Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 20 / Chapter 22 –>

By late afternoon, Brett had begun to feel the effects of his night without sleep. He had spent the remainder of the morning performing the tasks he had promised to do. There were seals to examine, intake and exhaust ports to monitor, atmospheric measurements to be taken on all levels. He ran diagnostics on the comm, power and HVAC equipment, ran quality diagnostics on Cassandra, viewed live file reports of the now massive and almost complete failure of the entire circuit of Persia’s Sperling Engines. In between these tasks, he maintained frequent contact with Liston and Ilam, who had secured themselves in the mech engineering lab, though each call tended to degenerate into sniping and only quasi-literate growls by the time he broke the connection.

But they were making progress. That was the gist of their reports, and it was the only portion that mattered to him.

During all of this he had consumed coffee until his stomach burned and his head ached. Around noon, he took a brief and unintentional nap in his chair in front of his workstation that, when he woke, left him with a stiff neck, but at least the illusion of refreshment.

Much of the afternoon that followed was an indistinct blur of relieving Vernon from his boredom in medical bay. He watched four people die in the space of two hours, but performed no function other than to click off their assortment of wailing vital monitors. Shortly before Vernon returned, Djen appeared, and on Ashburn’s suggestion, the two of them arranged the conversion of the third level recreation room into a barracks for the remainder of his crew. As they were now down to ten, the urge toward isolation had vanished. Everyone wanted community. They appreciated the need to observe the others for the least sign of infestation, and in turn to have objective eyes observing themselves.

Brett reflected that it wasn’t unlike the summer he had spent at camp in central Ohio when he’d been twelve or thirteen. The cabin counselor that year had been a boisterous and faintly psychotic Methodist youth minister who enjoyed more than anything else terrifying the young campers with graphic tales of local murders and hauntings and false news stories of escaped convicts. No one had properly believed him. On one level, everyone had chuckled over his idiocy, over the fact that he seemed to believe they didn’t know he was jerking them off. But they had sat up late most nights, their sleeping bags pulled high about their shoulders, all of them clustered together on the edges of their beds and jumping at owl hoots and crackling twigs until exhaustion took them. In some ways, it wasn’t so bad to be terrified when there were others to share the loneliness with you.

But he cleared the furniture in the rec room, even if it was a worthless exercise. He set up pallets on the floor and programmed the retrieval of a series of light video comedies from the entertainment library.

By the time they were done, it was the evening of a day that he could hardly remember. Brett managed to locate Ashburn and advised him over the intercom to head in that general direction, making certain to stop at the commissary along the way for whatever goods they could scrounge. Attler piped in to add that she could throw something together if there wasn’t anything already made and Ashburn promised to deliver the whole group within forty-five minutes. Brett flipped to Liston and Ilam. They were still arguing, but arguing in shorter bursts and language so rapid it could only be stim induced. The message he received was more or less that they had too much work left to think either about eating or sleeping, and fuck-you-very-much for reminding them.

Brett turned from the comm console shaking his head, but content. Everything they could do was being done.

“What about you?” Djen asked him.

“What do you mean?”

She arched an eyebrow. She must have thought he was being intentionally obtuse. “Are you going to grace the crew with your presence tonight, or do you have other plans?”

“I’ll be here,” he said. He tried to smile, but probably failed. “One of the upsides to having alien microbes eradicate two-thirds of your crew is the time saved in administrative overhead.”

“I was thinking you’d be too busy.”

He finally caught the look she was giving him. “Oh. I believe I might have plans, then.”

“Something memorable?”

She moved toward him until their bodies touched. Brett looked down at her. With one hand, he tangled his fingers in her short hair. With the other, he stroked her smooth, olive cheek.

“Only for a few the next few hours,” he whispered.

He knew it was wrong at once from the way she winced. He felt her pull away from him, but he didn’t allow it. Brett dragged her back with the hand on her head and the other gripped about her waist. He kissed her hard until her hands gripped his shoulders in return, until she held him as tightly and completely as he embraced her. When he released, she held him still, pressing the side of her face against his chest.

“I don’t want to lose you, Markus,” she said.

“Maybe you won’t. We found each other once. It will happen again.”

“Do you really think so?”

He didn’t, not if he really thought about it. He didn’t think so at all, but he could say anything he chose here. He could make any number of promises and prophecies because the shelf life of his words would be finite. All of his actions had a quality of freedom, because they were completely without consequences. And there was so much sorrow in her, a desperate and smothering sadness that had originated in death and fear and confusion. Djen deserved all the hope he could give her.

