Earth Bound (12 page)

Charlie had taken an entire afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at least a quarter of an hour of which she’d spent in front of a single chalk sketch by Michelangelo. In the picture, the figure’s body had been twisted, muscular, beautiful, but it was the hands that had kept Charlie riveted in place. The wrists radiated strength, the fingers long and graceful. They reached off the page, away from the viewer. She’d wondered if they would be rough from work, or smooth like silk. Those fingers had haunted her dreams for weeks.

Parsons had hands an Italian master would salivate to sketch.

His hands were probably why she’d said those stupid words, and why she’d had an assignation in a seedy motel with him. They were why, only hours after she’d left him and with her body still sore, the sight of his fingers sweeping over the conference table, gesticulating, holding his pen, had her running back to her office until she could cool down.

She didn’t want to think about how they’d felt in her hair when he’d finally kissed her. She didn’t want to remember his forearms bracketing her head while he’d thrust into her or the desperate edge to his breathing, as if he needed this, her. She particularly didn’t want to consider the weight of him, the textures and planes of his body, hard against her when they’d finished. All she’d wanted in that moment was to burrow into him and stay all night. Warm and sated.

Which had been why she’d bolted as fast as she could, hauling her clothes on and her façade back into place.

He wanted her body—
that
had been obvious. But he also wanted the boundary between who they were here and what they did there. She wanted to show him she understood, that she could respect it, that she needed it too.

She stepped out of her shoes and balled her toes against the linoleum floor. She knew two things: First, she was going to overcome this, to learn how to keep it locked away. She was going to figure out how to sit in a room with him and not think of his fingers on her thighs. Because, second, she wasn’t going to stop meeting him in hotel rooms. The desperation, the intensity, the near violence with which she’d found pleasure with him—no, she wasn’t about to give those things up after having found them.

All she needed was to blot out his hands. Then she could be in a room with him, cold as marble like she was supposed to be.

February 1962

Parsons opened his eyes and stared at the bedside clock.

4:31 a.m. and he awoke without the alarm going off, as he did every morning. You could take the boy off the farm, but not the farm out of the boy.

The morning was winter dark and chilled; the sun wouldn’t appear for another few hours. Being awake at 4:30 in February was always a special kind of misery.

He gave a sharp glance to the empty half of the bed before rolling onto his back, tossing his arm over his forehead. Before he’d begun this…
thing
with Charlie, he’d slept in the very middle of his bed. It was his damn bed, he didn’t have to share it—why shouldn’t he take up all of it?

She’d never once been in his bed—never would be—but ever since their first assignation all those months ago, he’d slowly inched over to one side in his sleep, making space. And he’d stayed there. They didn’t even fall asleep together in the hotel, so he didn’t know what his strange sleep patterns were all about.

If he was going to think about her, there were better choices to linger on than why he was sleeping funny. He’d rather remember how she’d looked last week in a sheath dress and heels, a strand of turquoise beads around her slim neck, at the blackboard as she worked out a calculation. She’d taken her lip between her teeth as she’d pondered, eyes narrowed as she attacked the problem.
 

But it wasn’t her lip caught in her teeth that had hung in his memory. No, it was when she’d raised a hand to the board, long-fingered, the nails a delicate shade of coral, pressed her fingertips to the surface, and flexed against it.

It might have been the most erotic thing he’d ever seen, that tiny movement of her hand. If they’d been alone, he might have taken her upper arm, spun her from the board, and dragged them both to the ground. She’d have threaded those fingers through his hair, spreading white through the strands and grinding chalk dust into his scalp as she demanded he kiss her harder, deeper…

He would, too. He’d drive himself into her, savoring her high, breathy moans as he pushed them both toward—

His hips lifted from the mattress as he came into his hand.

He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling, and simply breathed for several moments. There. Now he was ready to face her at work, to keep all his lustful thoughts confined to where they ought to be: here in this bed and in that hotel room.

He got up, changed the sheets, had a shower, and made his way to the kitchen in his robe. A few shakes of the grape-nuts box into a bowl, a splash of milk, and breakfast was ready. He was halfway through the bowl when the phone rang.

He picked it up. “Parsons.”

“Eugene, is that how I taught you to answer the phone?”

A smile softened his mouth. “No, Ma. How are you?”

“My rheumatism is bothering me some, but other than that, I’m all right.”

Which probably meant she could barely move her hands, but he knew better than to bring that up. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“Roy told me the old Deere was acting up again. Wouldn’t start.”

So this was the purpose of the call. He knew his mother loved him even though she wasn’t the most demonstrative of mothers, but she never called without a reason. She thought him too busy to bother, not for anything so silly as a mother checking on her son, so she always had a reason when she called. A small one sometimes, but she always had some excuse.

“That machine is tricky,” he said. He remembered it well, the temperamental old bastard. “Tell Roy to check the choke. It slips sometimes.”

“I will. And that’ll probably fix it right up. Did I tell you the Smiths got a new combine?”

He tucked the phone between his ear and his shoulder and took a sip of coffee. “Did they? How much did that cost?”

