turns to him, just raises an eyebrow. 

“Watch it,” she says, glint in her eye, and it’s so hot he sort of feels his brain melt in his head, just like that.

The next day is, finally, her birthday; his last full day in Paris before he leaves late the next evening. They both stir at first light, and he rolls over to hook a leg around her lazily, kisses her good morning.

“Morning,” he murmurs into her skin. She’s so warm, as she wraps her arms round his shoulders and pulls him closer. A perfect, cool breeze lazes in from the window. “I know you don’t want me to say it, but happy birthday.”

She smiles against his lips.

“You’re allowed to say it exactly once,” she says, “so there you go, you’ve used it already.”

“You know, I think that’s one thing you don’t actually get to be in charge of,” he says. She moans quietly at that, and he kisses her again, takes note of it, the way he always does. “Happy birthday,” he says again, for effect, and she laughs for a moment before kissing him properly, deeper.

It’s charged and hot and a little desperate almost immediately. He loves when she wakes up like this, pliant and soft and wanting. It was always a sign she’d slept well, which, back before, when they were in one of their many phases of sleeping together, was a responsibility he took incredibly seriously. If he had even a small hand in getting her to sleep more than five hours consecutively, he’d basically considered his job done for the day. Here, though, it’s just starting, and he’s incredibly pleased about it. A little experimentally, he threads his fingers through her hair and tugs, just a little. She arches up into it almost immediately, a soft whine against him. God, she’s so beautiful, when he looks down at her. It’s so close, so intimate to see her needy like this. She’s already wet, he can feel it when she takes a leg round him and presses against him, and it gets him hard so fast he feels lightheaded. 

“Tell me what you want, baby,” he asks against the shell of her ear. Grazes his teeth at her neck, exactly where she likes it. His free hand comes to her breast lightly, he runs a thumb over her nipple as he pulls her hair again, just gently. 

“Fuck,” she breathes, pulling him closer and rocking up into him, “want it like this, just like this.”

He smiles, kisses her. “Think you missed a magic word,” he says. He used to feel faintly ridiculous, saying it, until he realized how much it turned her on in the right moment.

She swallows, chases his mouth for a moment, but he pulls back and runs a thumb over her lips instead; prompts it. 

“Please,” she says quietly, her eyes blinking open briefly as though to prove she can do it, and then he can’t help it, has to kiss her like she’s his last breath. 

Sometimes, he thinks he could come just hearing her say it. He buries a pathetic sort of sound into her mouth, rocks down against her for a moment of relief, then gently moves her hands above her head, holds them there loose in one hand of his own. 

“Good girl,” he says, and her eyes close at that, flush high on her cheeks. She used to be terrible at asking for what she wanted, when it was like this. Now, though still rare, her whole body goes liquid for it. “God, c’mere,” he murmurs, and she does.

He moves his free hand to her hip, shifts them both slightly until he can slide into her, slow and delicious and tight. 

“Oh, fuck,” she whispers, throwing her head back against the pillow. 

He gives them both a moment, breath ragged, then pulls out slowly, drives into her slow and shallow, once and then twice. Deliberately languid, wants to feel her, wants to make her writhe a little. She makes a sound beneath him; is so impatient, sometimes, when she wants more and wants it now. She gets her leg round him properly, thrusts up to meet him as he pulls out and then in again, and he squeezes her wrists for a moment to still her.

“Let me give you what you want,” he says, breath ragged already, and she does, her body relaxing into him like he flicked a switch. And God, he can’t deny her when she does that; so good for him. He digs his fingers into her thigh and his other hand into her hair and fucks her the way she likes it; deep and unrelenting and hot. She goes so boneless for it, bites her lip but punctures out a little whine anyway, every time he thrusts all the way inside of her.

They are all heat, all breath, and he feels her start to tense up, start to move beneath him. He can tell she’s getting close by the way she starts coming up to meet him again, trying to draw him even deeper, and so he leans in and kisses her, filthy and messy and all tongue.

“Gonna come for me, baby?” he asks her, and like magic she does: comes so hard she’s silent as he fucks her through it, before a sob escapes her lips and she throws her head back, pulls him close.

“Don’t stop,” she says, a small, shocked look in her eye as he meets her gaze, “oh my God, keep going,” and he swears she comes for longer than she ever has as she starts to writhe against him, her skin so hot to his touch that she bites his shoulder as he fucks her, whole body tight around him.

He’s not going to last; has to come so badly he’s lightheaded with it. When her leg loosens its grip round his waist, he slows down, kisses her.

“Where do you want it?” he asks, a little dirty with it, just the way she likes. She moans, kisses him for a second.

“Anywhere, on me,” she says, and it’s three words but it’s enough to make him almost come then and there. He pulls out and sits back on his heels, jerks himself off quickly. Heat pools through him, he’s so close he can taste it, and he’s about to come on her stomach when she moans slightly and reaches up to angle his cock higher, so he spills over the edge on her chest, her collarbone, her jaw, and Jesus, he starts to comes so hard he thinks he could die. 

“Yeah, baby, like that,” she breathes as he fucks his hand, and he thinks, not for the first time, that one day, she’ll probably, actually, kill him.

“Oh God,” he says, steadying himself against the headboard as he comes back down to earth, rides out the last of it, “God, you’re so hot,” he says, in that sort of moronic state he finds himself in when she’s made him come like that, and then she’s pulling him back down to her, kissing him until he regains the power of speech.

“I think I want to stay here all day,” she says, breathless and yet somehow still decisive, and he nods.

“Anything you want,” he says, then, against her lips, just because he can, “happy birthday.”

The rest of the day is a wonderful, easy blur. They watch a stupid movie, they eat a perfect tomato salad on the balcony with half a bottle of her favorite red for lunch, she rides him till they both come almost perfectly in sync, they have a long nap and then finish the rest of the bottle for dinner. When he gives her her gift as the sun sets - two tickets to Stevie Wonder at the Hollywood Bowl in December - the smile that spreads slowly across her face is something he makes a point to file away. 

“Oh my God,” she says, then looks up at him, almost in disbelief, “you remembered.” 

It was hard to forget, even though it was almost four years ago, now. They’d been arguing about an incredibly boring and specific question on fuel gauges in a hotel bar, in Estonia, of all places, growing increasingly animated with each passing hour and each passing drink, pieces of paper flying between them in a spin. People had given them strange, furtive looks the whole evening, and he barely noticed them. Somewhere in their third hour of going rounds, a Stevie Wonder song had played over the speaker, and in unison they’d both stopped and said I love this song. They’d laughed, and in lieu of either of them being able to prove their answers correct before the ship was actually built, she’d made him shake on a bet: whoever was wrong would buy the other tickets to wherever Stevie first toured when all of this was over. 

It was one of the first times he remembers looking across the table and thinking, oh no; one of the first times he went to bed and thought about her. He’d shaken her hand, and three months later he kissed her for the first time in the hallway of another hotel on the other side of the world. Three years after that, she won the bet.

“Of course,” he says, “you were right. I shook on it and everything, had to come good.”

She laughs, kisses him. 

“I’ll see you at Christmas, then,” she says, and he nods, kisses her back. 

He wants to see her in August and he wants to see her at Christmas, and he wants her all the time in between, too; near and far. It’s been that simple for a long, long time. For whatever reason, this is the moment he feels like he finally has the wherewithal to say it. He thinks about swallowing it down, about ignoring it, and then he thinks about all the years they’ve both wasted doing just that, and it suddenly feels so stupid. 

“Hey, so, now you mention it,” he says, before he loses the nerve, “I wanna talk to you about something.”

She pauses, pulls back almost instinctively. She picks up her glass, has a sip of her drink. He does the same. 

“Oh?” she says. 

He feels, suddenly, sort of childishly nervous. He sort of loves the thud of his heartbeat.

“Look,” he says, “I’m like, really historically and measurably bad at this, okay. Sort of embarrassingly so. Ask anyone. Well. Don’t, actually, on second thoughts. But go easy on me. And I probably should have done this a long time ago, so forgive me.”

Her face falters, just a touch. “Oh,” she says, “oh, that’s okay. We don’t need to–”

“--I know, but I want to,” he says, “because all of this has been so much fun, you know. The…the trips, and everything. But when you left the other week, I just sort of realized–” 

“--You don’t have–”

“--I get it, okay,” he smiles, “I think we’re probably both incredibly bad at this. But I swear, all I want to say is, I want this, okay, for real. All the time in between, too. And I know we have a lot of things to work out, and–”

“--Grace, just stop, for a second, please,” she says, and there’s something about the tone of her voice that does, actually, make him stop this time. 

It’s suddenly very, very quiet.

When she looks up to meet his eyes after a long moment, there’s something in her expression he doesn’t quite recognize. He swallows, and tries not to take it all like an anvil to the chest. 

He can be an adult, about it all. If he misread it all horribly, he can move past it, pretend it never happened. He closes his eyes briefly, opens them again. 

“I…look, if you’re saying you just want this to be a casua–”

“--It’s not that,” she says, quick with it, then closes her eyes for a moment, “God, please don’t say that. It’s not that.”

He looks at her for a long moment. The thud of his heartbeat turns into a different rhythm in his chest. He starts to speak, then stops. She won’t even look at him, not really. He can’t remember her ever doing that, not in all their years of skirting around this whole thing. 

“I…I don’t really know what’s happening,” he says slowly, “what, then?”

She sighs, presses her head to her hands for a moment. He wants to reach out and touch her, so badly. Isn’t sure that’s what she wants, anymore. 

“You need to stop, because I have to tell you something before you say it,” she almost whispers into her hands, before looking back up at him. He hates the look in her eye on instinct. 

All the blood in his head becomes loud as those words leave her lips. Without even meaning to, his head starts feeling out all the terrible options: a dark past, a life of crime, some terrible revelation. She swallows, like she can see it all over his face. 

Maybe it’s fine. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe he’s overthinking it all. He’s determined not to get ahead of whatever it is. 

“Oh,” he says, as forcibly light as he can, “what, secret French husband?”

She huffs a laugh, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

“No,” she says quietly, “c’mon, it’s not like that. You know this is…I feel the same. But I have to tell you something before I let you say it.”

She says it unbearably softly.

“You’re sort of killing me with the suspense,” he says, equally as soft, feels it all in his throat, “what is it?”

She takes a deep breath, and she looks so suddenly unsure of herself, of everything, that he reaches out and takes her hand.

“It’s okay,” he says, “c’mon, tell me.”

She lets him hold her hand for a long moment, and then she squeezes his fingers before she draws back, wraps her arms round herself.

“I don’t know how to,” she says finally, “God, I don’t want to do this.”

He swallows, doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t know what to say.

“You’re scaring me, a little,” he says, truthfully. “You’re scaring me sort of a lot.”

“I’m going to say it, and you’re going to hate me,” she says quietly, like it’s a fact, “and that’s okay, you should. But I just…I don’t know. At the time, it was the right thing to do. It’s terrible. I wish it hadn’t been. I’m sorry.”

He swallows. “What is it?” he asks, “what…what happened?”

She takes a deep breath, and then she sets her expression into something hard, like she’d rather be looking anywhere but him. She looks at him anyway. He hates it. 

“On the mission, right at the start, it was decided that we needed a contingency. We needed back up plans, for every role, privately. And…and the rest were easy, except for one. Except for the science. There was no one. So it was you. For a long time, it was you. And I never told you, and I’m sorry.”

She keeps speaking, for a long time. About pieces of paper, and clearances, and probability. He hears none of it. He is so confused, plunged back into this world they used to share without any warning. After what feels like minutes, he shakes his head slowly, holds up a hand to stop her. He can feel his brow furrow in confusion. 

“Slow down, hang on. I’m…I’m lost. A back up plan?” he says slowly, “me? What, a back up to who? You? If you couldn’t run the thing anymore?”

She swallows. “What? No, not for me,” she says.

“I don’t get it,” he says, “a back up for what, then?”

She looks at him, hard, like she can’t say it again. Instinctively, he doesn’t want to make her do it. But he says nothing, just stares at her right back. 

“For the mission scientist,” she says, and then, just as his brain catches up, “for the crew.”

Everything goes quiet, for a moment. A pit forms so deep in his stomach he almost doesn’t register it until he feels fleetingly, violently nauseous as it settles. 

