Late March 1996 · Cambridge / Boston
Saturday started with Paige pounding once on Stephen's door and then opening it without waiting long enough to qualify as polite.
"You're awake."
Stephen looked up from the desk. "That sounds accusatory."
"It is accusatory." She stepped inside, took in the notebook, the open textbook, the pencil in his hand, and the jacket still hanging on the chair. "You said we were leaving in ten minutes."
"We are."
"You're still sitting down."
"That's usually how ten minutes begins."
Paige folded her arms. "No. That's how ten minutes disappears."
He capped the pen, shut the book, and stood. "You're very intense for a Saturday."
"You're very willing to let a Saturday die in this room."
That was harder to argue with than he wanted.
The air outside still had enough cold in it to keep winter from feeling fully gone, but March had stopped trying to be January. Snow only survived now in dirty ridges where the plows had pushed it and forgotten it. The sidewalks were mostly damp instead of frozen. Sunlight kept catching in puddles and making the whole city look briefly cleaner than it was.
Paige waited on the front steps while Stephen locked the door. She had one hand in her coat pocket and the other wrapped around a coffee cup. Her hair was loose today, not fully brushed into order, just left alone. That usually meant she had decided not to care who saw her before noon.
"You're underdressed," she said as soon as he stepped down beside her.
"I'm wearing a coat."
"You left the scarf."
"I'll survive."
Paige looked at his neck, then at the weather, then at him again. "Debatable."
They had made it half a block before Eugene came jogging around the corner with his glasses slipping down his nose and a messenger bag bouncing against his hip like it was trying to escape.
"Good," he said, a little out of breath. "You didn't leave without me."
Paige did not break stride. "We considered it."
"You say that every time."
"Because every time it's true."
Eugene fell into step on Stephen's other side. "I brought nothing useful and exactly one opinion."
"That sounds normal," Stephen said.
"It is a weekend," Eugene replied. "Standards are different."
They took the Red Line over because Paige did not feel like walking the full distance to Harvard Square and Stephen was not going to suggest otherwise after the week they'd had. The train smelled like old metal, wet coats, and somebody's coffee turning sweet near the bottom of the cup. A little kid in a puffy jacket kept staring at Eugene's bag until Eugene finally opened it just enough to reveal that it was mostly books and not, as the child clearly hoped, something more interesting.
Harvard Square was already busy by the time they came up the stairs.
People were out in that particular March way where everybody wanted spring badly enough to pretend the wind wasn't still cold. The brick underfoot stayed damp in the shade. Someone was playing guitar badly near the corner. A delivery truck blocked half the view of the bookshop Stephen knew Amy had suggested.
She was waiting outside the café across the street with both hands in her coat pockets and the expression of somebody who had been there exactly as long as she intended to be there and not one minute more.
Amy Farrah Fowler did not wave.
She inclined her head once when she saw them and said, "You are two minutes late."
Paige crossed the street first. "We brought Eugene. It complicated the geometry."
Amy's eyes shifted to Eugene.
Eugene, who had spent the last ten minutes speaking too casually about how meeting new people was not in fact a stressful event for him, straightened in a way that made the lie obvious.
"Amy," Paige said, "this is Eugene. Eugene, Amy."
Eugene stuck his hand out too fast, corrected the speed halfway through, and produced something close enough to normal. "Hi."
Amy shook his hand once. "Hello."
There was a half second where Stephen could see Eugene deciding whether to speak and losing the decision to his own nerves.
"I know," Eugene said. "That sounded very advanced."
Paige closed her eyes briefly.
Amy looked at him for one beat too long, then said, "It sounded like hello."
Stephen had to look away.
Paige didn't bother hiding her smile. "Good. Everybody's settled."
"I'm settled," Eugene said.
"No," Paige said. "You're trying very hard."
Amy glanced toward the used bookstore. "Are we going inside or are we doing the thing where everyone stands outside and explains the day instead of starting it."
They went inside.
The bookstore was narrow and overfull in the best possible way. Shelves reached higher than they should have. Handwritten cards stuck out of sections that did not need them. The floor creaked in the back left corner near philosophy every time someone put weight on it. It smelled like dust, old paper, and heat from the vent fighting a losing battle near the front door.
The four of them spread out almost immediately.
Stephen ended up in mathematics and computation, which surprised no one. Paige drifted between linguistics, systems, and a shelf of old cognitive science texts with broken spines. Amy went straight toward neuroscience as if the room had pulled her there on a wire. Eugene vanished into the general nonfiction section and then reappeared every four minutes holding a book nobody had asked to see.
"This," he announced the first time, appearing at Stephen's shoulder with a battered hardback, "is apparently a definitive failure."
Stephen looked at the title. "That's geophysics."
"Yes. But still definitive."
"That doesn't mean anything."