“Of course,” he said. “How could it be any other way.”

She hugged him tighter, almost fiercely. He squeezed her in return.

“Let’s go now,” she said, laughing.

“We should wait for the others to arrive.”

“So they can ask us where we’re going? Do you really want to have to explain yourself?”

Brett grimaced at the thought. “Maybe you’re right.”

Djen seemed to believe she was exactly that. She sprang loose of him, but kept hold of his hand. She went for the door, dragging him along behind. They both laughed at their foolishness, their play, but Brett could feel the edge of frenzy to it.

Be merry, he thought. For tomorrow we really could die.

#

After, he sat in his bed with his back against the cool steel of the wall and a sheet pulled up to his waist. There was only the light from his desk lamp, and its glow was warm and yellow, but faint enough that most of the room was in shadow. She was mostly in shadow with her head resting on his thigh and her body spun loosely around and over his legs. Her skin was darker than it seemed. Her hair was almost black and her eyes circles of coal flecked with diamond. The breath from her nostrils was warm and moist, the exhalations deep and long. An almost feline languor, he thought, and stroked her hair.

“I ought to check on the kids,” he said.

“Ilam and Liston?”

“Yes.”

She wrapped her arms around his legs so he couldn’t move. “Later. I’m too comfortable, and it’ll be cold if you move.”

“I have an intercom about forty centimeters to the right of my head. I don’t have to move.”

“But if you start talking, I’m liable to have to wake up. And if they start talking, I’m liable to want to smack them.”

“I’ve felt that way all day.”

“About which part?”

He didn’t have to think about it. “Both, actually. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, you haven’t gotten much sleep lately.”

He smiled down at her. “You’re personally responsible for several of those lost hours, so I’d be careful.”

“Some things are more important than sleep.”

“And more amusing.” He would have liked to kiss her again, but the angle was all wrong and he was too tired to shift both of them around to get at her. He contented himself with a slow brush of his palm along her neck and back. “You’re very beautiful, Djen. I want you to know that. I don’t think I’ve said it.”

“Typically, Commander, you’re supposed to flatter the girl before you fuck her.” She was flippant, but he could tell that she was pleased.

“And aren’t you supposed to tell me I’m beautiful in return? I think that’s the proper etiquette.”

“You’re beautiful, buddy.”

“It’s not the same if I have to remind you.”

She pinched him on the inside of his thigh. He grabbed at her wrist, then tried to tickle her in return. Several minutes of wrestling followed, punctuated by hoots and giggles that weren’t all hers, much to his embarrassment. She won a short time later because her feet weren’t nearly as ticklish as the underside of his chin, and they collapsed together again, this time much more comfortably wound with legs meshed and arms folded in the least awkward positions. The only downside Brett could see was that her feet were like ice cubes and he had to expend an inordinate amount of wriggling to get the sheet between them and his calves, where she wanted to burrow.

It was, he realized, the most fun he’d had in more than five years.

#

The light had been turned out. The heat had been adjusted down to compensate for their collective warmth. The sheet had been snapped out and spread equitably between them, and Brett had covered his contingencies by sneaking a light blanket from the drawer beneath the bed and setting it on the floor within easy reach for the inevitable midnight moment when she would steal the covers. The station was silent, but he no longer found that particularly alarming. He realized that probably had something to do with fatigue.

Brett closed his eyes.

“Tell me about her,” Djen said, though he was certain she had been asleep.

“I don’t think that would be appropriate, bringing someone else into our bed.”

She grunted. “She’s been here from the beginning, and she’s never gone. Certainly, she’s loaned me the use of you on occasion, but she hasn’t set you free.”

He could feel her staring at him.

“Or is it you that can’t set her free? I honestly can’t tell.”

“Djen–”

“This may be your last chance, the last one ever in your life, to share the grief with someone other than yourself. Free confession, Markus, that’s what this is, because right now I’m just like God, or at least getting there. You cast your sins into this ocean, and by tomorrow they’ll have disappeared without a ripple.”

Brett chewed his lip, whether in thought or to keep his mouth from betraying him, he didn’t know.

“What was her name?”