“I’m…I’m not an astronaut,” he says slowly, a stupid thing to say, but it’s the first thing in his head, “I’m not an astronaut, that makes no sense.”

She swallows. “I…we don’t have to get into all that,” she says, “we can–”

“--I think we do, actually,” he says, faintly, “that seems like a relatively important piece, maybe.”

She bites her lip, looks down. Like she can’t bear to watch him watch her say it. 

“You could’ve learnt that part,” she says quietly, “much easier than an astronaut learning all the science. You were – you are – the expert, at the important part. That was the priority.” 

He looks at her, processing. He somehow has both zero and a hundred questions in his head.

“Where was I?” he asks, “on this list? What number was I?”

She presses her lips into a tight line. 

“Three,” she says, into the quiet, “behind Dubois and Shapiro. You were three.”

He chokes out an aborted sort of laugh, shock numbing his blood. 

“Out of how many?” he asks, hollow. He looks right at her when he does.

He knows the answer already. He wouldn’t have been on the list if there was anyone else. Has to hear her say it anyway.

“Three,” she says, “three real options, at least. The fourth was a…distiller, or something, with a bachelor in biology. There were thirty-six pilots and twenty engineers who qualified, and there were no fucking coma-resistant, real scientists who weren’t eighty-three, or blind, or dead. Anywhere. I promise you, I checked. Everywhere.”

He barely hears her.

“So you’re telling me,” he says, “that whole time, if something had gone wrong, if something had happened…that whole time, I was the next best plan? And I never knew?”

She nods, and he sees it, how every piece of her hates this. He hates that he doesn’t want to fix it for her, in this moment. He hates being on the other side of it so much he can’t stand it. 

“Yes,” she says, “I can…I can explain it, more. But yes, more or less. I wish it were different.”

Explain it, she says, as though he’s even started to make sense of it all. As though that’s even possible. I wish it were different. He feels his head swim with it, with a distinct sense of something like betrayal. It’s suddenly too hot, in here; everything too pressing and close. 

“I, uh. I’m gonna get some air,” he says. Looks at her for a long moment, everything playing across her face. It’s too much. “Yeah, okay. I need some air.”

He doesn’t wait for her to respond, just picks up his wallet from the side table and pulls the door behind him. 

***

iv.

The first time they fought – properly, not just their almost perpetual back and forth about the work – was on a spring day in Moscow. Her flight out was scheduled for mid-morning; his, not until the evening. He was sitting up in her bed, reading the international copy of the Times that had been slipped under her hotel room door, drinking a coffee as she got ready for the day. She’d already finished both of hers. She was vaping as she packed, no time to go down for a cigarette. Watermelon, the worst flavor; it was fucking disgusting. 

They had started making a habit of sleeping together on international trips, ever since that first fateful time about six months earlier. Some stupid line she had demarcated in her head, that if it was in an anonymous hotel and not on the ship, it didn’t have to be real. If she’d started asking him to travel with her more than was strictly necessary, that was between her and God. 

She’d glanced over at him, watched him read for a moment. He’d looked so good in the weak morning sun she’d lost her train of thought almost entirely. Something about it was terrifyingly intimate. She felt everything within her want it, and everything within her reject it, like a transplanted organ.

“What?” he said a moment later, a touch amused. Her eyes darted up to meet his gaze. He looked at her over his glasses, caught her staring red handed. She looked away, cleared her throat. 

“Nothing,” she said, and every wall she’d ever built for herself chose that moment to shoot up, “I just, you know. This can’t keep happening, I don’t think.”

She hadn’t even really meant to say it. The smile left his face in an instant. He sat up, frowned slightly, folded the paper next to him.

“I mean,” he said, already resigned; this wasn’t the first time, “if that’s what you want. But you know, we don’t have to have this whole conversation every time. This can just be…an option. On the table, when you want it to be.”

She swallowed, hard, against that. He made it sound so simple, when it was everything, anything but. It wasn’t even about the back up plan, burning a hole through her safe. It was everything else: the way he looked at her, the way she wanted him, the way he made her feel, almost shockingly, whole.

“I don’t think it can be,” she said, “and it’s not because it’s not…nice, you know, this is good. It’s just too complicated.”

She’d glimpsed the side of an eye roll as he sighed, then threw the duvet back and stood up. He grabbed his jeans from the floor, then his t-shirt, pointed but almost nonchalant, like he’d heard it all before.

“Uh-huh,” is all he said, “got it.” 

It was not the reaction she was expecting. He started getting dressed before she could quite catch up to the fact he was, clearly, about to leave.

“That’s it?” she asked.

It was an unfair thing to say, she knew, after throwing the first punch. But she regretted it suddenly, saying it so bluntly. She really didn’t want him to fucking go. 

“Actually, no,” he said as he pulled his shirt on, and his point was only mildly diluted by the stupid periodic table pun he was now wearing across his chest, “but I don’t want to do this with you every month. Not everything has to be suffering. This thing’s not going to collapse because we have a good time here and there. You’re choosing for it to be this way, and that's fine, your call. But it's a choice. This could just be simple.”

She blinked at him for a full few seconds. It was so incredibly out of line she was almost impressed.

“Excuse me?” she said, smoke leaving her lungs as though it, too, was shocked. 

He shrugged. “That’s it,” he said, “take it or leave it. But actually, I am taking this.”

He picked up the newspaper, then walked out and slammed the door without another word. It was the first time in recent memory she could remember feeling, truly, speechless. 

They’d had versions of the same argument for years afterwards. And while they said things they regretted, they’d always found a way through; always made it up to each other. That first time, he’d brought two gin and tonics up to her favorite spot on deck three days later, and the clink of their glasses held a mutual apology that transcended everything else; unanswerable questions, tired conversations, the same loop they would keep finding themselves in. 

This night – unseasonable chill in the Parisian air – does not feel the same.

She stands in the hallway for a long time, after he goes. She is rooted in place, can’t believe she’s said it, can’t believe that it’s out there now, after all this time. She feels so immediately nauseous in the deafening quiet that she thinks she might do something stupid, like faint. After a long while, she turns, walks slowly back into the living room. There is a tremor in her hand as she swipes a pack of cigarettes from the fruit bowl. She takes them out onto the balcony and smokes studiously, one after the other into the black of the night, until she’s lightheaded. 

She has no fucking idea where he is. Imagines him out there - in a bar, maybe, or walking the streets of her neighborhood - alone with this new, terrible thing to hold. She hates herself for it so much for a moment that it takes her breath away. She lights her last cigarette then immediately opens a fresh pack. The thought of going to bed, of going inside, feels somehow claustrophobic. She will sit out in the summer night until he comes back. 

It takes a long, long time. Every minute is fucking excruciating. 

The front door finally opens a little after three in the morning. It’s so quiet she barely hears it through the balcony glass. It makes her stomach drop just the same. She doesn’t turn round - maybe he doesn’t want to see her, wants to just take his things and go; she should give him that - but after a while, she hears the door slide open behind her. 

He comes out wordlessly. Doesn’t sit down next to her, doesn’t even look at her really. Just rests his forearms on the railing, looks out over the city. For a moment, it could be any other day. She says nothing, just watches him watch the horizon. 

For a long time, it is silent. He doesn’t turn to look at her, just stares, and after a while she can’t take it.

“Are you–” she starts, and is immediately cut off.

“--Is that why you kept me around?” he asks, quietly, out of nowhere. 

She is so blindsided by the question it takes her a beat to respond. 

“What?” she asks back, blankly.  

He lowers his head, looks at the ground from where he’s leaning.

“After the first year, after we did the…the resistance testing, is that why you kept me around?” he asks, “because there were hundreds of people who would’ve made more sense in my job. Is that why you gave it to me?”

She looks at the back of him, hard. Wills him to turn round and look at her. He doesn’t.

“No,” she says, “don’t be ridiculous.”

He shrugs. He seems so disconnected from her, from this; so oddly quiet. She hates it. 

“I don’t know. It makes sense, sort of. I was a middle school teacher. It never really added up, why you wanted me so close.”

“You were a middle school teacher who also happened to be a leading PhD in the exact field you were on the project for,” she reminds him, “you were smart. You were smart and you got it and you cared.”

“Plenty of people are smart, don’t do that,” he says, “plenty of people got it.”

She huffs a hollow sort of laugh. “They didn’t, actually,” she says, “they didn’t at all.”

He finally turns around at that. His face is set hard, into something she doesn’t really even recognize. He looks so bruised by it all that she has to look away, for a moment. She feels her face grow hot, digs her nails into her palm. She will not cry. She will not allow herself that. 

“I don’t even know if I should believe you, anymore,” he says, “do you know how strange that feels?”

She drops her head. Still hasn’t looked him in the eye, not properly.

“I know this was…an unforgivably big one,” she says quietly, “but it’s the only thing I haven’t been honest about. I swear. Everything else was true. Is true.”

He seems thoroughly uninterested in that response. His brain moves fast, he processes things in real time so quickly; she can tell he’s onto the next. It’s one of her favorite things about him. 

“So how would this have all gone? Theoretically?” he asks, eyes narrowed as he paces for a moment, before he stops back where he started. “You just…would’ve what? Straight jacketed me into a coma and sent me to space?”

“No, Jesus,” she says quietly, feels the hurt settle across her chest, “I would’ve asked you. I would’ve sat you down and asked you.”

He half laughs, disbelieving. “And what then? If I’d said no?”

She swallows. Can’t look at him. 

“You wouldn’t have,” she says. She forces herself to remain calm. Says the things she has repeated to herself over and over, for years. “You’d have said yes. If…if it got to that stage. It would’ve been the very last resort. You would’ve said yes.”

She can feel his eyes on her. She can’t bear to look at him.

“I think you want that to be true because it’s convenient,” he says, and it’s so quiet, and god it hurts, but he isn’t wrong, “and I don’t know that I think I would’ve.”

“Neither of us know,” she says, “a hundred different things could’ve happened. But I think you would’ve. You would’ve had time, you would’ve processed it, you–”

“Okay, okay, enough. Can we not?” he says, and she hates the rush of emotion in his voice, “God, I really hate that you’ve thought about it, like this.”

She laughs, humorless. Head in her hands for a moment before she sits back up.

“It was my job,” she says, “I hated it too. Do you know how many other plans I tried to make? It’s all I did at night, for about a year. I know this feels like a…like a betrayal–”

“--It is, actually. A betrayal, I mean.”

She swallows. Picks at a thread on her sleeve. “Okay,” she says, “I’m not going to argue with you. But I do want you to know that. I didn’t do it and close the fucking book. I cannot tell you how hard I pushed. I know it’s…cold comfort, probably. But I want you to know that.”

It’s so pathetic, even to her own ears. She winces inwardly at it. Isn’t about her, shouldn’t be about her. She just can’t fucking bear the thought of him hating her, of him not knowing that. It’s the worst thing she can imagine. 

“Well, thanks so much for trying,” he says, flatly, in return, “you didn’t maybe just want to tell me? After all that, you didn’t think it might just be best to give me a heads up?”

“No,” she said quietly, “you might’ve left. It was too late, by then.”

He laughs, a terrible thing, into his hands. Runs them tiredly over his face for a long moment, then through his hair.

“Yeah, you see how the implication of that is tough, for me?” he says, gesturing between them, “because it’s all I would’ve asked you and you would’ve said yes, but then you say that and it doesn’t seem like there would’ve been a ton of free will involved.”

“It’s not like that,” she says, hard, suddenly, “you were the chief scientist of the whole thing. Thousands of decisions relied on you, by then. I couldn’t have you walking away because you were angry at me about a hypothetical that was never going to happen.”

“Don’t say it like that,” he says quietly, almost hurt, “like I would’ve been some sort of…petulant teenager, for having a reaction to it. And it wasn’t a hypothetical, really, was it?” he asks, “it sounds like it was a plan. A real plan.”

“A back up, a hypothetical, a…plan, whatever,” she says. 

He exhales, slowly, like he’s trying to center himself.

“Easy for you to say,” he mutters through it, “easy to say when it’s not your name on the piece of paper.”

She pauses, properly, at that. Looks at him disbelievingly, for a moment. It’s the first time they have looked each other in the eye for more than a fleeting moment since he got back. She regrets it immediately. Feels herself losing the vague sheen of control, feels her teeth start to chatter in the cold. She stops them, sets her jaw for a moment. 