"It means the confidence of the subtitle offended me."
Stephen took the book, read the subtitle, and handed it back. "You're right."
Eugene brightened. "Thank you."
"That doesn't make the rest of the sentence useful."
Paige's voice drifted in from the next aisle. "Nothing makes the rest of his sentence useful."
Eugene disappeared again.
Amy found Stephen twenty minutes later while he was crouched in front of a low shelf reading the jacket copy of a book on probabilistic reasoning that had aged badly.
"That one is weak in the middle," she said.
He looked up. "You've read it."
"I tried to. He starts confusing measurement with certainty around chapter four."
Stephen stood and slid the book back in place. "That's a common problem."
Amy's eyes shifted to the shelf, then back to him. "Paige says you've been sleeping badly."
That was abrupt even for her.
"She says a lot of things."
"She usually says accurate things."
He looked toward the front of the store. Paige was three aisles over, leafing through something and smiling at one line on the page. He couldn't hear her laugh, but he could see it happen.
Stephen said, "The symposium made the room louder than I expected."
Amy absorbed that without hurrying to answer. "You are not as opaque as you think."
"That sounds unhelpful."
"It isn't meant to comfort you." She tilted her head slightly. "You're easier to be around now."
He didn't answer.
Amy continued, because of course she did. "Last year, every conversation with you felt like you were pre-arguing with someone who wasn't there. You don't do that as much."
"That sounds like a criticism with better posture."
"It's an observation."
He looked at her properly then. "Paige told you that."
Amy considered it. "No."
That felt true enough to be worse.
Before he could respond, Eugene appeared again, this time holding a paperback on behavioral economics and looking pleased with himself.
"I found one," he said. "This man is wrong on page three."
Amy held a hand out. Eugene gave her the book with surprising obedience. She read one paragraph, flipped to the back, checked the publication year, and handed it back.
"He's wrong by page two."
Eugene stared at her. "That was the best thing anyone's said to me all morning."
"Your standards are unstable," Amy said, and walked away.
Lunch happened because Paige declared it was happening and nobody in the group had enough energy to resist her when she got like that.
They ended up in a small noodle place off the Square where the windows fogged at the bottom and the tables sat a little too close together. The host tried to fit them at a two-top, thought better of it when Paige looked at him, and pushed two small tables together by the window.
Eugene knocked his water glass with his elbow before they'd even looked at menus.
It tipped, rolled, and dumped half its contents across the table toward Amy's sleeve.
Stephen caught the glass before it hit the floor. Paige caught the soy sauce bottle before it joined the disaster. Amy lifted her notebook out of the way without saying a word.
Eugene froze. "I can explain."
Paige took the wet napkins from the holder and pressed them into his hand. "Don't."
Amy wiped one drop off the table edge with a dry corner of her napkin and said, "You seem to generate local weather."
"That's fair," Eugene said.
The server came over, took one look at the table, and turned around for more towels without asking questions.
By the time the food arrived, the crisis had shrunk enough to become funny instead of humiliating. Stephen sat at the end where the two tables met, which gave him just enough room to brace his knees properly and keep the whole arrangement from shifting every time Eugene moved.
Paige looked over the top of her menu. "Order something that tastes like you chose it."
"That sounds manipulative."
"That sounds correct."
Amy was still scanning the menu with the seriousness of a grant review. "What does that mean in practical terms."
Paige said, "It means if he orders plain noodles and tea, I'm taking his wallet."
Stephen looked at Amy. "This is why I stay busy."
"That is not a defense," Amy said.
Eugene looked delighted by all of this. "I'd like it noted I'm being very reasonable."
Nobody acknowledged him.
Stephen ended up ordering spicy miso and dumplings mostly because Paige was still watching him and because he did, in fact, like spicy miso when no one made a sociological event out of it.
When the food came, conversation loosened.
Eugene admitted he had been slightly intimidated meeting Amy and then tried to cover the admission by calling himself "socially overclocked." Amy told him that was not a real phrase and then, after a pause, said she understood what he meant. Paige watched that exchange with open amusement.
At one point, Amy asked Stephen whether systems-builders ever actually stopped thinking in systems or whether they just learned better social camouflage.
He answered after a sip of broth instead of immediately, which Paige noticed and approved of without saying so.
"I think most of us just get more selective about when we admit it."
Amy nodded. "That tracks."
Eugene pointed between them with a dumpling. "You two are much meaner to concepts than Paige is."
Paige looked up. "That's because I'm meaner to people."
"That's not true," Eugene said.
Paige held his gaze.
Eugene revised quickly. "That's only true sometimes."
After lunch they walked to the river.
The wind picked back up near the Charles, enough that Amy zipped her coat all the way to her throat without comment. Eugene lagged half a step behind for most of the first stretch because he was still finishing his drink and refused to throw it out before it was truly empty.
