Earth Bound (17 page)

But her analytical expression never eased into something less unsettling, and he had the sensation she could somehow see those inconvenient emotions, even though he’d already locked them into that impenetrable box.

She’d found him. It had been almost five hours since the meeting broke up. Charlie had waited for Dot and Beverly and everyone else in computing to go home. Then she’d given it another thirty minutes, in case anyone was lingering elsewhere.

She’d started her search in his office, and when he hadn’t been there, she’d gone down the hall to crew systems. He seemed to like to wander there, simply to touch the mechanical bits scattered around. She could tell he missed engineering; it was in his fingertips when he’d stroke some new machine. He’d stay in contact with a prototype a beat or two longer than was necessary. He wished he’d built it.

But at any rate, he wasn’t in crew systems.

She could try the parking lot, she supposed, to see if his car was there. But before she could, she detoured to the break room, and when she rounded the corner she found him.

His hands were braced on the counter, his shoulders hunched. The coffee pot was percolating. Inside the carafe, the coffee was sputtering and bubbling.

“You should set up some of the engineers to build a better one.”

At her voice, he didn’t turn, but he shifted his weight and his body softened. His tone was still guarded, however, when he said, “That would be a misappropriation of ASD resources.”

She leaned against the doorjamb. “This place can’t run without caffeine. It would be a necessary investment. Should I run a cost-benefit analysis for you?”

He gave her a sliver of his profile then. He was smiling the barest amount, and it made her sad—sad he didn’t smile more, sad something had rattled him at the meeting, and sad that for all she knew about him, she didn’t truly know him.

At this point, she knew the textures of his body: the springy, coarse curls on his chest, the strength of his arms, the hard thrust of his… well, best not to go down that route now.

She knew what frustrated him. She knew what drove him mad. But she didn’t know what might lead him to insult Friedrich Gerhardt in front of everyone at ASD.

Most of all, she didn’t know why she cared.

But that didn’t stop her from walking into the break room and pulling out a steel-framed chair. It squealed on the linoleum floor, and she curved herself into it.

“Why aren’t you at home?” he asked.

“Eh, I wanted to get a start on some notes toward a schematic.”

He turned around, empty coffee mug in hand. “This is like Christmas for you. I present an impossible rendezvous mission, and you think—”

“It’s never been done, and I get to help.”

He gestured with the mug. “I want to copy you.”

“Well, that’s another technological problem—and we don’t have enough biologists on staff.”

He laughed then. An actual Eugene Parsons laugh. She wanted to note the occurrence, but she also didn’t want to scare him from doing it again.

She did something equally stupid, though. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Genetics? Oh no. Not my area.”

He knew exactly what she’d meant, so rather than responding, she waited. They watched each other—evenly—until the coffee machine stopped hissing.

Then he said, “I’m an asshole. You’ve known that for over a year.”

So she had. “This time it was unprovoked. What did Gerhardt ever do to you?” He huffed out a laugh, but without humor. She added, “This time, it felt different.”

Parsons blinked and adjusted his glasses. He was digesting what she’d said, or he was pondering the new oxygen filtration system for the capsule, or—she didn’t
know.
She wanted to pound on his chest, to make him tell her, but she knew she couldn’t force any intimacy from or with him.

“Your coffee is done,” she said instead. Her voice came out light, as she’d intended.

He poured some and pulled out the chair across from her. He didn’t sit down. He pondered the chair intently. “Is anyone else around?”

“No. It took me a while to find you, and I didn’t see a soul.”

He nodded. Then he looked up, right at her. “You… searched for me?”

Well, it was a night for confessions. “Call it an impulse.”

He was twitchy, but he was keeping it contained. She could see it in his eyelids, in his hands fisted in his pockets.

He surprised her when he spoke at last. “I have—had—a brother.”

Ah. She released a long breath.

“He was seven years older than I am. I have another brother, Roy, who is five years older. I was—I mean my parents have never said this, but I suspect I was not planned for. I grew up on a farm; they clearly assumed they’d pass it to my older brothers. Anyhow, he, George, was…”

He trailed off. She didn’t push. She tried not to move. She couldn’t believe he was telling her, and she didn’t want him to stop.

He nodded a tiny bit and spit out, “I found him overbearing.”

Parsons had found anyone overbearing? She almost snorted.

“He was, you know—” He stopped abruptly, and spun away from her. “Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“I realized I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

She suspected what he had actually realized was that he was about to reveal something about himself, but she’d let him avoid the truth if he wanted to. He didn’t owe her any of this—even if she desperately wanted to know.

He started pulling open the doors on the bank of cabinets behind him. “We have crackers. Sardines. What appears to be…” He unscrewed a jar and sniffed at the contents. “Uncooked oatmeal, perhaps.”

She smiled at his back. “You do realize that’s someone’s food.”

He put the lid back on the jar and examined the masking tape scrawled with a name. “I don’t think Winfrey would mind.”

“Have you met him? He’d bad-mouth you for years if you took so much as a teaspoon.”

“I can live with that.” He produced a loaf of bread and read another label. “What about O’Connell?”

“Oh, he’s over in retrieval.”

Parsons opened the loaf. “So you’re saying we
need
to take his bread as payment for your assistance with the calculations.”

“My role was minor.”