“That’s what you think?” she says, “that this was all just easy, for me?” 

He shrugs, looks away. Like he doesn’t want to have to feel anything, for her. She swallows the lump in her throat. 

“I guess I don’t know,” he says, and he’s being harsh but it’s not unfounded, she knows, “I guess it sort of seems that way. You write a name down, you get your perfect back up plan, all good, right?”

She can hear it in his voice, that he doesn’t really believe it. She closes her eyes against it for a moment all the same. 

“Okay,” is all she says, and her voice finally cracks in a way that makes him snap to attention. She feels his eyes on her, but does not look up. She clears her throat, tucks her hair behind her ears and pulls her sweater tighter round herself. Swallows, hard. She will not cry here. “Well, if that’s what you want to think, then fine.”

She lights another cigarette for something to do. The smoke makes her nauseous. She inhales anyway. 

“You know, I gave up a lot for all this,” he says quietly, into the dark. His voice is quieter now. She wishes he’d just sit down. He doesn’t. “My job, my home, my whole life.”

She bites the inside of her cheek. 

“So did a lot of people,” she says, gathering herself into something resembling calm, “and no one ever made you do that, by the way. You begged me. You followed me that first week and you begged me to let you do it.”

“I know,” he says, “I know that. It would’ve been nice to know, though, what I was actually signing up for.”

It’s the first thing he’s said that makes her feel a little hot with something like anger. 

“Yeah, well, that makes two of us,” she says, runs a hand through her hair, and he scoffs. “Oh, you think I knew, going in? All the shit that we’d have to do? You think I had any idea, really, the kinds of decisions we’d - I’d - need to make?”

“You were in charge! You’re the one who led it all!” he says. 

“I didn’t have a choice,” she says quietly, “well. I didn’t have a better choice. All of it was the best of a bad fucking lot. You know that.” 

He looks at her for a long moment. 

“You should’ve told me,” he says, voice returning to normal, “I know…I know you feel like you did what you had to do. Maybe you did, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t know. But I hate this. I should’ve known before now.”

She drops her head to her hands again, briefly. The smoke stings her eyes. 

“I know,” she says, and the fight drains out of her as quickly as it came, “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you that. I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer.” 

He considers her for a long moment. She knows he’s going to ask her something terrible, just from the look that passes across his face. 

“What if there was no time?” he asks, and he’s so quiet but it’s all she can hear, “what if…I don’t know, a month before launch, something terrible happened? What would you have done?”

She swallows, exhales slowly. Makes herself look at him when she answers. 

“I would’ve asked you,” she says again, like a mantra, “and you would’ve said yes.”

He shakes his head, disbelieving. “What, I would’ve just done two weeks of astronaut 101 training and called it a day? Good enough?”

She runs a hand over her face. “I don’t know,” she says, “yes, probably. The others would’ve…helped, up there. When you arrived.”

He shakes his head again, like he can’t believe it. Then he stops, looks her dead in the eye. 

“And if I’d said no?”

The terrible thing. The thing she refused to have a plan for. It was the only thing she could never tempt fate by thinking about. 

“Well?” he prompts, at her silence.

“What do you want me to say, hm?” she asks, then softer, “I don’t know. We would’ve…delayed, probably, until we could train someone.”

“No you wouldn’t’ve,” he says, “it would’ve been a year, more, till the next window. There’s no way.”

“I don’t know,” she says, truthfully, and she hears the tremor in her own voice, “I swear to you, I’m not lying, I don’t know. If I’d thought about it and made a decision to do something fucking terrible, I’d tell you. I didn’t. I tried not to think about it. When I did, I took two Ambien and tried to sleep. I didn’t think about it. I thought it was probably the thing that would make me have a nervous breakdown, so I just fucking...prayed it wouldn't happen.”

He nods. She means it, and she thinks he knows it’s true, at least. Even if it’s awful, she’s glad he knows that. 

“I couldn’t have done any of this to you,” he says, “I couldn’t have asked you to do any of that.”

She laughs, unhappy. It’s such a fucking terrible thing for him to say.

“Well, I don’t know that I could’ve either,” she says, and at this moment, at least, it feels true, “if it came down to it. It was just a piece of paper.”

“You wrote it down,” he says, “I couldn’t have done that either.”

“Well no one ever asked you to,” she snaps, “no one ever made that your responsibility. Lucky you.”

She doesn’t mean to bite it out. She’s tired, and everything is so heavy, so pressing. He laughs, hollow, and suddenly all the times he’s laughed so bright, just for her, feel so far away. Another life. She presses her palms to her eyes. 

“Yeah, lucky me,” he says, and that is all. He goes back inside, quietly. He doesn’t even slam the door. It’s almost the worst part. 

She does not follow him. She knows there is no point. Twenty minutes later, she hears the front door click, and when she goes back inside, his things are all gone. Vanished, like another life stolen away. There is no trace of him; no one would even know he was here.  

Now, in the silence, the gravity of it all hits her. She wipes furiously at her eyes, breathes out for what feels like the first time in hours. She thinks of his face just now, looking at her like she was a terrible stranger. He hadn’t looked at her like that in years - or ever, maybe. She thinks of yesterday, the way he kissed her cheek, the way he stroked her skin, the concert tickets discarded on her coffee table. The only person she’s wanted in every possible way for so, so long; gone without a goodbye. 

The first light is coming up, the sun-filled promise of a new day. She closes every blind, and goes to bed for a long, long time. 

***

v.

In the aftermath of the mission, Grace had become used to the unexpected. Almost everything was unexpected, about what happened after. Maybe he was naive, but he just hadn’t seen a lot of it coming. It wasn’t as though there was a blueprint to follow, exactly.

For one, on his return home, he no longer had a job. It should perhaps have been unsurprising that the school board wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of his return, but it hadn’t crossed his mind until he returned to the gray haze of the Bay. He was told, awkwardly, that his complicity in vague acts of eco-terrorism, extra-judicial decision making, and a litany of other moral transgressions had made him a target for every whack job online, and understandably the PTA weren’t exactly falling over themselves to have him back in the proximity of their children.

“Not that we don’t think you’re incredible, for everything you did,” his now-former employer had said, hurriedly, “just, you know. It’s a tough one to navigate.”

“No, sure,” he said, his newly discovered rap sheet ringing in his ears, “I get it,” and the worst part was he did.

The only thing that had surprised him more was the call from NASA a month later. He’d been sitting on his couch eating dumplings at two in the afternoon when his phone rang. He was meant to be out on the run he’d promised himself he’d go on at nine o’clock that morning, which was really the run he’d promised himself he’d go on for the last four days. 

He almost hadn’t picked up the phone, and when he did, he had assumed it was some sort of scam. It was only when the voice down the line started talking about advanced deep space technology that he realized she was, in all probability, actually the Director of the Jet Propulsion Lab. The offer was a dream, on paper. Advisory board of the JPL, still in California – just had to move to LA – and well paid. He said thank you, and that he’d think about it. He’d hung up and wished he had someone to talk it out with, then realized the only person he wanted to talk to was Eva. 

They hadn’t spoken since they’d said goodbye three months earlier. He still couldn’t really work out why, but the longer the silence dragged on, the harder it was to work out how to break, so he didn’t. He tried instead, halfheartedly, to throw himself back into his life from before: old colleagues, old friends, people whose lives he’d vanished from overnight who welcomed him back like a hero. It was so strange, to hear about grading papers and relationship issues and birthday parties from the booth of a bar again. He had never felt more alien, never come so close to grabbing people by the collar and saying, don’t you know the world is ending? Don’t you understand? 

The most unexpected thing: after a few months back in real life, he started forgetting, too. Not forever, not for long; but for a day or two at a time, the weight of the world vacated his shoulders, and the guilt he felt for remembering to breathe without it was sometimes too much to bear.

He’d texted her, finally, one night he felt so insane, so alone, that he couldn’t stand it anymore. He’d nearly burnt his kitchen down, figured she’d like the laugh at his expense if nothing else. The most unexpected thing of all: she replied almost instantly, a fever dream. 

And then all these months later, Paris is unexpected too, in all of the terrible ways. 

By the time he leaves that morning, gets into a car with the rising sun, there is very little to salvage. It feels so terrible, suddenly, to be in her apartment. It’s more than twelve hours before his flight, but he has to get out. There is so much lying broken between them, and he can’t think of what to say. So he leaves. 

She doesn’t try to stop him. He doesn’t know if he even wanted her to. 

He spends an almost foolish amount of money to upgrade his ticket and get into a lounge. He would like nothing more than to put his head in his hands and have a miserable sort of capitulation and fall asleep, but those things feel decidedly un-French to do in public, so instead he finds a bartender to get him on a steady stream of good bourbon, and watches, for hours, as planes take off and land, a constant pendulum. Watches the sun move across the runways, watches life march on when it feels like his whole world has come to a terrible, grinding halt. 

Without even meaning to, he thinks of her. Wonders what she’s doing, if she’s still out there smoking, if she’s finally gone to bed. He’s so tired he feels it behind his eyes. He thinks about what this day was meant to look like. A bunch of flowers, a last coffee down the street, kissing her goodbye on the balcony. The promise of something more. And now there is nothing, aside from this huge, unfixable thing that has taken all of it from him; from them. He had thought, finally, that maybe the end of the world had, just this once, given him something instead of taking something away. And now here they are - just another thing lost to the impossible.

He doesn’t even feel it yet, not really: just feels numb right to his toes. He boards his flight, finally, that evening – a little drunk and a lot sad and so exhausted he feels actually, physically unwell. 

He passes out, and when he wakes up to a cool Los Angeles night twelve hours later, he wonders for one hopeful second if he’s just dreamt it all. 

***

vi.

She gives herself a week, exactly, to feel it. 

She stays at home all day and goes for walks in the dark to do nothing but stare at the water listlessly. She smokes so many cigarettes she can feel her body rejecting them. She ignores everything on her phone, save for a few time sensitive emails. Watches braindead sitcom television that won’t make her feel anything, screens every call she gets, pretends not to be waiting for one of them to be him. She thinks about him almost constantly. Feels the absence of him like she’s woken up to a missing kidney; a lost lung. 

Old habits, from before, her only reactions to stress: can’t sleep; loses track of time; doesn’t really think to eat very often. He used to bring her snacks from the vending machine when she was like this, would scatter them throughout her office and the big conference hall and outside the door to her room. Towards the end, when the wheels sort of came off everything, including the only when abroad rule, and they started sleeping together at the base, he’d bring a late dinner up from the mess hall and make her share it with him. The memory of it makes her stomach turn, fucking ironically. 

She lets herself languish in it momentarily, because she doesn’t fucking know what else to do. And then, after a week in the pit of it all, there is really no option other than march on. The world doesn’t stop turning, the city doesn’t stop moving, and so it goes. There is nothing else to do.

She gets up. She goes to yoga. She goes to work. She has the occasional drink with a friend. She tries not to feel a lead weight in her stomach every single day. 

He doesn’t reach out. Not so much as a text. She doesn’t expect him to, and it hurts anyway. Hurts like a wound reopened, every week that goes by, every little news story or thing that happens that she knows he’s seen and, in another life, would have sent to her. She thinks about calling, thinks about texting. Imagines what she’d say. But she knows it wouldn’t be right. She’d told him the ugly thing and he’d left without saying goodbye. He doesn’t want to hear anymore. 

She thinks about doing it anyway, just to hear his voice – even if it’s just to tell her to go to hell. It would almost be worth it, but the truth is she can’t bear the thought of the alternative; wouldn’t survive, she doesn’t think, if she just never heard a word from him in return. 

It is such a terrible thing, to know this is her doing. It is such a terrible thing, to know she’d do it all again. To know she’d have no choice, but to do it all again. All of this has always been such a heavy thing to hold. She hadn’t quite realized how much of it he’d been holding with her, for her, until he is no longer there. 

On the night of the launch, there was a reception for the team at the base. A somber sort of thing, a quiet drink and acknowledgement between colleagues after the circus had packed up and moved on. It was small, as far as the scale of the project went: no more than a hundred of the core crew were still on site. Monitoring of the ship was taking place elsewhere, by NASA and the ESA and all of the partner agencies, as planned. Media, dignitaries, delegations had all scattered earlier that day, to the handful of small airports ready to whisk them home. For the first time in four years, there was nothing to do. She’d packed her things up and headed to the gathering just as night fell over the base, and for the first time in a long time, a lump had risen sharply in her throat. 

