“What is it?” I ask.
I step next to Henry and glance at the glowing monitor. On the desk a mug of tea sends out a curl of steam and the hot scent of English Breakfast, milk, and sugar. I wonder how many cups of tea he drinks in a day. Maybe as many shots of espresso as I drink.
I move closer and my arm brushes against Henry’s as I lean in to look at the monitor. He’s warm. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and the fabric scratches against my bare skin. He doesn’t move aside when my arm whispers against his shirt. In fact, I don’t think he even notices me.
I ignore the frisson of heat and the electric buzz riding over my skin. Instead I concentrate on the rumble of thunder outside, the drum of rain, and the crack of lightning. The storm is moving directly overhead, growing stronger, shooting down bolts of lightning and growling with booming thunder. I can almost feel the vibration all the way down to my toes.
Henry doesn’t look my way. The harsh light of the monitor reflects off his skin as his eyes quickly scan the numbers rolling in front of him. His shoulders tense, his mouth turns down, and his eyes narrow on the screen.
There’s a nervous energy in the control room. I glance from Henry to the others at their computers. Heads down, fingers flying, energy crackling.
“Just leave it on the desk,” Henry says suddenly, not bothering to look at me. His voice is abrupt, distracted. A lock of hair falls across his forehead, sweeping over his eye. He doesn’t bother to brush it back. Instead his mouth tightens, and he shakes his head.
Henry’s intense concentration, the low hum of the monitors, and the noise of fans cooling the overworked system all add to my growing unease. It’s drumming through me like the rain beating against the building.
Years ago—2008, to be exact—there was an incident at the LHC. A faulty electrical connection between two magnets caused helium to release into the tunnel. You may be thinking, “Oh helium, fun! I love balloons! You can make your voice sound like a chipmunk!” No. The LHC uses liquid helium to cool the air to the coldest temperatures on earth, colder than space. When the faulty connection caused the leak, it vaporized and superconducting electromagnets collided. Imagine a subway tunnel where dozens of train cars collide and the metal smashes, twists, and wrecks. That. The damage was surreal. All because of a faulty electrical connection. So even though this happened years ago, when I was a kid, I’m still twitchy about it.
“What’s wrong?” I ask again, more insistent.
“I’m busy,” Henry snaps, tapping in a command.
“I can help—”
“You cannot—”
I can. I slap the papers onto the desk and accidently hit the glass cup of steaming-hot tea. It slides to the edge of the desk, teeters, and almost in slow motion I reach out and try to stop it—but then it flips over, falls, and smacks the floor. The glass cracks, shatters, and scalding tea and sharp fragments punch my legs. I flinch at the heat lashing my bare skin and the glass cutting my legs.
Henry jerks from the desk and jumps back, trying to avoid the explosion of steaming English Breakfast tea and glass.
It’s a mess. Milky tea seeps across the floor and glistening shards of glass litter the ground. The bottom of the mug still holds a lump of sugar not quite melted by the hot liquid. The tea spreads fast, moving toward the hardware.
“Shoot,” I say. I don’t think—I grab the papers off the desk and drop to my knees to sop up the liquid.
“Don’t—” Henry says, holding out his hand.
Too late my knee hits a glass shard, and I flinch as it slices into my skin. The pain is hot, and I hiss at the sudden welling of blood. I’m afraid to move, fearing that if I do I’ll lance another shard of glass through my leg. The tea is hot and sticky against my skin. I let go of the papers, hoping they’ll soak it up.
Henry kneels down next to me, pulling me up from the broken glass. He gently takes my knee, his warm fingers probing my skin. His eyes darken at the half-inch-long, glistening shard of glass sticking out of my knee. He grips it between his fingers and tugs. The glass cuts his skin—I see blood welling from his pointer finger and thumb—and then the sharp teeth biting at my knee cut loose as he slides the glass free.
He brushes at my legs, his hands moving efficiently over me, until he finds another shard in my calf. He tugs that free too and then presses the well of blood.
