It had been. And finding it, finding something so small that I never would have without his clue—without his telling me his secret—made me warm in a way I hadn’t been in a long time.
So a stranger and I began, one degree of separation between us.
This lonely season I’ve made it my routine to curl around the glowing hearth our words make in the dark.
We’ve made rules, big ones, so that we can maintain the stakes—small ones. I’m still just Lincoln, and he remains C. We’ve not met, and haven’t asked to.
We know that we both work in the college of sciences at Lakefield State, but not for who or what.
The present is the immediate present of the moment, the past distant, the future nonexistent.
We’re stripped down to just enough words for a few flames of ideas, illustrated with his photographs, illuminated with a safe spark that flares bright and quick against the blackness of my evenings.
I leave Jenny behind in the bright winter light.
Here, it’s just C and Lincoln, strangers everywhere else in the big world but here, inside the tight circle of light we’ve allowed ourselves, everything else crowded out.
Sometimes, I write to C tonight, sleet ticking against the window, I really like living by myself for the first time. Like, I realized that I always eat cereal in the living room, and never for breakfast anyway, so I got one of those dorm fridges and I set up a cereal station right at the end of the sofa.
Really? C’s response blinks up. I’ve started to think I can hear the sound of his voice when his words pop into his message box in the corner of the screen.
No. But I think about doing that all the time.
What’s stopping you?
Nothing’s stopping me. I think that’s the problem. I’m not ready to do something crazy without someone else arguing with me that I’m a little nuts. Doing something crazy all by my lonesome still feels lonely.
You know what would be completely insane and you probably shouldn’t do?
I grin, and adjust the laptop where it’s perched on the arm of my sofa. No idea.
You absolutely should not buy a tiny fridge so you can keep milk and cereal in your living room to eat on the sofa.
I laugh, but am surprised by the tears that come right after. Thanks, C.
Anytime, Lincoln. One more thing.
Yeah?
Let me know when you get the tiny fridge and I’ll share a bowl with you.
He’s serious about that, I know. If I wanted him to, he would leave his unimaginable house and get into his unimaginable car, and he would be here. I would see him and he would be more than words on my screen, glowing in my dark Ohio living room.
This man, who coincidence found for me, could fill the space beside me on my sofa, warm and real.
I’m not ready for real.
I want to be, but I’m not.
Anything else I shouldn’t do? I hold my breath. My hands, my neck, go hot after typing the words.
You shouldn’t suck on the end of your finger. Then you shouldn’t use that finger to draw a circle around your nipple. You shouldn’t let that finger brush over where your pajama pants have warmed up. Definitely don’t get your whole hand under your panties and think about what my hand would feel like, how you wouldn’t be able to predict what my hand would do from moment to moment, how you’d jump when I pinched and how you’d push against me when I slid inside.
We don’t do anything, just like that, for a long time. As long as it takes the loud rattle of sleet to quiet into snow.
* * *
“Hey, Jenny?”
“Yeah, Bob?”
I’m messing with the app that adjusts the screen of my monitor to account for the light levels in the room. It isn’t perfect, but it’s necessary.
I’m not sure I’d programmed the right resolution for the sample I zapped with electrons earlier.
“Were you the last one here last night?” Bob comes over and leans against my worktable. He’s a good scientist but he also uses lab supplies to plate out his own throat cultures when he’s worried he has strep, so I think of him as a kind of rogue.
“Yep.” I toggle the black/white balance.
“You armed the alarm?”
“Um, yep?” I stop what I’m doing to look at him. He has his arms crossed over his EXPERIMENT WITH A MICROBIOLOGIST T-shirt.
“No.”
“No?”
“You put the code in, but you didn’t hold the door so the contact plate was touching the bar thingy.”
Shit. “Sorry.” I wince.
“Forgetting about the tens of thousands of dollars of cultures we’ve got in here, we’ve also got a lot of computer equipment.”
“I know; I get it. I honestly thought I was holding the door so that the bar was making contact.”