She’d walked inside, swallowed it all with a mouthful of whatever drink someone had put in her hand, and told herself to make it through.

She was meant to make a speech: a final thank you, an in memoriam for the people she, personally, had just sent to die. She had done a lot of hard things over the course of the project, and a handful of fucking impossible ones. Staring out over the people gathered in front of her, her breath had caught in her chest, and she’d realized that getting up there and looking them all in the eye, tonight, was a new category entirely: a thing she could not do.

She blinked herself back to breathing and slipped away from the conversation she was caught up in to get some air. Ducked out the back door and rounded the corner of the wraparound balcony until she was alone. Hands on the railing, she took a deep, shuddering breath and wondered, in a new and rising panic, how the fuck she was meant to live the rest of her life, after this terrible thing. 

“Eva?” a voice had asked behind her, rounding the corner. 

She closed her eyes and tried not to feel as though the answer had been sent straight to her. 

She swallowed, took another steadying breath before she turned around. She hadn’t seen him in hours. His hair was the slightest bit damp from the shower, and he was wearing the striped sweater he’d worn his first day on the ship. He probably didn’t even remember that. She’d wondered why the hell she did. Then he’d smiled, all warm and soft and knowing and just for her, and suddenly it had made perfect sense.

“Hi,” she said, leaning back against the railing as he walked over.

“Hey,” he said. He handed her a drink, which she took wordlessly. “You okay?”

She’d exhaled, sharp. “I don’t know how to answer that,” she said, and he’d just nodded. 

“Yeah,” he said, “I know. You still going to talk, later?”

She threw half the drink in her hand back in one go. Sighed, then shivered slightly in the evening breeze.

“I’m meant to,” she said, “I don’t know if I can.”

He smiled at his shoes, sad and exhausted and all the things she knew were written across her own face.

“I know,” he said, “I miss them already. I miss this, already, this whole place. I haven’t figured out if that’s an insane thing to say, yet.”

She smiled back at him, weak with it. 

“Me either,” she said, then before she could stop herself, quieter, a hand through her hair, “God, I really don’t think I can do this, tonight. I sent them up there. I can’t give the fucking eulogies.”

He’d just nodded. For a long moment, he looked at her with so much gravity she thought she might cry. Then he’d reached out and taken her glass, stacked it in his own and put them gently on the railing together.

“What are you–”

“--Just come here, for a second,” he said, and when he wrapped his arms around her, it was the only time she’d felt her head fall quiet all day. 

He smelled like soap and laundry and liquor, and she’d closed her eyes against his chest. Let herself be held, just for a moment. She’d felt the press of his lips against her hair, one solid thing out in the silent black of the night. The first night on the other side, the first moment she’d exhaled since he’d stood next to her as they watched the last of Earth’s hopes ascend into the sky that morning. 

“You did everything right,” he said quietly, “you did what you had to do, and everyone who matters knows it. All three of them knew it. They did it because they got it. Don’t listen to anything else.”

She hadn’t realized how much she’d wanted to hear every single one of those things until he’d said them. She swallowed, her eyes swimming against it; willed herself to keep it together.

“Okay,” she said, leaning back to look at him, closing her eyes as he stroked the skin of her cheek, “thank you.”

For one, sharp, moment, she thought of her safe, thought of the piece of paper inside. She blinked it away as fast as it came, but felt the almost violent sting of it nonetheless. Then she leaned in and kissed him. Just quickly, just for a moment or two. Just to feel the warm, reassuring heat of him, for a second. She could feel the surprise on his lips. He kissed her back anyway.

When she pulled away, he was staring at her like she might’ve, actually, lost her mind.

“Out here, just like that, on the clock? Where anyone could have seen?” he said, smile all soft for her as it took over his face. 

“Well,” she said, “the mission's over in a few hours, technically. Close enough.”

“Oh my god,” he said gravely, like she was having some sort of medical episode, “quick, someone change the nuclear codes. She’s lost it.”

It was the first and only time she laughed properly all day. Later, back in the mess hall, she kept her eyes trained on him the entire time she spoke. 

Now, a year later, she thinks about it a lot, a mantra she has played over and over in her head, every time she has felt sick with it all, sick with what she had been keeping from him: You did everything right. You did what you had to do. Everyone who matters knows it. She wonders if he regrets saying it, now. If he thinks back to all those thousands of memories and moments and wishes he could take them back, wishes he could unspool the thread of it all. 

Of all of it, that might hurt the most: the idea that maybe he looks back at it all with disdain, with hatred; this, them, her one bright spot amidst it all.

A month passes; two months pass. It is late summer. The date of his original planned trip arrives, and it passes silently. She deletes it from her calendar only when the full first day disappears with no sign of him. If someone were to ask her if she were holding out hope that he might just miraculously appear, she would lie about it under oath. You don’t often get the same gift twice, she supposes; the best surprise at your door.

Every day - every day - she replays their conversation on her balcony in her head. She is obsessive about it: what else she could’ve said, what else she could’ve done. Thinks of the way he’d looked at her, so cold and so bruised, and wishes she’d done something. Stood up, kissed him, told him she needed him, begged him to stay. Anything, other than let him leave. She should’ve done anything else. Now there is nothing, the worst thing of all. She should’ve tried harder. Then again, maybe that would’ve been selfish. She doesn’t know anymore. Everything just feels wrong.

She takes a trip back to Berlin for two weeks as the late summer turns to a creeping, autumn chill. She catches up with an old friend from university, now a professor at their alma mater, who she knows will take her home after three glasses of wine. She just has to feel close to someone, has to feel like she isn’t going mad. Has to feel like she isn’t going to die alone. When he kisses her, she feels a dread so deep she thinks she could choke on it. She can’t even let him fuck her. She leaves before he can stammer out a confused question; deletes his number and crawls into bed back at her hotel, and for the first time, wonders if she can really fucking do this. If she knows how to move through the world with the remnants of her heart falling from her sleeve. 

She does, of course, because there is no option. There is no option but to live with it. Like all the other things she will live with until she dies, it burrows its way into her skin and she knows that she will feel it there forever, a perpetual scar; a wound that heals up, eventually, but still aches in the cold.

You did everything right. You did what you had to do. Everyone who matters knows it. Sometimes, when she’s tired enough, she almost lets herself believe it, just to get some sleep.

***

vii.

Grace learns, over the course of the summer, that Los Angeles is a bad place to be miserable. 

It’s all well and good to see three hundred days of sunshine a year when things are on the up. It’s another thing entirely when the world feels like it’s collapsed right in his lap. There is something so cloying, so unnatural about the bright, insistent light when the only thing he wants to do is hide away, pretend none of this is real. It’s a much easier thing to do in the European gray, in the fog of the Bay; anywhere but here. 

He passes the long, warm months very quietly. Goes to work, comes home. Spends a lot of time at the movie theaters dotted round the east side. He runs, he hikes, he does what people are supposed to do when they need to put one foot in front of the other. All of it feels like moving through quicksand, even more impossible in the dry, unrelenting heat. 

He thinks about her like breathing; doesn’t even notice he’s doing it. For the first long while, it’s with anger, a hot thing he hates in his chest. He can’t bear to unpack it, any of it - feels the burn of it right through him. So many years, of this pure, untainted trust; gone just like that. She’d done all of those things with him knowing his name was on a piece of paper, an undercurrent to all of it that he hates. He thinks about every flicker of her eyes, every we shouldn’t, every stolen moment between them. Every we can’t, it’s not right, every time she had said it was too complicated. Was that what she meant, the whole time? That they couldn’t have all of the good things because she had him sized up and ready to go at a moment’s notice? Was it always that, and he’d been too stupid to see it? 

The worst part is that, eventually, he knows the answer is no. She has stared at him with that look in her eye, whispered against his lips, teared up with her face held gently in his hands too many times for none of it to be real. It’s a strange thing to be sure of, but he is. It is a small, terrible comfort. 

He spins himself out on the hypotheticals, a constant loop of them, for months. What would she have done, if he’d said no. What would she have done, if he’d left. What would she have said, when she asked him. For a long time, the answers to those questions feel vitally important. It drives him crazy, to never be able to know for sure, until he realizes that if he’s honest with himself, he does know, mostly. They had all done things they weren’t proud of, but none more so than her, and she held almost all of it as a party of one; protected the rest of them as much as she could. She would’ve done what she had to do to save the world. It was that simple, really. She would’ve done the right thing, on paper, and she would’ve never let herself have a moment’s peace after doing so. Even now, she barely sleeps through the night. She would’ve gotten it done, and she would have let it cut her open to the bone. 

By the time fall finally comes, when the initial burn of it scars over and the hot, urgent sting is gone, he’s really just left with a terrible case of missing her. The person he likes best in the world, also the only person he doesn’t know how to pick up the phone to. He almost wishes he were still angry; such an easy, flat thing to feel in comparison to this keen, awful loss. He tries, sometimes, to get it back, but it isn’t there. Not for the first time in the last five years, he is left with nothing but the profound dissatisfaction that two things can be true. The right thing can also be the terrible thing. She wrote his name down and she was probably right to do it; she was probably, rationally, even right not to tell him, and all of that can also be terrible. There is no further detangling of it, no better answer: nothing that can be done aside from living with it, this ugly, gaping thing they have no choice but to look into.

When he emerges from the harshness of his anger and the fog of the twisted, strange what ifs, and into the part of this that feels somehow worse; where he wakes in the middle of the night and for a second thinks she is next to him, he thinks a lot about that last night in Paris. He’s not embarrassed by it, exactly; he doesn’t even really regret most of it. It was never going to go another way, they know each other too well. They have always been painfully good at airing things out, even if they weren’t always good at putting them back together. But wishes he hadn’t left like that. Wishes he hadn’t made it feel so unfixable, this huge divide. 

He thinks, sometimes, about calling her, and doesn’t even know what he’d say. He doesn’t know how she feels, if she’d even want to hear from him. 

All of which is to say: every question makes him sick, every answer makes it worse, and none of it makes him feel any differently about her, not even really for a second. A small microcosm of the purgatory the world has entered into, just for him. He knows, with a certainty he used to love, that she’d probably roll her eyes at the metaphor.

***

viii.

As Paris starts to turn to winter, she retreats into what she does best: work. Through all of the years of her adult life, through heartbreak and grief and loss and conflict and everything in between, she has always found a certain peace in a project, in a challenge, in a job to be done. 

It is different from before, of course; different to the mission. Everything is. But when she stops resisting it for being so, and starts letting herself engage, she finds she actually quite enjoys it. Her role is somewhat self-defined, which she likes: she picks and chooses the projects she cares about and the initiatives she thinks deserve attention and lets herself be good at something, again. 

There is only one thing she avoids, and that is anything beyond the bare minimum interaction with the Americans. No one needs to know why. No one needs to know that the first time she sees Grace’s face in a NASA leadership org chart, she feels her heart honest to God skip a beat; that when she spots his name on a visiting delegation list she makes an excuse to go to a conference in Istanbul and stays away for a week either side of their planned trip, just in case; that the thought of having to see him from across a conference room, and not feel his hands on her skin or his eyes trained on her, feels like something she could never bear again. No one needs to know any of it, and if anyone notices, she’s sure they chalk it up to a general distrust of their closest allies, a tale as old as time. 

When she finds herself working late, her mind often wanders to before. To the Hail Mary, where it is, where they are; her crew comatose in space. She tracks the ship almost obsessively - the projections, at least; the actual tracking is non-existent now - and when no one is around to see, she goes to the observation deck and trains a telescope in the right direction and prays. All she can do is pray. It is some of the only time she ever feels something close to a peace, about it all.

She wonders, sometimes, if the telescopes in Pasadena are ever seen doing the same thing, and she can’t bear it, knowing they could be looking up there together, if only she hadn’t done the only thing there was to do. When she starts to find herself thinking those things, she goes home. There is something about the deep black of the night sky that makes it so, so much worse. 

Her heart stays bruised, but the surface heals enough to push on. So two months later, when the Director General asks her if she’d go to Houston to speak on a panel about mission leadership, no is at least not the first word from her mouth. 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she says instead, for which she feels incredibly gracious.