It was a simple question, and he lunged at it, because he recognized exactly what it was. Djen had come to know him. She understood the depth and grasp of secrets, and that she couldn’t expect them to come spilling out just because she wanted them, or even because he might have wanted them to. The experience was too complex to codify. Every detail interrelated in a way that made them all essential, so that the loss of one, even the smallest, would bring down the whole edifice.

She understood that the telling was cheapening. She’d told him that. But she also understood the rest, that humans are verbal creatures, that they make sense out of experience by talking themselves through it. In the absence of communication, what you have is fantasy, mystery, illusion all piling together into enigmatic mazes.

And so it was smaller than the smallest part where she began to open him up, to peel away the rough hide of his memory. She began with an artifact of the past that had predated his history, prefaced his entrance into the story.

Brett told her, most of all, because he wanted to. She understood that, too.

“Were you married to her, to Miss Emily?”

“No. We lived together for a few months. Not long, really. We had this great peeling and collapsing beach home just north of Savannah. I’m probably still paying the mortgage on it.”

Djen watched him with her dark eyes, but he didn’t notice any longer.

“And the dog, I don’t want to forget the dog. He was just a big scruff of fur, stupid as a cement block, and he’d always come piling through the kitchen with sand all over his paws. Emily would chase him around with a broom like she was going to break his damned head with it, then he’d yelp and run and eventually hide under the couch. It was hilarious stuff if you were allowed to sit back and watch, which I never was, of course.”

The memory bathed him in a glow as fresh and wholesome as spring. Emily with the broom over her head, her brows furrowed and her eyes small slits. She chased after him, Mr. Grumbly, shouting and cursing like a backslidden Baptist.

“She had this sweet, Georgia twang when she spoke,” Brett said. “She’d gone to school in New York, and lost a bit of it up north as time went by, but you could hear it if you listened. She said y’all if she wasn’t thinking about it. And peaches. Man, she smelled just like peaches all the time, especially in that little hollow between the neck and shoulder. It was amazing.”

Djen prodded him. “Where did you meet her?”

“College. I was nineteen, just going into my sophomore year. I was on scholarship–it was the only way my parents could have afforded to send me to a private university. I didn’t know much about upstate New York, though most of the time it wasn’t much different than southern Indiana in terms of the weather and the attitudes and the hospitality. Em’s folks had a summer home up there, and though they weren’t wealthy by that time, they wanted to send her to the best they could afford. She told me it was part of the definition of the new South. Girls of quality were supposed to be finely educated, and that meant something other than the statue university. That was for the minority kids, or the poor ones.

“She always thought we happened to run into one another that first day, in the apple orchard just outside of town. Merrilman’s? Moskiman’s?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, I guess. Em was with a group kids from her behavioral psych class–okay, our behavioral psych class. There were only about a hundred, hundred and fifty of us in there, and she didn’t know me. Oh, but I knew her. I’d watched her from the first day. She was like that, fresh and winsome and full of light.

“I heard the plan. I followed them. I made dead certain that we made contact. We talked about the best apples for baking, of all things, and I pretended like I knew at least something about it. Maybe she knew as little as I did, because if I blew any of the details, she sure didn’t call me on them. Later it was warm cider in the café, and I sat across from her with our knees touching. Her cheeks were red, I remember, because it was cold, though the sun was bright and everything seemed all golden and blue-sky perfect. Toward the end of the day, I suggested we should finish gathering our apples so she could rejoin her friends. She said to me, ‘Fuck the apples’, and landed this huge, wet kiss before I knew I should even expect it. I did know in that instant, however, that I wasn’t going to let this one get away. She was precious and beautiful and. . .hell, and perfect.”

Djen smiled at him. “From the kiss? Was it really that good?”

“Not the kiss, from the ‘Fuck the apples’. It was my first real glimpse of her feistiness. All that Southern class and Georgia charm, but inside, she was a goddamned hillbilly. I was from rural Indiana, baby. Hillbilly was second nature to me.”

Brett laughed and Djen laughed along with him at the pleasure of the remembrance, but he fell silent soon enough and continued. “That was really all it took. We were steady for two years, got engaged right after I graduated, though her parents were horrified that she’d not only fallen for a dreaded Yankee, but a hick Yankee besides. More because of them than us, we put the wedding off while we both did grad school. Then we settled in Atlanta for a year or so. She hated it, I hated it, so we made the house happen.”

“But you weren’t married?”

“We weren’t.”

Djen hesitated. She placed a warm hand on his cheek and pursed her lips in sympathy. In a quiet voice, she asked, “What happened?”