Maybe ten seconds have passed, but I’m immobile. The sting of the glass is still sharp. It felt like scalding bullet rain. It’s not the pain that stunned me though. It’s how quickly Henry dropped down next to me and pulled the glass free, cutting himself in the process.
“You all right over there?” Steven calls from the back of the control room.
I jerk away from watching Henry brush his hands over my legs, scanning them for more glass. A warm shiver slides over me and I shake it off.
“Fine,” I call.
Then I turn back to Henry. He presses the cut on my calf with one hand and the cut on my knee with his other.
“Thank you,” I say gratefully.
His face is turned away from mine. He’s kneeling next to me, looking down at my bare legs covered in tea and a little bit of blood.
I’m feeling almost warm toward him.
Then he looks up, his eyes angry and hard, and I jerk back in surprise. He keeps a tight hold on my leg, pressing his fingers into my skin.
“What is wrong with you?” he asks in a low growl, his voice sharp and cutting. He jerks his chin toward the shattered remains of his teacup. “Do you ever stop to consider the consequences of your actions?”
I flinch—this seems like a gross exaggeration—and try to pull my leg away, but he doesn’t notice and his fingers curl over my calf, holding me in place.
“It’s just tea,” I whisper, my gratitude flipping to irritation. “There were no consequences.”
Minus the shattered mug, the ruined papers, the spilled drink, and the bloody cuts.
“It’s not just tea,” he says, echoing my thoughts. “And there are always consequences. Cause and effect.”
“My gosh. Life doesn’t have to be so serious. Lighten up.” I tug my leg free from his grip. When I do, I totter a bit on my heels, and Henry reaches out, grabs my hand, and steadies me.
Outside, a slice of lightning streaks across the sky. A spark travels down my arm and jolts my heart into rapid-fire beats.
Henry’s grip tightens and his eyes darken from blue to steely gray. “I will not lighten up. Life is not all fun and games.”
I blink at him, confused at the whiplike slash of his voice.
“Are you angry because I broke your mug? I’m sorry, jeez. I’ll get you another. Heck, I’ll superglue it for you.”
At the mention of superglue, he drops my hand like I’ve burned him and I fall backward onto a lukewarm tea-soaked piece of paper, my hips smacking into the floor. Luckily, there wasn’t any glass under the paper.
I rub my hip. Henry stares at me as if he’s appalled by my predicament.
But then I realize he’s just appalled with me, because he says, “An adhesive is the last thing I would ask for. No, thank you.”
Oh. Okay. I see where this is going. This is the argument we never had a year and a half ago. Fine.
“Why not?” I ask. “Glue is useful. It fixes things. It’s fun.”
His eyes narrow. He leans closer and then deliberately pronounces each word slowly. “I. Dislike. Fun.”
Yeah. Me too.
In fact, I’ve disliked the word "fun” since I callously threw it out there at The Cock and Bull.
However, Henry needs some actual fun in his life.
I scan my eyes over his flawless gray suit, his crisply ironed white shirt, his red tie, and his unsmiling features. I wonder what he’s done with himself for the past year and half. I know what he does here: he works, he works, and he works. He drinks tea at 10:15 a.m. exactly, he dusts his keyboard, he sorts his files alphabetically, and he sharpens his pencils to exactly 177 millimeters. But what does he do when he isn’t working? Somehow I think whatever it is, it isn’t fun.
I’m not talking about sex. I’m just talking about good, wholesome, old-fashioned fun.
“It’s too bad,” I tell him. Then I say honestly, “You could use a little fun in your life.”
His mouth twists in a disgusted “I can’t believe you just said that” sort of way.
He shakes his head. “No, thank you.”
And that “no, thank you” isn’t directed toward fun as much as it’s directed at me. In fact, I’ve never had someone look at me with such undiluted loathing in my entire life. It’s rolling off him like the thunder rolling over the building.
So I was right. Henry isn’t and has never been neutral toward me. Our relationship is tofu, not a neutron. There is no neutral.
But then he zips up all that dislike curling his lip, lighting his eyes, and rolling off him in waves, and goes back to that pH of 7.
I feel a tiny spurt of disappointment. Funny enough, I think I prefer this show of utter dislike over the constant apathy.