“Why?” he asks, blunt. He is doing at least four other things as they speak. 

She waits patiently until he looks back up at her, and he gestures a little apologetically for her to go on, his undivided attention now hers.

“It’s all a little self-congratulatory, isn’t it?” she says, “a little American?”

He quirks a smile in her direction. “Sure,” he says, “of course. But, you know. Eighteen months since launch, almost exactly. It’s a nice moment to remember them, if nothing else.”

She blinks at that. Hadn’t expected the humanity, but he’s not wrong. She’d promised herself, ever since the day they’d signed on the dotted line, that she wouldn’t let people forget the sacrifice they’d made. And admittedly, she has hidden away from every opportunity she’s had to do so up until now. This is easy: not press, not public, just their community. She can almost see herself getting through it.

“Maybe,” she says quietly, “I’ll think about it.”

“They offered to have Dr. Grace join you,” he says, “could be an idea, if you don’t want to do it alone.”

“No,” she says quickly, ending her streak, “no, let’s not do that. Cleaner, if it’s all just directors.”

He’d shrugged, already moved onto the next. “Whatever you prefer,” he says, “I’m just glad you’ll think on it. Didn’t think Texas would be your thing.”

It is decidedly not her thing, but she can’t avoid a whole continent forever. There is at least about one Europe’s worth of space between Houston and LA, and it’s not as though he’d have any reason to fly across the country to attend: he’s maybe the only person on earth who already knows everything she’ll say. Small mercies, in the worst way. 

Later that week, she runs into Dr. Lokken in the halls - she had also returned to Paris, after the mission ended - and they agree to get a drink after work. It’s so strange, returning to a new normal, where hierarchy is so starkly different from before. They had always gotten along, as much as she allowed herself to get along with anyone back then, and becoming her colleague rather than her director now meant they could actually be friends.

They meet in a bar around the corner from the campus in the 12th, a place with terracotta tiling and a wall’s worth of proper, expensive wine. They sit at the bar, and the bartender lets them smoke inside because it’s late, and they catch up over a red that makes her warm to her bones despite the fresh chill in the autumn air. 

“Anyway,” Lokken says, most of two glasses deep after a long story, “what’s new with you?”

Eva just shrugs. “Oh, you know. The usual. I’m going to Houston, actually.”

“Oh, you’re doing the NASA thing, I heard. Isn’t Grace there now? Is he doing it with you?”

The mention of his name has her stop in her tracks. She takes a sip of her drink to steady herself, ashes her cigarette when it starts to burn her fingers.

“No,” she says quietly, works hard to keep it even, “I mean, yes, he’s there now, but in California. And no. We’re not doing it together.”

Lokken raises an eyebrow. “Isn’t that kind of weird?” she says, “he was your second in command, he works there, he’s not on the mission leadership panel?”

She shrugs, sort of evasively, in response. 

“He wasn’t, officially,” she corrects her; wishes they were talking about anything else, “you know, there are others. Directors, I mean, who’ve led interesting things. It was enough people.”

Lokken just snorts, shakes her head. “As though the director of any other mission is half as interesting as the admin assistants on the Hail Mary,” which isn’t incorrect, exactly.

Eva just waves her off in a sort of strange way and doesn’t say anything further, which seems to pique Lokken’s interest. She raises an eyebrow, considers her over her glass. Somehow, with a certain sinking feeling, she knows its coming before she even says a word. 

“Did you ever…you know? With him?” she asks, a suggestive sort of look in her eye, “I always wondered, about you two.”

Eva feels her face flush in real time. 

“Oh please,” she says as dismissively as she can, willing her heartbeat calm. She makes herself look at her, steely and unimpressed. “Didn’t take you for an office gossip.”

Lokken just laughs. “Of course I am,” she says, “not like there was anything else interesting to talk about, for all that time. And that wasn’t an answer, by the way.”

She thinks about lying, briefly, almost does it out of habit. But suddenly, she’s so tired. It’s nice to talk to someone who knows him; knew him, at least. It’s funny how unimportant the secrecy feels now. Three of their colleagues are in a coma in space. She hasn’t spoken to Grace in months. She probably never will again. So who cares, really. She had so many rules, so many stringent boundaries for so long, and in the end, they all failed her: she is alone, without him. So really, who fucking cares. 

She sighs, takes a drink. 

“It was complicated,” is all she can manage to say, but Lokken’s eyes widen nonetheless, in a way that would be comical if it wasn’t about her own actual life.

“Oh my God, Eva, I was mostly kidding,” she says, “it was always just…you know, a joke we all had. Oh my God. Are you serious?”

She just shrugs again, lights a fresh cigarette for something to do. Tries to play it off as anything other than the defining relationship of her adult life, which is the first time she’s thought that, and has to restrain herself from having a physical reaction to the idea of it. 

“Yes,” she says, clipped, “anyway. Should we talk about something else?”

Lokken looks at her like she’s completely fucking mad. 

“Talk about something else,” Lokken echoes slowly, “yeah, so no. Oh my fucking God. Was it the whole time?”

She starts filling in blanks before she can stop herself. 

“No,” she says, “well. Not the first year, at all. And then sometimes yes, sometimes no, for the rest. I don’t know. I told you, it was complicated.”

“Fucking hell,” she says, taking a drink, “was it serious?”

What a question. Yes, she wants to say, it was the most deathly serious thing in the world, for a moment.

“No,” she says instead, a lie even if she’d have never admitted it back then. She swallows, feels the admission on her tongue before she can stop herself saying it. “Not so much at the time, anyway. After, though, maybe. For a moment.”

Her initial shock somewhat subsided, or at least no longer so present on her face, Lokken’s expression becomes something softer.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and it’s oddly nice to hear, “you want to talk about it?”

Eva laughs, a little hollow, even to her own ears. 

“I think I’d rather eat glass,” she says faintly, and it’s nice to pretend it’s some normal, trite thing for a moment, and not the thing that keeps her up each and every night of her life. 

“Okay, okay,” Lokken says, and holds her hands up in something like surrender, “well, you know. If you want my two cents, good for you, he’s hot. And he’s smart, and yeah, he’s a dick, but he’s not a total dick. So, you know. Patch it up, figure it out. We’re all probably going to be dead in twenty years. Call him.”

She takes a long drag of her cigarette. Wishes it were as simple as it feels in this moment. 

“You give terrible advice,” is all she says, and Lokken rolls her eyes.

“Hey,” she says, and it’s kind, and sincere, “I mean it. You two were always…something, I don’t know. In each other’s pockets. Who knows. It might work out.”

Eva just drops her head for a moment, focuses on the wood grain of the bar. She realizes in that moment she can’t remember the sound of his laugh, of his voice; is straining to find them in her head, but can’t. The rough of his face, the lines of his smile, the feeling of his arms around her. She can’t really remember any of it properly. It grips her with something like panic. She wants it all back so much she can’t stand it. Is left with the twist of her stomach instead; her one, constant, companion, ever since he left.

“Maybe,” she says, and she doesn’t believe it at all. She wishes she did. “Okay, God, enough. Can we talk about something else?”

They stay at the bar for another two hours, night turning cold around them. She tries to remember the warmth of his skin the whole, entire time. 

***

ix.

He learns she’s coming to Houston from an all-staff email, a monthly bulletin about what’s happening on each campus. He usually deletes them without so much as a click, but her name is in the subject line and he nearly spills his entire coffee as he glances at it one unsuspecting morning.

No less than eight people ask him about it later that day. Texts, hallway conversations, two forwards of the same email he learnt it from. Are you going? Special guest…? Oh?, they say, press him for information like he should know something about it. She is somewhat of an enigma in the broader community circle, he is asked about her often, but something about her coming here makes it so pressing, so horribly inescapable. He ignores them all. Doesn’t want to know about it, can’t think about her so close and so, so far from him. 

He realizes it’s a terrible first: finding out she’s coming not because she texted him her flight details, but from a cold, impersonal email; finding out she’s coming here and it’s not to see him, not to his city, and that it probably never will be again. A terrible, strange version of a first. 

He remembers so many of the good ones. The ones that used to make him smile to himself as he shut the door to his room on the ship, the ones that used to make him look at her with what he’s sure was a neon sign lighting up his face. The first time he’d glanced up from a headache of a meeting and caught her eyes on him. The first time he made her laugh, properly, bright and unfiltered over a negroni in Rome. The first time they slept together, her legs shaking and her hand gripping his like she’d never let go, soft warm light of New York kissing her skin beneath his hands. The first birthday of his that they spent together, when she’d started her tradition of thoroughly embarrassing him with the most ridiculous balloons she could get on deck and into his room without him noticing. The first time he’d told her he didn’t think he could keep doing it, the whole project, and the way she’d held him close and let him feel it. The first time he’d done the same thing in return, an almost perfect reverse. 

And then, of course, the first time he realized he was probably in love with her. They were at a hotel in Seoul. Her room key had broken, and there was only a digital concierge until the next morning, which, for whatever reason, wasn’t computing her request for a new card. It was so late, they were both so tired; he could see it in the slump of her shoulders as her door buzzed red again. She swore under her breath in German, always a telltale sign of her at the end of her tether; she turned to him with a stifled yawn. 

“You should go to bed,” she said, clipped with exhaustion, turning to go back downstairs, “I’m good. I’ll figure this out, eventually.”

“No, c’mon,” he said, gesturing across the hall to his own room, “just come in here.”

She’d raised an eyebrow, looked at the floor and pinched the bridge of her nose. 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said finally, and he rolled his eyes. 

They were not, for various reasons, currently sleeping together. It was a big trip, she hadn’t wanted to be distracted. She’d kissed him two weeks earlier when she’d told him - the promise of later, when things settled down - and she hadn’t so much as glanced his way since.  She possessed an almost unfathomable level of willpower; that, or she just wasn’t that fazed by them taking a break. It used to be harder to tell, but he was fairly certain it was the former, now. 

“Fine,” he said, no energy left to argue, “then let’s at least sit down.”

He yawned as he slid down the wall and onto the floor, legs outstretched, and she sighed as she looked down at him. He saw the soft look in her eye before she could hide it, just for a beat. 

“You should go and get some sleep,” she said again, and he shrugged.

“What’s another night?” he replied, and she laughed for a moment, knowing, before she sighed and sat down next to him.

They sat there in silence, backs against the wall, the day heavy in their bones. She closed her eyes almost immediately, lay her head back against the wall for a moment. The light was mercifully low in the hallway, quiet save for a low buzz in the air. It was almost peaceful.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, “sorry, you know. I know we could just…go to bed. I just–”

“--It’s okay,” he said, “really, I mean it, what’s the difference? Four hours sleep isn’t really going to do much, I don’t think.”

She opened her eyes, looked over at him and smiled; the unguarded, gentle look she so rarely wore. He loved it. He could think of nothing to say other than how beautiful she looked, so instead he said nothing at all. With a small sigh, as though relenting to something he couldn’t see, she reached out and brushed her fingers over his, and he took it as he always did: a wordless invitation. He threaded his fingers through hers slowly, the familiar, soft warmth of her skin so welcome after these long, awful days that he had to stop himself from just leaning in to kiss her. He always wanted her, now; this latent, constant thing. But at this moment he wanted her so much he could think of nothing else. Wanted to hold her and sleep for three days, just them, just here. Nothing else. 

“You know, not to harp on it, but we could do this somewhere more comfortable,” he said, and she flushed.

“No, we can’t,” she said, matter-of-fact. 

“Why?” he asked. Not even really frustrated, just curious. He shifted slightly against the wall to look at her properly. 

“Because I’m running critically low on self-restraint,” she said quietly, “and if you take me to bed I’m not going to be able to say no, and everything’s going to get fucking complicated again.”

It took the air from his lungs. She was so rarely so plain about it, so vulnerable like that. He stroked a thumb over her hand. Everything in him had wanted to argue, but instead, just for a night, for a change, he chose peace.

“I don’t think it has to be that complicated,” he said quietly, like he always did, “but you’re the boss.”

She made a face at that. “I hate when you say that,” she said. 

“We could put a pillow down the middle,” he says, ignoring her.

She smiled. “No,” she said.

“Sleep top to toe,” he said, “we could be like the grandparents, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. You’re not thinking big enough.”

She laughed, and for a second he thought she might kiss him, but she held back. 