What could he say that would make sense? I destroyed her. Except that wasn’t totally true, and he knew it, though it was usually of no worthwhile comfort. Her parents took her away. Also close, but just as inaccurate. What choice had they ever possessed once he had played his part?

Brett gave the only answer that was honest enough to satisfy her.

“She came to Archae Stoddard.”

Djen blinked, either stunned or unable to comprehend. The gentle stroking she had performed against his cheek stopped.

“What?”

“Emily is Cassandra. The human component, of course. The primary system interface is what remains of her, what was left after the accident and the surgeons and the brilliant engineers at Palimpset. I followed her here, because it was the least I could do. And because I couldn’t do anything else. She was everything to me, and I wasn’t going to move on like the psychologists advised. I wasn’t going to throw myself into work. I wasn’t going to drive myself into an institution with grief, either.

“She was my wife in spirit, if not in actual deed. It was my responsibility, and my desire to go where she went and take care of her if she needed me.”

Brett looked away sharply. “She didn’t. She doesn’t. She never has. She doesn’t know me from any of the other crew, except that my rank entitles me to certain liberties and regular use of the PSI. That used to bother me, but it doesn’t much these days. I’m beginning to see that it never has been Emily, not since the accident. It’s always been Cassandra and my own fantasy that kept the illusion intact.”

He had explained, but it was done harshly, bitterly. Djen had been right the first time, he realized, when she’d told him to keep his secrets because the telling would tarnish them, cheapen them. A picture of Emily floated behind his eyes, but when he studied it, when he really bent his attention to the pierce the growing fuzziness of the mental image she had become, it was Cassandra’s pallor that he noticed first. If he let himself, he could spy the place where the feeding tube entered her back. Her hair vanished, to be replaced by the cold, fiber optic cortical inserts.

Brett closed his eyes against the image and buried his face in the heat of Djen’s shoulder. She said nothing, but smoothed the back of his hear as though he wept. He didn’t, not any more than Alaric wept over the sack of Rome, or Sherman over the holocaust of Atlanta.

He found himself anticipating the insertion of the nanomechs.

Djen whispered into his ear. “Most men spend their entire lives waiting for a moment of pure and incandescent strength, Markus. They live quiet lives. They dream quiet dreams. And in that desperate existence, they hope for a clear opportunity to measure themselves body and soul against a challenge so daunting that it makes them quiver. I believe you’ve had that moment. I think you met it, understood it and broke it down.

“But if you’re ever to be happy again, if you ever intend to know another instant of joy, you’re going to have to do more than your share. There’s a difference between honor and peace. You’ve earned all the honor you’ve accrued or could ever be given, because of what you’ve sacrificed for love. But if you want peace, Markus, you’re going to have to face that moment again and sacrifice something else.

“You’re going to have to choose. You have to choose between the past and the future, because you can’t live in both. You’ve tried. I know you have, because you’re doing it now, making love to me and thinking of Emily. Giving me your body, and her your soul. I’m not asking you to choose me. I’m not telling you to get over what you’ve lost. I’m telling you that you have to choose one or the other, because after tomorrow, if what we’ve had returns again where we have time and energy to give it the focus it deserves, one or the other of us will be destroyed. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.” And he did. It wasn’t a lie.

“Do you believe it?”

“Yes.”

She seemed content with that. Brett wove his arms around her and pulled her close once again, but he was grateful for the darkness and the silence and his inability to do anything but hear the quiet rise and fall of her breathing.

“I love you,” she said at last.

Brett held her and willed himself to sleep.

#

Emily swung back and forth on the hammock in the corner of the living room between the two banks of tall windows. She was in the hammock because they didn’t have a couch yet, though it was two months since they’d moved. They had scrimped for a decent one until last week when the old and clanking refrigerator had entered early retirement. The new fridge was nice, though, he had to admit. Ivory, with holographic insets of ducks. Or maybe geese, he wasn’t sure, but Emily had decided she would decorate the rest of the kitchen to match, whichever. He’d said that struck him as a fowl idea and laughed. She’d only looked at him.

It was high summer, mid-afternoon. Saturday. The windows were open, and there was a light breeze, tangy with salt, which pulled at her hair. Mr. Grumbly curled himself on the floor beneath her, using her motion as a personal fan. She wore a pale sleeveless blouse and khaki shorts. Her feet were bare because she liked to knot her toes between the strings. There was a book in her lap.