Henry glances back at his computer monitor, his jaw muscles ticking, then he gestures at the sodden papers on the floor. “If you could replace the data before leaving for the night, I have to—”
He waves this away, then starts to stand, as he does he reaches out for me, takes my hand in a tight grip to help me up.
My hand slips into his warm one, wet with tea and blood. Behind him, the red numbers on the clock glow. 7:31 p.m.
He frowns at me then—at the lightning striking outside and the sparks coalescing where our palms touch. His eyes darken. When I smile at him, he flinches.
“I don’t understand you,” he says, and it almost sounds angry and accusatory.
I shrug, my chest pinching. “Funny. We have symmetry then, because I don’t understand you, and I doubt I ever will.”
“Do you want to?” he asks, frowning down at me.
My hand is still in his, a growing, sparking, almost painful current flowing between us.
I shake my head. “No,” I lie. “Understand the universe, yes. Understand you? No, thanks. We’re too dissimilar.”
I smile at him to let him know this is all in good fun—even though we both know it isn’t.
But he nods as if I’ve confirmed a theory he’s always had. “That is one thing we’ll always agree on,” he says. “We are too dissimilar to be anything but—”
Loathed coworkers?
Misunderstood opposites?
Tolerated colleagues?
A regret?
“A mistake,” I finish for him. Then I add, “Fun, but a mistake.”
Henry swallows, the line of his throat moving painfully as his eyes burn into mine.
This is it, isn’t it? Maybe after this I can truly move on. It’s apparent, it’s blatantly obvious, that Henry dislikes me. A lot. Perhaps his (now apparent) dislike can let me snip away the last threads of connection that have stubbornly held on even though I’ve tried to snip them again and again.
I move to pull my hand from his.
Outside a loud shout of thunder shakes the building and lightning slices the sky in half. There’s a shrieking—a loud, high-pitched screaming sound. I flinch. It’s the long, metallic whirring of a drill caving into a skull. An electronic whining that burrows and shrieks. It’s the noise of the equipment when the LHC cools down or speeds up. A sound we never hear in the control room, but here it is, ratcheting through my head.
“ATLAS has gone off—!” someone shouts.
“The alarms!” another yells.
The projection wall lights up red, flashing.
Henry whirls around, spinning me with him because he’s forgotten he’s holding me, and I hit the desk. Stumble. Fall into him. His cedar starlight scent wraps around me.
There’s a cracking boom and then the power trips and the control room bleeds into darkness. Blessed silence. We have a generator—the power should be back on in a millisecond. In fact, there shouldn’t be any interruption in power at all.
Yet . . . yet . . .
The LHC . . . Did something happen? Is this another faulty electrical connection? Did the storm disrupt something? Is there another wreckage happening below us at this very moment?
While proton beams collide, while multiple dimensions form and collapse, while particles are torn apart and new particles are born, we wait in endless darkness.
I stand against Henry, my cheek pressed to his chest, and hear the bang of his heart echo and then move in time with mine. I close my eyes, feeling the magnetic pull of him rushing through me. The control room bleeds with an eerie dark silence.
“Henry?” I whisper.
He grips my hand tightly and his other presses into the curve of my back, pulling me close.
Then the room starts to spin like a tilt-a-whirl and a strange high-pitched roar sounds around us, and then I’m shooting, shooting, spinning, faster, faster, faster, until I feel as if I’m being pulled apart—as if my cells, my particles, are shredding, sliced through by darkness—and I’m moving at lightspeed, around and around and around, and I grip Henry’s hand because I’m certain if I let go I won’t exist anymore, I won’t be, so I bury myself against him as I spin and spin until I can’t breathe, I can’t see, I can’t hear—I’m torn into a thousand pieces of myself—and I rush toward something, something pulling me in, pulling me close, something I can’t resist, I only know I have to fly, and then—BAM!—I collide, I hit with a shattering boom, I break apart—the wreckage is profound—and in that wreckage—Henry?—that trillionth of a second, everything in me breaks and then realigns, coalesces, and becomes—