“Stop it,” she said instead, but in all the warm, easy ways. 

“Fine,” he relinquished, squeezing her hand, “talk about something else, then.”

“Well, for one thing, this whole fuck up is really making me question the automated admin on the ship,” she said, as she ran her free hand over her face briefly, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the lobby and the ill-fated tablet that had refused to spit her out a new key. “I mean, Jesus. What if it just ends up in the death loop of that thing?”

He smiled. “Yeah, not sure this regional Marriott is investing in quite the same tech we are.”

“Fair,” she said with a smile, the kind that crossed her face when she was trying not to give him the satisfaction of laughing at everything he said, “maybe I’ll donate them some proprietary software, or something. Feels like they could use it.”

“Seems like a worthy job, after all this,” he said, “God, you’d be so scary running a hotel.”

She hit him softly with their joined hands. He snorted, did it back. This whole thing, so rarely easy and silly like this. He made a note to commit it to memory, one of the good things. 

They talked like that about nothing, for hours. He watched her, tired crinkles at her eyes when she’d laughed, yawns stifled into her hand, hair tucked into the collar of her sweater, and it had just gradually dawned on him like any good idea: slowly, without warning, a seed planted that grew so suddenly it seemed astoundingly obvious, like a green shoot that had always been there. He was terminally, untreatably, gone for her. Just like that. Just like breathing. He looked at her mouth and her eyes and the freckle he liked best on her hand and the dip of her collarbone, and he realized he’d sit on a hallway floor for the rest of his life, if it meant he got the chance to look at her like this. 

“What?” she asked him after what could have been forever, eyes narrowed, and he suddenly realized he was just staring, “you’re being all strange.”

“Nothing,” he said, and heard the warmth in his own tired voice, “keep going.”

She did. And when, half an hour later, she blinked so heavily he knew that she was about to fall asleep, she curled in to meet his outstretched arm wordlessly. Her head found his shoulder, and he fell asleep against her as soon as he felt her breath slow against his chest, and they slept like that until daybreak; the crash of the real world. 

A temporary, perfect thing. It always was.

So many good things that hurt to remember, now, as he thinks of the distance between them. So much promise. So many things he misses. 

He’s spent a lot of his life avoiding the hard things, the messy things, the painful things. Had enough of them to last a lifetime, then thought if he could just avoid them forever, he’d be okay. And then he met her. And suddenly so much of what they did together was the messy things, the terrible things, the painful things - and he’d found he’d never been closer to another person in his life. 

She had done something terrible, something he hated. He had felt it so sharply he couldn’t bear it. And still, he wants her anyway. It was an exceedingly simple distillation of something so complicated, but it was all true. He has no real way to reconcile it all in his head, yet, but he knows it’s true. 

He misses her so much he can’t bear it, can’t believe he used to go through his life without knowing someone else like he knows - knew, at least - her; like sleepwalking, like running on fumes. He has no idea how to get it back, how they’d ever talk their way through this one. But for the first time, he is sure he has to try; the only thing he is sure of. Can’t let the last gasp of this thing fizzle out over an ocean between them. Thinks that maybe, after everything else, it’s the only thing he’d never truly forgive them both for.

He opens his laptop and goes to his junk folder, stares at the email from earlier. She’ll be in Houston in just over two weeks’ time. It feels, in a way that would make her roll her eyes, like a sign from the universe. For the first time in a long time, he thinks he might pay attention. 

*** 

x.

For the rest of her life, she will remember exactly where she is sitting when her phone rings four days later.

It is a Friday night in late November. It’s the first day she’s had to pull her proper winter coat from her closet, where it sits hanging over the chair in her bedroom. She’d meant to put hooks up in the hallway and had never gotten round to it. She had gotten in earlier from a friend’s birthday, called time after two glasses of wine, tired after a long week. Now she’s fresh from a long shower, in a hotel robe she’d stolen on her last trip to her favorite hotel in Geneva. She sits down on the couch, and is thinking about what she feels like for dinner when her phone rings. 

She yawns, reaches a hand out absentmindedly to the coffee table, and when she looks at it and sees his name she freezes for so long, hand in mid-air, that she almost misses it.

“Fuck,” she breathes to no one at all, and then just as it’s about to ring out, there is nothing else to do: she answers it.

“Hello?” she says, almost whispers, as she sits up. 

It’s so tentative that she wonders if he heard her. It’s so silent for a long moment that she’s almost sure he hasn’t. For a terrible moment, she wonders if it’s a pocket dial, a mistake, and the nausea tears through her so fast she thinks she might, actually, be sick.

And then there he is, a soft rustle through the phone, and when he speaks she realizes it’s the first time in almost six months she feels like she can breathe, right to the bottom of her lungs. 

“Hi,” he says, and the blood rushes to her head so fast that she brings her knees up to her chest, leans her forehead against them.

“Hi,” she says back, quiet and stunned and unsure, but so, so fucking relieved, “I…hi.”

She hears him just there for a few moments, he says nothing again. Then he huffs a small laugh, and it breaks something inside of her so far open she has to close her eyes. She digs her nails of her free hand into her palm; presses her phone closer to her ear with the other. 

She thought she’d never hear from him again.

“This is weird, sorry,” he says, “I, uh. I don’t know what to say.”

She laughs, out of shock more than anything. Wants to say you called me, but doesn’t know what this is yet, if they can joke like that anymore, quiet and easy like before.

“Me either,” she says instead, “I. Hi. It’s been a long time.”

“I know,” he says, quiet and just for her, “you, uh. Seen any good movies lately?”

She laughs again; hopes it doesn’t sound so completely full of relief, to him, as it feels to her. Floods her chest with something so warm she could cry.  

“Are you drunk?” she asks. Sort of means it as a joke, sort of wants to know.

“It’s one in the afternoon here,” he says, a smile to it, “I haven’t gone completely off the rails.”

“Right,” she says. Timezones. He’s always made her just a bit more stupid than she typically likes to be. 

“I don’t know where to start,” he says quietly, “but I miss you.”

She swallows. Feels every complicated beat between them, in those words; feels them move right through her. 

“I miss you too,” she says, “it’s been forever.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I just–”

“--Don’t apologize, it’s okay,” she says, cutting him off, “I’m glad you called. I…I wanted to call you, I just…”

She doesn’t know how to finish that, if she should. If he wants to do this, right now. She isn’t sure she knows how to, even if he did. She trails off, and the silence sits between them for a long moment. She wonders if either of them know what to do with it.

“How are you?” he asks, finally.

She opens her mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. A question she can’t even begin to answer.

“I’m okay,” she says, “you know. I’m okay.”

“That’s good,” he says, and God, she wishes she could see him, “that’s good, I’m glad.”

“How are you?” she asks. 

Winces quietly, at how awkward it feels. She used to know everything about him. He used to hold her in the middle of the night. 

“Yeah, I’m okay, too. Mostly, you know. Adjusting.”

“That’s good,” she says. 

It’s quiet again for a moment, and then he groans, as though the stiltedness is too much for him, and all the air comes back between them. She remembers to exhale, smiles as she does. 

“Okay, I know this is a weird thing to say, because I called you, but I sort of just realized I don’t want to do this on the phone,” he says finally, all in a rush, and then, “can I see you? Is that crazy?”

She looks at her phone screen quickly. It’s barely been three minutes since she picked up. So many things she is so fond of about him summed up by that. She bites the inside of her cheek to stop herself smiling wider. She thinks he can probably feel it anyway, somehow. He was always so good at noticing every little thing about her. 

“You know, I’m in Houston next week,” she says slowly, “I’m doing a panel, at Johnson.”

“I know, I saw it on the all-staffers. Hottest ticket in town,” he says, “which, you know. Not to make you feel bad, but it is Houston. It’s sort of one of the worst cities on the planet. So not a lot of competition, but still.” 

She laughs. “Very funny,” she says.

“You’ve gone soft,” he says, the slightest bit fond, “you would’ve told me to shut up about two sentences ago, before.”

“I know. I was trying to be polite.”

He laughs at that. It feels so good to hear him laugh. 

“I could come there,” he says, “come to the panel, meet you for the weekend, before you have to go?”

She shakes her head before realizing he can’t see her. 

“No,” she says; hears him sort of freeze on the other end of the phone, “not no, sorry. I just mean not there. I don’t want to do it there, have to…do all this, with other people around. I’ll come to LA, after. I have some time.”

God, she sounds just like him. Too many words. No one ever makes her the slightest bit nervous, except for him. She welcomes the butterflies in her stomach back like an old friend. 

“Okay,” he says, “well, come and stay. Don’t book a hotel. Well. Unless you want to, obviously. Or you’re seeing someone, or whatever. I didn’t even ask you, which I realize is sort of presumptuous, sorry. I want to see you either way, if you want to. I just mean I can set up the guest room. If you want. Are you–”

“--Grace,” she says, smiles as she does, “shut up. I’ll stay.”

“There it is,” he says, and she laughs, and for the first time she thinks they both remember to breathe, “okay. Deal. I’m gonna hang up now, before I say something embarrassing.”

“You already–”

“--I know,” he says, half laugh, half groan, “I’m going, I’m gone. Goodnight. Get some sleep. See you next weekend.”

“Okay,” she says, “see you soon.”

The line goes dead right around the same time her heart nearly flies out of her fucking chest. For the first time since that long, dark week in June, she lets a single tear fall down her cheek, and she wonders when she last cried from being unimaginably, painfully full of hope. 

***

xi.

It’s the longest week of his life.

Every day stretches into an age, time dilation on planet earth itself. They don’t really speak, save for a few swapped texts on logistics. She doesn’t send him her flight details, just tells him she’ll be there in the evening; he thinks she probably doesn’t want him collecting her from the airport, which he chalks up to the fact that there will be no real conversation before the big one, and that she won’t want to do it in the car. For a fleeting moment, he considers getting on a plane to Houston, but she’d said she didn’t want him there, and he understood why, even if it stung a little. Next time, he thinks, God willing. There has to be a next time.  

He makes the bed in the guest room just in case. Doesn’t want to assume, and can barely remember anything they said in their one brief phone call. He closes the door as soon as he’s done, and hopes he doesn’t have to reopen it again until she’s gone.

And then, finally, Friday rolls around, full of mild winter sun and a clear, blue sky. He drinks a slow coffee and he thinks about what he wants to say, and every time he glances at the clock and he’s a little closer to seeing her, he wonders how he waited all this time. 

When she knocks, finally, in the early evening, it feels a lot like something that was always meant to happen. He stands up from where he’s been working at his laptop, closes it quietly, and takes off his glasses. He smiles to himself for a moment as he puts them down on the table and walks over to the door. She used to tell him off for leaving them in her room all the time; forgot something? she would lean down and ask him quietly before a meeting, and drop them into his stack of papers in one fluid motion. 

He swallows, pauses for a moment, and opens the door.

There she is, in the soft sunset light. Everything he remembers, his girl on his front porch. She’s in a baby blue sweater and her hair falls over her shoulders just like always, and she looks so beautiful he can think of nothing else. 

For a long moment, they just look at each other. She looks down for a moment, as though she isn’t sure what she’s walking into, and he hates that. Hates that she thinks she might be here to be rebuked, eyes guarded just in case. Likes, so much, that she’s here anyway. Both of them are rendered silent, watching each other, waiting for what comes next. And then his body remembers how to move, and he exhales; half a laugh, half something else so happy in his chest he doesn’t know what to do with it.

“Come here,” he says, voice a little rough. It’s all he can think to say. An echo of a time before, and she laughs too. He sees the way her shoulders fall as she steps inside, into his arms, and he pulls her in so tight he thinks he might never let go. 

“Hi,” she says into his shoulder, whole body melting into him; his favorite feeling in the world. 

“Hi,” he whispers into her hair, “I’m so happy you’re here.”

Whatever, he thinks. They have a lot to talk about. All the terrible things. But they can just have this, for a small moment.

“Me too,” she says, “me too.”

When she pulls away after a long moment, her eyes are shiny, and it’s all he can do not to kiss her right then and there. 

“Sorry, come in,” he says, leans behind her and grabs her suitcase from the porch. He clears his throat, draws the door closed, and when he turns back she is walking slowly into the living room, arms crossed round herself.

“It looks different, in here,” she says, turning back to him. She smiles as he meets her eye. “It looks good. You decorated.”