Brett sat in the chair on the other side of the room. The chair, because there weren’t any others, unless you counted the lawn chairs on the back porch. He sat in the chair, she took the hammock, because he wanted to watch the game, and she didn’t particularly care. Not that he did, either. The Braves at home against the Mets in crumbling Turner Field didn’t exactly bip his betty. But it was local, it was free, and it was baseball. He didn’t have the cash for the satellite connection that would bring him the Red Sox, so he made the best of it.

At least the Braves were getting properly walloped. That was something he could cheer about.

Because he wasn’t interested, he saw what she was about to do. He kept his eyes on the video screen, but his peripheral vision on her. He noted when the hammock ceased its swing, when the dog looked up in aggravation, when she folded the book closed with her finger between the pages to mark her place. He could just barely make out her expression, the intensity with which she watched him, the way she chewed at her lower lip.

Emily had wonderfully animated eyes. When she was surprised, her brows lifted high, then slowly descended as she relaxed. Her nose crinkled when she was unhappy, and her eyelids lowered. When she smiled, her eyes were big and round and inflected with an intentional innocence. When she was aroused, and when she was feeling mischievous, which were often nearly the same state, they were furtive slits of crystal blue.

She dropped the book onto the floor. It fell flat on its side with a resounding smack. Mr. Grumbly leapt ten centimeters off the floor and scrambled into the kitchen. Brett didn’t move.

“Prove to me that you exist,” Emily demanded of him.

“Nope.”

The Braves had put runners at first and second, but as it was the early innings and the pitcher batted next, he wasn’t concerned, even with only one out.

“Of course not,” she growled. “You won’t prove it because you can’t. There is no objective proof that you exist in my universe.”

“Or you in mine,” he suggested.

“Shut up. This is my universe, you carpetbagger. I might believe you exist. I might want you to exist. But that’s completely subjective.”

Brett rolled his head around his neck. “I might be a fig newton of your imagination.”

“You might very well be a figment designed by my überconsciousness to teach me patience.”

“And humility,” he added, winking. “Not to mention the forbidden secrets of hot and nasty Yankee sensuality.”

She rolled her eyes at him. If she’d had a pillow, she probably would have thrown it. Personally, he was just glad she’d dropped the book in a place that would spill her flat on the hardwood floor if she tried to retrieve it to chuck it at him.

“What are you reading?”

“I mean,” she continued, “we’ve only known since goddamned Descartes that all we can really prove about our experience of reality is that I think, so therefore I am. You, on the other hand, are a totally different argument built entirely upon questionable suppositions.”

Two balls, two strikes on the Braves’ pitcher. Brett began to wonder how he could get away with a good and satisfying grunt when the bastard swung at nothing but air, without Emily braining him for not paying attention.

He said, “Number one, I was not a philosophy major. Number two: you took just as many philosophy courses in college as I did, which was one, which was introduction to, which was designed to teach us as close as possible to nothing about the complexity of philosophy in general. Number three: I thought Bertrand Russell had something to say about Descartes being an idiot. Number four: what are you reading? And finally, Number five: if you throw that book at me, I’m going to pull back the edges of that hammock and shoot you out the window like you’ve been fired from a slingshot. Then I’m going to lock the door so you can’t get back in.”

She stopped mid-stretch toward the book, which was probably just as well since she was about a handspan away from overbalancing and flipping herself out onto her face and probably breaking her pretty little nose.

She huffed at him for a second or two. “It’s called Fractal Consciousness, and it’s by some Hahvahd trained piece of shit who thinks he’s solved the secrets of the universe. Jenny said it was brilliant.”

“Consider the source,” Brett said.

“I’ll find something else to throw at you.”

“Throw your shorts. That would be interesting.”

> The Braves’ pitcher did strike out, but Brett missed the pitch. Her khaki shorts deflected off the ceiling and landed directly on his head. He wasn’t certain if he was more impressed with the one in a thousand toss or the fact that she’d managed to wriggle out of her shorts without toppling from the hammock.

“So what’s the problem?”

“The author is an idiot,” she said. “And is taking my clothes off the only way to get your undivided attention?”

“It isn’t the only way, but probably the best.”

He left her shorts where she’d thrown them, but listened close in case she tried to spring at him while his eyes were closed.

“So why is the author an idiot?”

“Because he’s asking some interesting questions and he has some really fascinating thought experiments, but his science is bullshit.”

