Page 64 of Ten Years and Then…
Nora, January 7
“Mom, if we don’t leave now, I’ll miss the train!”
Nora’s relationship with her mother had been infinitely better since last spring, but some things about Karen Langley hadn’t changed. Her lack of punctuality was one of them.
“Nora, darling, you worry too much.”
She didn’t say what she wanted to, something along the lines of, Because you don’t worry enough.
Mom had insisted on one last breakfast out at Nora’s favorite diner, which was thoughtful, but it had left Nora only fifteen minutes to pack her suitcase and find her train ticket before they absolutely had to be out the door. Those fifteen minutes, and another fifteen too, were gone now.
“Okay, Mom. But the train’s not going to wait and the next one isn’t until ten o’clock tonight.”
Ten minutes later, they were finally in her mother’s car.
“Don’t worry, dear. I know a shortcut. And Steven—lovely man, I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet him—bought me a radar detector for Christmas, so I can drive as fast as I like and not worry about tickets.”
Nora was pretty sure that wasn’t how radar detectors worked, and she absolutely didn’t trust her mother’s “shortcut.” But she just smiled and nodded anyway.
Somehow, they arrived at the station in one piece, and with five minutes to spare.
“I want you to enjoy yourself, Nora,” Mom said, walking ahead of her up the steps to the platform. Nora started to point out that you were supposed to walk behind someone, so that if they tripped, you’d be able to catch them before they fell backwards. But she thought better of it. “Perhaps you’ll find some time to see that boy you kept changing the subject about for the last two weeks.”
Nora sighed. There was a reason she hadn’t told her mother about Ben. She wasn’t sure what she thought about Ben herself, other than that he was very handsome, and smart, and her boss; but she knew her mother would have thoughts, and plenty to say about him—and she wasn’t at all prepared to hear it.
Daniel, the same time
Daniel was in his bedroom, checking the closet for the tenth time. There wasn’t any point; he was all packed and ready and he knew he hadn’t forgotten anything. It was just nervous energy, he supposed.
Dad was going to drive him all the way downtown, to Penn Station in an hour. He’d be back at Albion by this afternoon. Back in his dorm room. Back in the lab in Ellis Hall tomorrow morning.
Back to seeing Valerie three times a week.
He’d been thinking a lot about her over the break. Going over and over all the reasons why she wasn’t flirting with him, she wasn’t interested in him, he was just deluding himself.
Or was he? Maybe it was time to think logically about it.
He was only twenty-one, she was twenty-four. That was a huge difference. But his birthday was in two months; he was almost twenty-two. And he was just assuming she was twenty-four. Maybe she had a really late birthday. Or she’d been skipped a grade as a kid. Or she had a ton of AP credits and worked like a dog and finished undergrad in three years. They might be almost the same age, really.
She was nearly a lawyer, and far more knowledgeable than him. But was she really? Yes, she’d asked him to proofread a paper once, and he’d only understood about twenty percent of the words and maybe two percent of the argument. But that didn’t mean she was smarter—just trained differently. She lived in a world of case law and legal theory. His world was wires, code, and logic gates. Could she build a computer from scratch? Configure a company-wide network? Not likely.
He was a dork who played Battletech on Saturday nights. Yes, that was true. But she might have hobbies that most people would consider equally silly. Maybe she was an obsessive soap opera fan. Or she secretly loved knitting. Or anything, really. She could be just as much of a dork as he was, in her own way. And she might appreciate Battletech anyway—you had to think strategically as a lawyer, didn’t you?
All the things he thought were flirting were just his imagination. But she did make a point of always sitting closer to him than she needed to. And she touched his hand when it wasn’t at all necessary. And she never came in the lab except when he was there. It stretched credibility to believe those were all just coincidences.
He still wasn’t over Nora. There was no counterargument for that. Except—his mother had sat right here on his bed a few weeks ago and told him how she’d had her heart broken, and she went out and dated before she really felt ready. And it wasn’t like he was contemplating marriage or something. He could go out on a date—whether with Valerie or anyone else—without it being anything more than hopefully a fun couple of hours and maybe—or not—a kiss at the end.
And if it wasn’t fun, and there was no kiss, so what? It wouldn’t be the end of the world. He would have tried. That had to count for something.
Nora, January 8
Nora was just starting to unpack when the phone rang.
“Nora? I’m glad you’re back.” It was Ben. What could be so important that it couldn’t wait until the first staff meeting of the semester next week? “Want to meet me over at Sammy’s Grille in half an hour? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
It was weird that he called her dorm room; he never did that. So it had to be urgent. “Sure. Can we make it an hour, though? I literally just got in the door five minutes ago.”
“It’s a date. See you then!” And he hung up.