“Well,” he says, “last time you were here it was a little…IKEA college dorm, you know.”

She laughs. “Too good for IKEA, now?” she asks, a raise of her eyebrow. 

If she hadn’t let him hold her just before, if he hadn’t seen the look in her eye, he’d almost mistake her for being unbothered. She’s always been so good at maintaining a steely, soft distance, except for with him. 

“Very funny,” he says, deadpan, “you want a water, or anything? Something to eat?”

“No, I’m okay,” she says, then looks at the bar cart across the room, “actually, is it crazy if we do this over a drink?”

He laughs, relieved.

“Thank God. Thought you were gonna make me drink alone,” he says, and she laughs in return, “that feels like the right place to start.”

He pours them a drink, and they drift outside, settling on the sofa on the back patio. Something about it all feels easier in the cool of the evening; the way they always used to talk about hard things, in the dark, a drink in hand. The air is crisp, and the mountains stare down at them as the sun slowly starts to retreat. The second time she came to visit, his birthday, he’d kissed her out here for what felt like hours, until they were both so hot for it he’d carried her inside and straight to bed.

Tonight is different. Heavier, quieter, harder. They both curl in on themselves, feet up; looking over their glasses at each other. For a while, they talk about nothing: inane things, mutual friends; he asks her about the panel, which went well. But after a while she looks at him, as if to say, well, and he sighs. 

“I don’t know where to start,” he says, “I think that’s part of why I didn’t call, for so long. I’m sorry. I should’ve called. I’m not good at this.”

“Don’t,” she says quickly, furrow in her brow for a moment, “don’t apologize. This isn’t…you haven’t done anything wrong.”

He shrugs. “I think I have, probably,” he says, “I don’t know. There’s not exactly a blueprint here, right? But I’m sorry I left like that, at least. I regretted it, later.”

“It’s okay,” she says, waving it off, like she’s almost embarrassed by it, “all of it, it’s okay. It’s…not important.”

“It is. It is, to me. I don’t want to be like that.”

She laughs, almost disbelieving. “I’d just told you the worst thing in the world,” she says quietly, “so you have to stop apologizing. Please.”

“Okay,” he says, “okay. Are you sleeping?”

She looks back up at him like she's surprised by the question. A relic of a time before; are you sleeping okay? he used to ask, instead of all the things that he knew would spook her: I’m worried about you, how are you, I want you.

“Sure,” she says, “sometimes.”

The answer he’s heard a hundred times before; in the backs of cars, at breakfasts, in bed.

“That always means no,” he says, and relishes the little laugh of acknowledgement that pulls from her, “why not?”

She shrugs. “Will you let me say jet lag?” she says, and he shakes his head.

“No, sorry. That answer’s no good here.”

She smiles, small, picks up her glass again and takes a drink. 

“I’ve spent a lot of this week wondering if I’d get here and you’d remember you hate me,” she says. She walks into it blunt and matter-of-fact so that it hurts less, he knows. He’s seen her do it a thousand times before. “Which is fine, by the way. You can. I…I don’t want you to, but you can. But I think the worst part of all of this is not knowing. So you can just tell me. And then we can, you know. Go on from there.”

Like she’s bracing for impact with no parachute, like she thinks it’s about to fall from the sky and hit her, she leans back a little. He watches her as she makes herself look him in the eye. She mightn’t have gone to space, but he thinks she’s always been so ready to be brave, to take everything she thinks she deserves.

“I tried, actually,” he says, almost conversational, just to disarm her a little. Just to see the little surprised blink cross her face for a split second. “I tried for a while. I thought it would be easier. I don’t know. Turns out I was really, pathetically bad at it.”

Her eyes fill with something like a small, quiet hope.

“Well,” she says, “there’s still time.”

He laughs, to break the tension, but there’s nothing really that funny about it to him. 

“I mean it,” he says, and it’s so quiet between them, “I was so angry, for a long time. And then I sort of went insane, for a minute. I really, really hate that you did it. I get why you did. It doesn’t make me hate it any less. But I don’t know how to hate you.”

She blinks at him, swallows. 

“Oh,” she says, and he sees her exhale, sees her breathe out something deep before she wipes furiously at her eyes, “God. I’m not crying, by the way.”

“I know,” he says, faced with all evidence to the contrary, and she laughs sort of miserably as she gets herself together without shedding a proper tear. 

“I don’t think I deserve that,” she says, finally, and she won’t look at him for a moment, “I don’t think it’s something you should forgive.”

He nods. “I felt like that, for a while,” he says, “and now I don’t.”

“Why?” she asks.

He isn’t expecting it, for whatever reason.

“I…I don’t know,” he starts, “I don’t want to hold onto all of it, anymore. I just want you.”

He doesn’t really mean to say it like that, but it falls out of him before he can stop it. She smiles at him, this warm, beautiful thing, but her eyes are tight with something else. He leans over and takes her hand, squeezes. Something he’s done a hundred times. Today it feels like the first. She squeezes back, but she looks away again for a moment.

“You know, it’s all I wanted to hear you say. This whole time, really. But I just…I don’t know. You’ll wake up one day and hate it again,” she says as though it’s a fact, and the hate me is left unsaid, “and that’s okay, you…you should. If it were me, I would too. But I can’t do this again. It’ll kill me. I don’t want you to feel bad, I don’t mean it like that. But I can’t do this again.”

He looks at her until she looks at him. Draws his hand back slowly. 

“Do what?” he asks, and she shakes her head a little, like she doesn’t want to say it. She picks at a thread of her jeans. 

“Lose this,” she says, “lose you. I’m happy to be here, and to talk about it, I really am. I’m glad we get to talk about it. But I can’t…I can’t do this last few months again.”

“Me either,” he says, and she looks so sad he has to do something, “you know how many pints of ice cream I’ve eaten, since June? I had to sign up for a half marathon just to not keel over and die.”

She laughs, a sad sort of thing, drops her head to her hands almost despairingly. 

“Grace, I’m serious,” she says.

“I know, me too,” he says, voice lower now, “I mean it. I get it. I don’t want to do that again either. I hated everything about it. But this is sort of it, for me. Really.”

He pauses, takes a drink, watches her react to that. The furrow of her brow, hair tucked behind her ear; like she can’t let it be true. 

“It’s so stupid, for you to feel like that,” she says, “I don’t understand it.”

God, he loves her. She looks at him like that and tells him he shouldn’t love her and he wonders how he could ever make her understand it: that she wandered into his life one gray day and left him, in the best way, with no other choice. 

“You know, I’ve been thinking about it, a lot. I don’t know. We did all these terrible things, we watched all these awful things. There’ll be so many more of them. Our lives are all…different, forever. Our friends are never coming back. And in ten years, twenty years…” he trails off. “Well. You know.”

“I…yes, sure, okay,” she says, “not that it wasn’t before, but this conversation is making me especially anxious, now.”

He laughs, tired. Props his head up in his hand, elbow on the couch. Looks at her. 

“I just mean this is one thing we can fix. I don’t want to lose another thing to this. It’s been six months. I don’t want to waste six more. There aren’t that many left, you know. In the grand scheme of things. And I don’t want to do more of them without you, I guess.”

She’s quiet for a long moment. 

“That’s such a crazy thing to say,” she says, and it’s so, achingly, soft, “God, you’re so American.”

He laughs, bright. “That’s all I get? I’m doing the big thing, here! You gotta give me more than that.”

She swallows, puts her glass down again. Somehow, she ends up closer to him. 

“I don’t want to do any of them without you, either,” she says, “I…Jesus. I want all of this, too. More than you know. But I don’t deserve it. I don’t know what to say to make it better.”

“I don’t either, I guess,” he says, “I don’t know that there is anything. It’s just sort of terrible. For you, for me. It’s terrible, and it’s…” he searches for the right word, for a moment. 

“--Fucked up?” she offers.

He laughs.

“Well, sure,” he says, “fine, yes. Terrible and fucked up. And I love you anyway.”

He doesn’t even mean to say it, really. Is so glad he does, at the look on her face, at the way she freezes, at the smile in her eyes. He’s never seen her look like that, not in five, long years. He could bottle it and fuel another goddamn spaceship.  

“God, come here,” she says, whisper quiet, and before he can respond, she leans in and kisses him. 

He doesn’t even know how it happens, but one moment she is across from him, and the next she is in his lap, and her mouth is on his, and it’s shaky and breathy and frantic and so full of everything between them he doesn’t know what to do first. Runs his hands through her hair, cups her jaw, finds her waist and pulls her close, thumbs at the few tears she’s let fall onto her cheek while she does the same to him; he kisses her so deeply he’s lightheaded. She kisses his bottom lip and he moans, pathetic to his own ears and he doesn’t care in the slightest. Her hands are in his hair, riding up his shirt. She presses herself down into him and he lets her pull a sound from his lips; gives her two, just because. Pulls her sweater over her head so fast they barely have to separate, loses his t-shirt in the process; her hands find the his skin of his shoulders, his chest, and when he kisses her deep and moves a hand to ghost at the seam of her jeans, she drops her head to his neck, grazes her teeth there.

“Oh, God,” he says, feels a shiver through his spine, and she moans, chases his touch and presses closer. 

It’s so fast, a haze: hungry and so sharp, the blunt need between them after so long. It used to be something like this, a version of it, when they’d decide to pick up where they left off after months of being so good, so restrained. This is different, though. Something more raw, something more all-encompassing. They just move against each other, hold each other; hands everywhere, his tongue is so deep in her mouth he thinks he might just kiss her til the day he dies. He never wants to stop.

“Fuck,” she breathes against his mouth, and then she stops. Leans her forehead against his, breath coming fast. “Take me to bed, please.” 

His eyes close as she says it, so heated he can’t stand it.

“God,” he says again, a prayer against her lips, “okay, c’mon,” and he would pick her up but he thinks he’d probably do something embarrassing like drop her, so helps her to her feet, takes her hand and guides her inside instead. 

It’s dark out now, he hadn’t even noticed the sun setting. The lamp across the hall in his bedroom throws a warm, soft light into the living room. He turns round to look at her and she looks so beautiful standing in it that he can’t bear it. Presses her up against the wall, right where it splashes brightest, and kisses her, holds her hands above her head and feels the way she lights up for it. 

“Sorry,” he says against her lips, after a moment, “got distracted. You look so beautiful.”

She smiles, runs a hand over his face, strokes his cheek. 

“It’s okay. We’re out of practice,” she says. She breathes hard as she takes her wrists from his grip, slowly undoes the button of her jeans, and looks him dead in the eye as she takes his hand. She guides his fingers to her underwear and he takes the hint, dips his fingers lower and gets so hard so quickly at the way she throws her head back, at the way she feels, so wet at his touch already. “But I want you now,” she says, “c’mon.”

“Fuck,” he breathes into her neck, because he knows she likes it, and he takes the moan from her lips in his own as he walks her back into the bedroom. 

They shed their clothes fast, like it’s nothing. Then she’s underneath him, on top of his sheets like every perfect dream he’s ever had as he comes down to meet her lips again, warm skin and soft hands and every part of her pressed to him. 

“Can I go down on you?” he murmurs, and when she says nothing, just rocks up into him, he knows she wants him to ask again; she loves hearing it almost as much as he loves asking it, “please, baby. Want to taste you so bad.”

She makes a faint little sound as he says it, tugs his hair as he kisses her. “Yes, God,” she murmurs against his lips, “go on, want you to make me come.”

He moans at that, doesn’t need to be told twice. His lips find her neck, then her breast, then the other, and he kisses them until her breath comes unstuck, ragged as she nudges him further down her body. He mouths at her stomach, at her waist, and when he makes it to her hips her legs fall open around him, and he looks up at her as he grazes his teeth slow and hot at her inner thigh, then the other. 

“Oh, fuck,” she says, looking at him for a moment before closing her eyes, throwing her head back, “please, I need–”

He chooses that moment, perfect and a little mean, to get his tongue right where she wants it; flat against her, just a little pressure. Her hand flies to his hair, she rocks up against him like a reflex, thrusts against his tongue. She’s always so ready for it, so hot for it, when it’s like this. He holds her hips steady for a second, then presses his lips, his tongue to her clit, then inside of her, then back. Everywhere, hungry for it; lets her just take what she wants and gives her just what she likes. He’s so hard he could probably grind down against the sheets and come before she does, if he wanted to. Instead, he wills his hips still and focuses on the tug of her fingers in his hair, the way she writhes against his mouth every time he circles her just right. He can feel her getting more erratic as he goes, feel her legs start to shake, and he runs a soothing hand against her thighs, buries his face deeper into her. Moans into her, so wet against his mouth as he slips two fingers inside of her, and when she starts to come, he closes his eyes and loses himself in it until she laughs, high and keyed up and arching her back under his hands. 