“Philosophy isn’t science. Nor is psychology once you take it out of the lab. Sociology, maybe. Most anthropology is a freaking joke.”

It was an old argument, and she didn’t let him get started. “He bases most of his major assumptions on a social universe with objective proofs.”

“You don’t have to read the rest of it. You have my permission. Read Descartes, instead. We know we agree with Descartes.”

She grunted in frustration. “That isn’t the point.”

“What is the point?”

“What do you mean when you say ‘I’, Markus?”

“I. Me. Markus Jasper Brett. Humper of the most attractive, shorts-less, intelligent woman in this room. Maybe on this whole beach.”

“If I was a therapist, I would say something critical, and perhaps cutting about the order of those adjectives.”

The eyebrow had just gone up. He didn’t need to see it or hear it in her voice to know he was about five seconds from a thrashing.

“Intelligent. Shorts-less. Attractive. That would be my dyslexia kicking in, my love. The first time, I mean. Everything is working properly now.” He offered a wide and apologetic grin, though she couldn’t see it through the fabric of her shorts covering his face. “Besides, if you were a therapist, I’d be forced to inform you that psychology as a field of study is little removed from phrenology, pedology, astrology and a dozen and a half other pseudo-sciences. Therefore, your conclusions, cuttingly critical or no, are suspect.”

“I’m serious, Markus. What do you mean when you say ‘I’? Do you mean the product of your memory since birth? Do you mean your brain and nervous system and the bag of flesh? Do you mean that nebulous thing you call your human spirit or your divine soul? What is the definition of ‘I’ beyond the obvious of its use as a self-referential artifact?”

He sighed deeply. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather just flirt a little more than go upstairs and have sex. Do I have to parse the meaning of consciousness on a Saturday afternoon?”

When she didn’t answer, he pulled the clothing away from his face. She watched him and waited. He, in turn, shrugged for lack of a better answer.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I want it to mean something profound. I want, when I say ‘I’ to speak of some wonderful, willowy, triune spirit, soul, and mind. A sense of interconnected being that goes beyond the fact that my neuronal connectivity keeps my perceptions, my thoughts and my behaviors in some basically coherent pattern that you can recognize. I want there to be more to me than the fact of my biology.”

“And that’s why the author is an idiot? Because everything comes down to biology?”

“That’s what he says.”

“What does this have to do with proving I exist?”

She tugged at her ear as though the question embarrassed her. “Nothing, except that if you could answer what I saw as the most obvious flaw, then I might have to think about closing my eyes and taking a bigger bite of the bullshit this guy is passing out as pastry.”

Brett raised his arms, signaling victory. “Dilemma solved. By not being able to answer the question, I’ve proved to you that I don’t exist and that you are therefore not merely a chittering bag of randomly attached cells.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Do I believe what? That you have a soul? That you’re individuated and special, and that there might be something so eternal sparkling inside you that it’s almost divine?”

He was kidding, but she wasn’t. Her mouth had set in that firm line that made her lips so pale they were invisible.

“Of course I believe it,” he said, and for her sake, he spoke in as serious a tone as he could manage. “I knew it from the first moment I saw you. Something in me cried out toward that something in you which it recognized as its own. That may not be objective proof, Em, not by a long shot. It’s mysticism or religion, but that’s good enough for me. In my universe, that sense of immediate recognition is the soundest and deepest and most profound of truths. And since the one I perceive is the only one I can prove for certain, that’s all the proof I need.”

She sprang across the room, leapt free of the hammock and landed in his lap without seeming to touch the floor. Emily threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him. She was laughing, and he delighted in the sound of it. Even the dog poked its head back into the room. He would have laughed as well, but she had crushed his nose in the cleft between her breasts and at the angle she held his neck, he was having some difficulty breathing.

“You’re an idiot, Markus,” she said. “You’re a stubborn, romantic, wise-ass, and I love you for it.”

“Because I know just what to say to make you feel better,” he mumbled into her chest.

“Because,” she corrected him, “you’re also going to run me upstairs and show me how fun and satisfying life can be if it turns out that you’re the one full of shit and I am just a meatbag with a nervous system.”

Brett hoisted himself to his feet. He caught her up in his arms, then twirled her around once so he could verify that the Braves had failed to score in the bottom half of the inning. He hooted to show his excitement and plunged with her up the stairway.

Neither of them made it back downstairs before sometime late Sunday morning.

<– Chapter 20 / Chapter 22 –>