This was exactly the question his mother had been waiting for. “Oh, who knows.” Too much, her tone said. “I’ve heard it has a
radio
.”

He smiled at her scandalized emphasis on
radio
. “What do you need a radio for in a combine?”

“That’s what I want to know! And how much more did that cost?”

“Too much, I’d guess.” It was a comfort to talk with his mother of the things of his childhood, letting his accent slip where it wanted to.

But there remained one thing—“How’s Dad?”

A long pause, in which he heard everything his mother wasn’t going to say. “He had a bad day yesterday,” she said.

Which meant it must have been terrible. “What happened?”

“Oh, the usual. He just… he’d do things differently than Roy does.”

His father had always been a stern man who wanted things done his way. But as he’d aged, the stern need to control everything had hardened into an explosive rage over the fact he was too ill to work any longer and the world refused to shape itself to his desires.

He understood his father’s need for control all too well. Sometimes he thought he was turning into his father, albeit on a slower time scale. Thank God he had no immediate family to drag with him on his journey of embitterment.

“I know, but Roy doesn’t do things wrong.” He’d have to call his brother later this week, find out exactly what had happened.
 

His mother’s sigh was heavy even across the line. “Your father isn’t wrong either. It was no easy thing to keep this farm going during the Depression.”

“Roy knows.” There would be no farm for Roy to inherit if Dad hadn’t worked so hard. But knowing that didn’t make his blow-ups any easier to take.

Another long pause, but he sensed this one had nothing to do with his father. “The town took up a collection,” she said finally.

His heart slowed as he realized what that was about. “Oh?”

“They wanted to put up a new monument for George.”

The shame made his mother’s voice sag. The shame sizzled across the line and settled in Parsons’s gut, shame that his family couldn’t afford a proper memorial for their war hero son and the town had to provide it instead.

“Well, that was…” He couldn’t finish the lie and say nice. “Something.” This then was the real reason Ma had called.

“Yeah.”

“Where they gonna put it?”

“Right in the center of town.”

Of course they would. “Well, he deserves it.” And George did. But Ma didn’t deserve the reminder of her lost eldest son every time she went into town, or the reminder that other folks had paid for it instead of the family.

“He does.” Her swallow was loud across the connection. “Just thought I’d tell you.”

“Thanks, Ma,” he said softly.

“All right, I’ll let you go.”

“I’ll talk to you later.” He hung up the phone, letting the pride and grief—and yes, the
shame
—he felt whenever George came up wash over him for long moments as he braced himself against the counter. Then he tossed his bowl into the sink and went to finish getting ready.

He walked back into the bedroom and switched on the radio. Hank Williams sang about how nobody was lonesome for him as Parsons shaved in the bathroom. When he was done, his shadowed jaw met his gaze in the mirror. No matter how often or closely he shaved, he never could get rid of that shadow.

He put on his usual uniform of white shirt, black suit, and black tie and he was ready. Only two days until they sent Kit Campbell into orbit, now that Joe Reynolds had backed out. Only two days until Parsons found out if his efforts to wrestle the astronauts, engineers, and everyone else at ASD into shape would pay off.

Charlie couldn’t stare at the punch cards stacked on her desk any longer. With the first manned Perseid mission at a successful end, people might assume the hard work was over. They would be wrong, and Charlie knew it. The impossible things they were going to do were only starting.

She had to pinpoint every moment of suboptimal computer performance and fix it before the next mission in a few months. Then, when they sent up another astronaut to follow Kit Campbell into space, they would have learned from their mistakes.

Next time she would complete the damn confirmation of the exit angle in twenty-two seconds as projected, for example.

Charlie frowned hard at the wall, remembering Parsons’s admonishment of the morning before, but of course it wasn’t as if she’d punished him for it. Oh no, she’d snapped to attention the moment he’d asked and met him at Mulligan’s that very night. Well, he had been under a bit of a strain, and really, with a little practice, she could reliably hit—

She pressed her palms hard into the desk. She was doing it again: making excuses for him. She needed to stop that. She needed to stop thinking about him at all, actually. He was her boss. He was her lover. She needed to keep those ideas constrained and separate—and she didn’t need to give him a single second more of her time than he warranted in either capacity.

What she needed was to find these errors. He couldn’t help her do that.
 

But some coffee might.

Charlie fished her mug out from under a pile of file folders, reports, and scratch paper and headed for the break room.

There, watching the coffee pot percolate, was the man of the hour.

“Congratulations again.” While they’d seen each other last night, they hadn’t really spoken of the mission—by design—so she offered the platitude to Parsons, or more specifically to his back, dryly.

He startled and gave her a look, but he quickly settled into his normal tense posture once he saw who’d interrupted him. “Ah, I didn’t know anyone was around.”

“There’s too much to do. The lights are on in crew systems, too.”

“Well, those bastards have a lot to answer for.”

Charlie snorted and pulled out one of the chairs at the table. “Such as?”

Parsons turned and leaned against the counter. He crossed his arms over his chest. His movements were slow, though not graceful. He was probably exhausted. “Well, crew systems and the capsule team have spent the day in my office arguing about who was responsible for the faulty switch on the heat shield.”