“Come here,” she murmurs, “come here, want to kiss you.”

He’s there like a shot. Tongue in her mouth, filthy with it so she can taste herself, his cock heavy and hard against her thigh. He’s never wanted someone so much in his life. She moans, gets a hand between them, strokes him slow and sure until he’s burying a whine into her neck.

“What do you want, hm?” she asks into the shell of his ear, and then when he doesn’t answer, “want to fuck me like this?”

He nods, can’t speak. 

“Or d’you want to lie down and let me take care of you?” she asks, and he moans again, her nails blunt at his back. “Tell me what you want,” she says again, and he swallows, raises his head to look at her.

He wants it all so much his head swims with it. 

“Let me fuck you like this,” he says finally, mostly because he just wants to hold her. 

She seems to get it, smiles, kisses him and caresses his cheek with her hand.

“Good,” she says, “c’mon, want to feel you.”

He swallows, adjusts them so her leg is round his waist, and when he slides into her - so warm and tight and ready for him - he drops his head with a groan, teeth at her collarbone, sucks a bruise there so he doesn’t come straight away.

“Oh my God,” he says, “oh my God, Eva, Jesus.”

“Fuck,” she breathes, a soothing hand at his side, “you can move. Fuck me, c’mon.”

He moans into her skin, kisses her as he pulls out then thrusts into her, all the way; kisses her as he starts to set a pace; kisses her as she smiles against his mouth. Everything about her is electric, like this. She starts to meet him halfway, clenching around him every time he pushes inside, pulling him closer with her leg; faster, harder.

It’s not his best display of endurance, but he doesn’t care, knows they’re both close. He’s so keyed up on her he could die, maybe; so happy to have her like this again he doesn’t know what to do with himself. She starts to get louder beneath him, and he smiles against her lips, takes it from when she cries out.

“I’m so close, baby,” he says, and she just nods, pants against his lips as if to say me too, gets a hand on his ass and pulls him closer, “oh my God, you feel so good. So close, fuck. Can I come inside you?”

“Not yet,” she pants, voice high, cheeks flushed beneath him, “oh fuck, I’m so close, keep–keep going, fuck,” she says, and he feels it, as she starts to come again on his cock, and she curses again, kisses him hard to quiet herself, hips grinding in tight, hot circles underneath him.

He’s not going to last, and just when he thinks he’s going to come before she finishes, she pulls her mouth from his, tugs at his hair.

“Oh, fuck, come now,” she says, and like they never stopped doing this, he does. 

He thrusts into her once more and then he’s going over the edge, buries all the sounds coming from his lips into her neck, and as he shakes through it, she strokes soothing little shapes into his back, right until he comes back down to earth. 

“Oh my God,” she says, against his ear, “God, I forgot how good we are at that.”

He makes a pleased sort of sound without even meaning to, kisses the curve of her breast.

“Rude,” he says, skimming his hand there, “I didn’t, for the record.”

She smiles against his hair, a hidden sort of thing, only he knows just where to look.  

“I missed you,” she says, and it feels like the first simple thing she’s said all night.

He smiles too, into her skin. 

“Me too,” he says, low and gravelly, coming up to look at her. He brushes the hair from her face, gently. Kisses her quick. “So. Guest room’s set up down the hall. See you in the morning?”

She laughs, properly, and then she looks back at him for a long, long moment. It’s so intimate he feels it in his jaw. He’s still inside her. He goes to move, to clean them up and get her a cigarette, but she stops him. Instead, she just leans in, hands sliding up to his shoulders. She kisses him for a second, then looks at him again, through big, unguarded eyes.

“What?” he asks, suddenly suspicious. It’s unlike her, vaguely, to just lie in the afterglow. “You’re being all strange.”

She smiles, unhurried. When she finally opens her mouth, he knows what she’s going to say, just a second before she speaks. 

“I love you too,” she says quietly, “I got distracted, before. But I love you too.” 

And yeah, he thinks as his lips find hers, he’s going to love her for the rest of his life. 

He kisses her until daybreak, like so many nights before. This time, though, the morning is welcome; they greet it like a perfect, precious thing. 

***

xii.

Her three day trip to LA becomes a week, then two, and ends up being just shy of a month. They don’t even talk about it, really. She just can’t bear the thought of leaving, now she has this wonderful, unexpected thing in her hands, all theirs to hold. Paris is in the cold depths of winter, LA is warm and somehow, fleetingly, perfect; so there they stay. 

Everything in the city suddenly has a treacly, rich glow to it. She needs clothes, so they go to the mall, and something about the novelty of the outdoor plaza feels stupidly romantic. They hike all the main trails of the San Gabriel mountains, and he kisses her at the peak of each one. He takes her to perfect restaurants and smokey bars and coffee shops making drinks so strange she can only look on in a bemused sort of horror. 

They make it, against all the odds, to the Stevie Wonder show. It feels so full circle she almost can’t stand it. 

They work at his dining table during the days, and she adopts one of his Golden State hoodies when it’s cold in the evenings, and when they get into bed each night he kisses her temple and holds her until she’s warm. She has never been so warm, in the middle of winter, and she knows it’s not just because she’s in California. 

They keep talking about it all. The hard things, the terrible things. Threads they are still yet to pull. It feels so much less terrifying than that first day when she’d turned up at his door. They tell each other every awful thought, and he still loves her anyway. It’s like a fucking magic trick. It takes her breath away every time.

“You know, this is the only time I think I’ve actually liked LA since I’ve lived here,” he says one night. 

The sky is orange and pink and purple. They’re eating a stupidly large pizza and drinking a beer on his patio. He has a football game playing on the TV inside, quite hum of it echoing faintly out to them. It’s impossibly normal; almost dull. She’s never loved anything more.

She looks at him, sort of surprised. “What do you mean?” she asks.

“There’s never really been anything for me here, I came here on a whim,” he shrugs, “it’s just never become my place. ”

“You did it to work at NASA,” she points out.

“Yeah. Yeah, which is great,” he says, “honestly, it’s just not what I want, I don’t think.”

She had sort of gathered this over the last few weeks, from the way he works. She was so used to seeing him in flight, for all those years, passionate and spun up in it all and almost insane, actually; unable to be dragged away. He’s different, here. Does what he needs to, is good at it, but something in him is different. More subdued.

“Well, what do you want?” she asks. 

He shrugs, finishes a slice. Eats an olive from the pile of them she’s discarded on her plate.

“You know, I think I just want to teach kids. Everyone thinks that’s insane, I know, but it’s true. I can do some Agency stuff on the side, I’d actually like to do that. But I just miss being in a classroom.”

She nods. “It makes sense,” she says, “you’re a great teacher. I’ve seen it.”

So many people she’d watched him train; all of them, to a person, loved him. 

“I know it’s crazy,” he says, ignoring the compliment, as is typical, “do you think that’s crazy?”

“No,” she says, and it’s true, “I think you know what makes you happy. It’s a good thing.”

“Yeah, well, anyway. I can’t do it here, so.”

“Well, you could. We’d just need to…negotiate,” she says, and he looks at her the way he often does, as if to say please don’t commit a crime. She waves him off. “But, you know. You could also come to Paris.”

She would’ve rather died than suggest something that big, that meaningful, to anyone, for most of her life. Now, she barely even registers that she should maybe feel embarrassed for saying it. This last month has passed in such a perfect haze, they have moved past so many things. Treacle slow for so long; now, warp speed. She thinks she could ask him to knock her up, or build her a house, or kill fifteen people, and he’d have them all done before breakfast, if she liked.

“And do what?” he says, “not that I don’t want to, y’know. But I don’t speak French.” 

She laughs. “You think you’d be the first person who ever came without the language?” she says dryly, “have you ever watched a movie?”

“I’ve seen…French Kiss,” he says, defensively.

She raises an eyebrow. “I was more thinking An American In Paris.”

“Ah,” he nods sagely, leaning over and taking another olive, and she smiles, “the cool version. Sure, that too.”

“Seriously, though,” she says gently, “international schools, English language schools, universities. You could do lots of things. Think about it.”

“I mean,” he says, takes a long pull of his beer. Something about that works on her a little too well. It always has. “Yeah. Why not? City of love, right? Sort of fits.”

She laughs, rolls her eyes a little to stop herself blushing like an idiot.

“So American,” she says, “it’s not, it’s the city of lights.”

And just like all those years before, just like every time they’d pick an argument over conference tables and lab reports and hotel bars, he rolls his eyes right back. 

“Can’t it just be both?” he says, and she opens her mouth to argue before she realizes she doesn’t really have a good reason why it can’t, actually. 

Maybe it fucking can. 

By the time his birthday rolls around in late May, Paris is back in full, perfect bloom, and they live in a new apartment in the 10th; a bright two bedroom that only makes them feel marginally broke at all times. They have a kitchen with green cabinets and a bike rack downstairs and two Juliet balconies he likes to kiss her on. 

So, she supposes, maybe he was right. 

They say goodbye at the cafe by their place each morning, and he takes the metro to the American School of Paris while she crosses the river to go to the Agency. When she gets home each evening, he is almost always grading papers on the floor, and he looks up at her over his glasses when she walks in the door, and leans up to kiss her as she comes and sits on the couch above him. She evolves from politely wearing one of his basketball team sweaters on occasion to adopting his whole San Francisco sportswear collection as her own. He makes her practice his French with him three times a week, and she finds it so charming that she wonders how she’ll ever teach him her mother tongue without kissing him stupid. 

She comes to his classroom one day and for a second it feels so much like that gray Thursday, all those years ago, and it takes her breath away. Whenever he comes to the Agency, they go up to the observation deck and find the projections map and they talk for long nights, about all of it. They light candles four times a year; once for each of their birthdays, and on the anniversary of the launch. It becomes a strange sort of continuous grief. She is so relieved to not have to go through it alone. 

She wakes up early on his first birthday in Paris. She remembers all five of the ones prior like they were yesterday. The first, when he’d relocated onto the ship barely three weeks earlier, and she’d had an assistant organize their usual celebration cupcakes but told her to get the nice ones for a reason she couldn’t quite articulate. The second, when they stayed up all night talking in a hotel bar in Vancouver and she found herself wondering what he’d taste like if he ever kissed her. The third, when she’d broken her own rule and slipped into his room at midnight, slept the night there; the fourth, when they ate room service in London and read papers together, and she kissed him every fifteen minutes as a reward for working on his birthday; and the fifth, that hazy weekend in LA. They all feel like a lifetime ago, but somehow, that one feels like the furthest away. 

She takes a certain comfort in it, somehow, how much can change in a year. It’s the right kind of hope.

“Morning,” she says, rolling over as she blinks awake. He’s half awake, looks at her blearily with a small smile and pulls her close. Lips at her hair, just like always. “Happy birthday.”

“Huh,” he says, heavy with sleep; makes a content sort of sound against her for a moment, “that’s today?”

She hums a laugh. “Pretty sure. Unless your file was wrong way back when,” she says, and feels him smile against her skin, “what do you want to do this morning, anyway?”

She has booked dinner later that night, and they’ll meet some friends for a drink before, but the rest of the day stretches ahead of them: gloriously unfilled, a perfect early summer warmth in the air already. They could do anything they wanted.

He sighs, his hand on her cheek so he can kiss her good morning. Just like every day.

“Kind of just want to do this,” he murmurs, and she laughs, kisses him back. 

“Done,” she replies, “easy.” 

And against all the odds, it sort of fucking is.

***

 

Notes:

btw if u think about it they’re like if sideways by bleachers and bobby by phoebe bridgers had a baby who was a strange middle aged couple…….can anyone hear me

anyway i have a weird fear this is maybe too much of a canon zag, but for everyone who wanted more happy endings for these two, please take this as an offering <3

edit: omg everyone is so strict on tags these days i'm sorry for being lazy and type b about it i will grow and learn