I pace the hotel bathroom, the cold tile numbing my feet, the hotel robe chafing my sensitive skin. The fluorescent lights cast me as a pale, ghostly woman with wide, freaked-out eyes and pink, kiss-stung lips.
I’m swallowed by the white terrycloth hotel robe. Even so, the chill in the black-and-gray tile bathroom has me shivering.
After Henry’s question I distracted him with a kiss and then told him I needed to clean up. I threw on the robe, grabbed my phone, and headed toward the bathroom.
He asked if I’d like room service. Coffee? Tea? Dinner? That bit of generosity nearly broke my heart. He’s a good guy. He’s . . . oh gosh.
I can see it now. I fall for him and all of a sudden we’re wearing matching outfits, riding a tandem bike in Napa, calling ourselves Denry, Hucky, Hersena (whatever), I’ll be pregnant with our fifth child and Henry will proudly say, “We’re pregnant!” even though he (and everyone else) knows he bloody (oh no, I’m already using “bloody”!) isn’t pregnant, it’s me who is pregnant, who is pushing the baby out of my vagina and taking maternity leave and . . . I’ll start watching BBC period dramas and unending cricket matches and drinking tepid tea and be British and not Californian, and somehow I’ll no longer care about physics, or even work at CERN, because suddenly I’ll care more about my husband and babies and breastfeeding and which diaper wipes to use, and my husband’s career prospects and his banking/dignitary(?) transfers to Mozambique, and his mom’s opinion of my cooking and his friends’ opinions of which football team will take the World Cup, and also getting an electric minivan and tax rebates and . . . I’ll be gone. I won’t be me.
I wonder for a moment what my best friend since childhood, Jillian—she’s a relationship columnist in New York—would do. Then I remember she can’t talk to men (at all) so she wouldn’t even be in this situation. Ever. So that’s no help.
I stare into the mirror. The bathroom is large with a modern glass-encased rain shower and little lux toiletries on the black granite countertop. Henry has placed a travel bag of toiletries on the counter. He has a stainless-steel razor, a shaving brush, expensive shaving soap in a metal container—it smells like him—and his toothbrush and toothpaste lined neatly by the sink. Everything is in order. Perfect order.
In fact, I’ve noticed his hotel room is unbelievably tidy and clean. His suits hang in the closet, pressed neatly, next to crisp white shirts. There are perfectly polished dress shoes—dark brown, light brown, and black—with a shoehorn.
A shoehorn.
Do you know what this means?
Henry is neat. Obsessively neat.
And me? I’m a slob. There’s no other way to look at it.
As I stare at myself in the mirror I can see myself fading. If I fall in love, I’ll slip away. It’ll be unnoticeable at first, until one day I’ll wake up and find that I’ve organized my shoes by color, my spice drawer is alphabetized, and I have a daily planner that I actually follow.
My face pales even further. My eyes are so dark against my skin they almost look black. I take a deep breath, wincing when I pull in the enticing scent of Henry’s shaving soap.
I turn on the faucet—a slick modern one where the water falls out of a flat chrome bar, illuminated with a purple LED light. The water is freezing-cold, so I cup it in my hands and then splash my face, pinching my cheeks.
“Pull it together,” I hiss at myself. “It’s not the end of the world.”
Do you remember five minutes ago when I was rhapsodizing about humanity reaching a divergence? A fork in the road?
Supersymmetry vs. Multiverse.
Order vs. Chaos.
Life vs. Death.
Well, this is my fork.
You can’t love two things passionately. One will always eclipse the other.
Doesn’t the Bible say that you can’t serve two masters? You will always love one and hate the other?
This is the same thing.
I fell in love with physics. I made my choice. I can’t fall in love with a man too.
I’m not going to anglerfish myself.
I can hear Henry outside the door ordering wine, fruit, coffee, and chocolate cake from room service. His rumbly voice, muffled by the wooden door, falls over me, making my skin tingle as I remember the low sound of his voice in my ear whispering delightful, shocking, delicious things while he was gripping my hips and driving into me.
So.
“Enough of that,” I say.
I take my phone from the bathroom counter. I brought it in because I know there’s nothing better to settle my tumultuous emotions than a good dose of work emails.
I lean against the cold counter’s edge, open up my email, and let the bright vanity lights and cold tile wash away all the lingering heat and need and pull.
I scroll through my emails. Let’s see . . . How about some plots from our latest dataset? The z, the nanoseconds, the . . .
The subject of an email catches my eye.
My team has a new project lead. Starting next week.
How didn’t I know about this? This is my boss. You’d think I’d have heard something before the announcement. Yet here I am, getting an email at the last hour.
I click it open, smiling because here I am, already distracted. A new boss is a guaranteed distraction. The scent of Henry’s shaving soap is barely making a dent in my concentration.
Really.
But then, two worlds collide. They crash together in a nanosecond. And my word, the wreckage is immense.
Because my new boss?
It’s Henry Joule, of Oxford.