He set four slices on the counter. “The report you wrote was worth a bit of bread. Now what are we going to put on these?”

“This is stealing.”

“It’s borrowing. This is basically communal food.”

“Everything is marked. And don’t tell anyone here you think the food or anything else is
communal
. It sounds Soviet.”

“Hmm, I don’t care.” He rummaged a bit more in the cabinet. Then he held up a jar of peanut butter.

“Sure.” It beat sardines at any rate. “Is there jelly?”

He opened the refrigerator. “That didn’t take much convincing. We can have jelly if you don’t mind offending Vought.”

“Oh, she’s lovely. She won’t mind.”

He was opening the silverware drawer, but he froze. “You can’t tell her.”

“I’ll tell her I worked late and got hungry. It won’t surprise her in the least, and I’ll leave you out of it.”

He gave her a fond, apologetic glance, and her heart seized. What were they doing precisely?

The simplest answer was they were having a meal together. For the first time in a year. They’d wrestled with engineering problems, they were lovers, but they’d never eaten together.

Rather than consider the significance of that, she watched him spread the peanut butter in smooth, practiced motions. Then he added jelly, and finally he handed her a sandwich and sat across from her. They both started to eat, and she couldn’t suppress an appreciative moan.

“You don’t skimp on the jelly.”

“Why would I? That’s the best part.”

When they’d finished, she got herself a cup of coffee and sat again. A few beats passed, but he didn’t return to his story. Except now, having heard the beginning, she wanted the rest.

Very gently, she said, “So, tell me about George.”

He nodded. He’d relaxed a bit when he’d been making the sandwiches, but the bounce evaporated from his body at her prompt. He didn’t, however, flinch from the recitation.

“George was perfect. He never complained about his chores. And Lord, was he strong. Things I would struggle to do today—moving hay bales and whatnot—he tossed off, like it was nothing.”

His voice had changed, subtly. It was slower, more drawling. Spoken more from his nose and the back of his throat. But not enough for her to place this new accent of his.

“He was the star of the football team. All the girls loved him. He went off to college, and everyone had such hopes. Then his sophomore year, Pearl Harbor happened.”

He took a long sip of coffee and looked away at something only he could see off in the distance. “He signed up the next morning. He joined the Army Air Forces and became a pilot, and shipped off to England after his training. He never said so in his letters, but reading between the lines—along with the Distinguished Flying Cross he was awarded—he was…”

His voice didn’t falter exactly—more like it balked, a horse refusing a fence. He cleared his throat. “He was an amazing pilot. But of course, he would be.” He adjusted his glasses. “By then, I was in high school. Every teacher I had would say,
you’re George’s brother
. I existed in his shadow. I felt like I was this weaker, lesser version of him and could never measure up. And the last time he came home on leave, we had some words about it.”

She swallowed. This was going to be an end more tragic than she’d assumed, not of course that he was telegraphing it, or betraying any emotion whatsoever. No, his delivery was flinty, each word chipped off.

“George was understanding—he was always so damn understanding. He said he’d hoped I would realize someday it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t think it was true, he didn’t think I was—”

His voice broke, but his features stayed totally unvarying. The hands clenched around his mug had ossified. Everything was happening behind his glasses. He was blinking rapidly, but moisture was building up anyway.

She wanted to touch him, but it wouldn’t make it better. There was no making this better. There was no making this bearable. So she nodded.

When he started again, he didn’t tell her what it was George had thought he was. “Anyhow, he went back to England, and a few weeks later, he was on a bombing run over Germany. They were hitting a factory, and the first plane missed the anti-aircraft guns it was supposed to take out. George’s plane took fire, but they still hit their target and started the trip back to England. On the way, though, some Nazi planes scrambled after them. They were over the Channel when they lost an engine. The plane went down, and there must have been a problem with George’s parachute. Everyone else made it off the plane but him. Everyone else got rescued but him.”

When Parsons finished the story, the break room was interminably quiet. How did one even respond to something like that? She didn’t have any idea how to comfort someone. Could she tell a joke? Ask about the rendezvous plan?

“I’m sorry,” she said at last.

“Me too. I had apologized in a letter, and he’d said everything was fine, but I… I wished I’d seen him again. I wish those fucking German bullets hadn’t—well, at any rate, that’s why I can’t stand
Friedrich
.” He pronounced it with a thick German accent, though at last the emotion in his eyes had turned to rage. Anger from him was safer, more predictable, than vulnerability and tears.

She couldn’t let herself touch him, so she tapped her nails on the table in a bit of military tattoo. “He’s always struck me as vain. Have you seen his suits?”

Parsons scoffed. “His
tan
. I bet he has a pool. Stupid Nazi... Well, yes. Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but indulging this isn’t a good idea. Everyone lost someone in the war—we’re not special. And it won’t bring George back. I need to eradicate it, my response to him. I have to, so there’s no point wallowing in my dislike. I have to cut it out.”

“I guess you could try. But I have a better idea.”

He gave her a long sideways look. He knew what she meant. He always did. At first his expression was skeptical, even affronted, but then it heated until it threatened to scorch her.

“I’ll do our dishes,” he said, his voice rough with lust. “Meet you in twenty minutes.”

“A man who washes up? Make it fifteen.”

Without waiting for his retort, she tripped out. She might not know how to comfort him, but she could make them both forget, at least for a little while.