The four of them spread and recombined naturally, first Stephen and Paige together, then Paige pulled forward by Amy when Amy wanted to point out something half absurd in a flyer taped near the footbridge, then Stephen and Eugene for half a block while Eugene explained why he had definitely recovered socially and did not need anybody to comment on it.
Stephen let him talk until Eugene ran out of certainty on his own.
Then Amy dropped back beside him while Paige and Eugene drifted a little ahead.
They walked in silence for a while.
Amy didn't rush to fill it. That was one of the reasons he found her easier than most people. If she spoke, it was usually because she had decided speech would improve the situation.
After nearly a minute, she said, "She's less tense when you're around."
Stephen looked over. "Paige."
"Yes."
That was all Amy offered at first.
He looked ahead. Paige was saying something to Eugene that had made him stop flailing his hands long enough to actually listen.
Stephen said, "That sounds like her business."
"It is." Amy adjusted her sleeves against the wind. "I'm not handing you a warning. I'm telling you because you seem like the sort of person who could miss a fact by refusing to classify it."
That was so specifically aimed that he had to respect it.
He said, "You do realize that was rude."
Amy glanced at him. "Yes."
They walked another few steps.
Then Stephen asked, "Does she seem different to you."
Amy thought about it. "Less defensive. Faster to laugh. More likely to leave a room before she's exhausted by it." She put her hands in her coat pockets. "You're better too."
He looked over.
"You don't sound like you're defending your right to exist every time you answer a question," Amy said. "That's new."
He had no good response to that.
Ahead of them, Paige turned and looked back once, found them, and slowed slightly without breaking stride.
Amy saw it too and said, almost absently, "See."
By the time they stopped at a bakery near the Square for coffee and something sweet, the group sounded easier around itself.
The place was crowded enough that they had to take two small tables near the back and turn the chairs at angles that made conversation possible. A glass case held pastries with more icing than structure. Eugene chose something with too many layers and then spent the first two bites trying not to wear it.
Paige ordered first, fast and certain. Amy surprised everyone by choosing the sweetest thing in the case and then looking annoyed when Eugene noticed.
"I was prepared to have an image of you as severe and nutritionally suspicious," Eugene said.
Amy took one measured bite and said, "That sounds like your error."
Paige laughed into her coffee.
Stephen ended up paying because the line had moved faster than the argument about splitting it and because it was easier to deal with the cash register than all of them pretending not to care.
When he came back to the table, Eugene narrowed his eyes. "That was sneaky."
"That was efficient."
"You're too old for that word."
Paige took her cup from Stephen before he sat down. "No, he's exactly old enough for it."
Eugene pointed between the two of them. "You know, at some point I'm going to stop pretending this is a provisional arrangement and just say you're basically married in a lab-approved way."
All three of them answered him at once.
"No," Paige said.
"That's not how marriage works," Amy said.
Stephen said, "You should talk less."
Eugene looked almost proud. "That's the most unified response I've gotten all day."
Nobody apologized.
The light had started going by the time they left the bakery. Amy had to head back toward Harvard. Eugene peeled off two blocks later with promises that were either real or accidental about reading a paper he had found in the used bookstore. That left Stephen and Paige walking back toward MIT with the day finally thinning out around them.
The city looked softer at that hour without actually being quiet. Traffic was still there. Doors still opened and shut. Somewhere behind them someone dropped a stack of something metallic and cursed. The river air had turned colder again.
Paige had her hands in her coat pockets. "Well."
Stephen glanced at her. "That sounds loaded."
"It means Eugene survived Amy."
"That was not guaranteed."
"No." Paige smiled slightly. "I think he impressed her once by accident."
"That's probably his best route."
They crossed one street in silence.
Then Paige said, "You needed that."
He looked at her.
"The day," she said. "Not the bakery specifically. Though that too."
Stephen let out a breath through his nose. "Yes."
"You say that like it surprises you."
"It does."
Paige looked ahead at the dorm lights coming into view. "You've been doing a bad job pretending you can live entirely inside the project."
"That's harsh."
"It's accurate."
He put his hands in his coat pockets and felt the folded bookstore receipt in one of them. One book for him. One for Paige because he had seen her pause over it and then put it back, thinking he hadn't noticed.
"I know," he said.
Paige glanced at him then, quick and satisfied. "Good."
At the front steps she caught his sleeve once before he reached for the door.
He turned.
"You're not going upstairs to work."
That was not a question.
Stephen looked at the door, then at her. "You've become very directive."
"You've become very manageable when you're tired."
"That feels insulting."
"It should."
She let go of his sleeve and opened the door herself. Warm lobby air came out in a stale rush. "Come on."
He followed her in.
(Thanks for reading, feel free to write a comment, leave a review, and Power Stones are always appreciated. Let me know if you find any mistakes)