Page 3 of 56 Days
She’s already ruined it.
So she might as well makesureshe has.
“There wasChallenger,” she says to the crack in the pavement by her right foot, “lost January 28, 1986, during launch.Columbia, lost February 1, 2003, during reentry.Atlantis,Endeavour, andDiscoveryare all on display—Atlantisis the one in Kennedy Space Center. But there was alsoEnterprise, the test vehicle. It flew, although never in space. It didn’t have a heat shield or engines, but itwasthe first orbiter. Technically. Which is actually what people mean when they say ‘space shuttle,’ usually. They mean the orbiter itself. The rest are just rockets. AndEnterpriseis the one that’s at the Intrepid.”
A beat of excruciating silence passes.
She forces herself to lift her head and meet his eye, lips parting to mumble some lie about needing to get back to work, foot lifting in readiness for scurrying away from this absolute disaster, but then he says—
“I was going to go get a coffee. Can I buy you one, too?”
There are numerous coffee options on this street and the vast majority of them come served with a side of serious notions. There’s the café that roasts its own beans and makes you wait five minutes for a simple filter coffee that only comes in one size served lukewarm. It’s right next to the place that has spelled its name wrong and, inexplicably, with a forward slash: Kaph/A. The most popular spot seems to be a little vintage van in theservice-stationforecourt, the one with a hatch whosechalk-drawnmenu lists not coffee blends but levels of depleted wakefulness: Fading, Sleepy, Snoring.
Ciara is relieved when he directs her past all of them and into the soulless outlet of a bland coffee chain instead.
“Is this okay?” he asks as he holds the door open for her.
“This is great.” She steps inside, turning to talk to him over her shoulder. “I like my coffee served in a bucket at a reasonable price, so...”
“I’ve passed the first test, is what you’re saying.”
He winks at her and she laughs, hoping it didn’t come out sounding like a nervous one, although sheisnervous.
Because of the implication in the wordfirst.
Becauseshehas to pass this test too.
Because this is already the weight of one whole foot on the edge of the minefield and she has no idea how wide it is, how long it will take her to get all the way across, how long it will be before she feels safe and comfortable and secure.
In the minute it took to walk here, he has told her his name is Oliver and that he works for a firm of architects who have the top floor of the large office building across the street. He is not an architect, though, but something called an architectural technologist. He explained it by saying that architects design the buildings and then architectural technologists figure out how they’re going to actually build them. He tried to dissuade her of the idea that it’s any bit as interesting as it sounds, promising that, in reality, it’s mostly spreadsheets and emails. When she asked him if it’s what he always wanted to do, he said yes, once he’d come to terms with the fact that he was never going to be an astronaut.
Then he asked her what she does.
She explained that afterherastronaut dreams fell by the wayside, she ended up working for a tech company that just happens to have one of their European hubs in a sprawling complex of glitteringglass-and-steel office buildings a few minutes away from where they stand. She held up herbright-bluelanyard and he read her name off it and said, “Nice to meet you, Ciara,” and she said, “Nice to meet you, too.”
Now, at the counter in the coffee shop, she says she’ll have a cappuccino. He orders two of them, both large.
“To go?” he suggests. “We might snag a seat by the canal.”
“Sounds good to me.”
She tries not to look too pleased that he wants to prolong this, whateverthisis, into drinking the coffees as well.
She goes to wait at the end of the counter and watches him pay at the till with a crispten-euronote. She sees the barista—a teenager; she can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen—steal glances at him whenever she thinks he’s looking at something else. She wonders if he’s aware of that and, if he is, what it feels like. (Approval or scrutiny?) She traces the lines of his body as suggested by his clothes and wonders what it would feel like to know the skin underneath,ifshe will know it, if this really is the start of something or just an anomaly.
She imagines those arms around her, the strength in them, how it would feel to be held by him.
Then she tries not to.
She doesn’t put sugar in her cappuccino, even though she normally does, and she thinks to herself,If this becomes something, I’ll never be able to put sugar in my coffeenow.
The sun has been appearing and disappearing all day; when they go back outside, they’re met with mostly blue sky. The canal bank is busy with lunching office workers, but they find a spot on the wall by the service station, near the lock.
They settle down.
He prizes the lid off his cappuccino to take a sip. She resists the urge to tell him that this will make it go cold faster but lets him know when he’s managed to collect a crescent of foam on his upper lip.
“So,” he says, “Kennedy Space Center.”
