Earth Bound (2 page)

“I don’t know.”
The probabilistic nature of the universe, perhaps?
But she didn’t want to anger him any further.

“Find out why.” His words were as hard as steel, and as cold. “Go through your processes and give me the time you promised.”

She’d never promised any such thing. “Of course.” It was the last thing she wanted to do, but once this mission was concluded they’d have to review all the processes anyway. She rose. “If that’s all?”
 

“Now,” he said, quietly. “I want you to do it now.”

He always had to twist the knife, didn’t he? “Even with all the critical tasks I’m overseeing?”

“Are you refusing?”

Sometimes she thought he hated her as much as he hated the astronauts and anyone else who failed to live up to his standards of how an ASD employee ought to perform.

But only sometimes.

“No. I’ll have it finished by the end of the day.”

He didn’t question that, since he knew she hit her deadlines. Her estimation of the time to complete the calculations this morning hadn’t been anything like a deadline, and they both knew it.

“When will that be?” Softer then, his intense gaze turned toward the papers on his desk.

Her skin tightened. “Before 9 p.m. I’ve an… appointment then.”

He nodded. “I’ll expect it.”

She left then, carefully shutting the door so it made no sound. And hung onto the handle for several seconds longer.

Everyone was at the party celebrating the safe return of Commander Campbell from his mission to space—everyone except the man most responsible for that safe return. They probably didn’t even notice he’d bolted early.

Eugene Parsons pulled into the lot of a seedy motel. One so seedy that not even the astronauts used it for their assignations. Which was the point. No one would see him here.

The powder blue Dodge he was looking for was parked in front of room nine.

He released the breath he always held until he saw the car. That was his fear: one day he’d show up and the blue car wouldn’t be there. He’d enter the room and it would be empty.

That was the agreement. Either one of them could end their arrangement at any time. But Parsons didn’t want it to end. Not yet. No, he wanted these meetings with a force that scared him sometimes.

How far would he have to push her before she decided it was no longer worth it? Before he pushed her completely out of reach?

He didn’t think he wanted to find out.

He parked his own car and went up to the door of room nine, gingerly trying the handle. Unlocked.

He slowly opened the door, walked in, and searched the shadows.

“How was your day, dear?” a voice asked from the darkness of the bed.

She was here
. Even though he’d seen her car, a small part of the fear held on until he knew for certain she was here. Waiting for him.

“All right.” He closed the door and began to strip off his tie.

“Make any astronauts cry?” she mocked. “You’re smiling, which means you must have.”

He could see her now, his eyes having adjusted. She was propped up on the bed, her blouse half unbuttoned, her skirt hiked to mid-thigh, her legs bare. Her curls were black in the low light as they tumbled about her shoulders. She had a beer in her hand, and she took a long swig as she studied him.

It had been quite a day, with the stress of thinking Campbell might not make it. For hours Parsons had calculated the odds of the entire mission burning to a crisp in the sky. But it had all ended well.

“Actually no,” he answered. “But that’s on the agenda for tomorrow.”

He unbuttoned his cuffs, rolled his sleeves up to his elbows while she watched. She took another swig, her throat working, her gaze shuttered.

He got onto the bed and climbed over her, enclosing her body with his own. She merely stared back, her bronze eyes defiant. Daring.

She never gave anything easy, this woman. He had to wrest everything from her. Which made it all the sweeter.

She lifted the beer to her mouth, took another swallow. As if he bored her. When she moved the bottle away, a drop of liquid clung to her swooping upper lip. He bent forward and licked it off.

“Hey,” she protested quietly. “That was my beer.”

He took it from her hand. “It’s mine now.” He set the bottle on the side table, lowered his mouth back to hers. “All mine.”

In this room, in the dark, with this woman, everything else fell away. There were no Soviets here. No faulty switches. No recalcitrant flyboys.

“That’s what you think,” she whispered against his lips.

Oh, but the struggle for control was just as real—and so were the rewards.

She never lingered afterward.

Not that Parsons expected her to. Half the time, he didn’t even expect her to show. And he never expected she’d stay.

She was already out of the bed and in the bathroom. Although the door was wide open, he didn’t watch her. Not that there would have been any point without his glasses.

He checked his watch. Seven hours until he had to be back for the debriefing on Campbell’s successful orbit.
 

She came out of the bathroom then, snatching up her girdle from the floor as she passed him.
 

He wished he could put on his glasses for this part, could catch all the fine details of what she was doing. But he already looked ridiculous enough without his clothes on—adding glasses would be putting a bow on it.

Even so, he saw enough. She shimmied into her girdle, going through the motions as if he weren’t even there. Not because she felt comfortable with him, but likely because he’d ceased to exist for her once he’d completed his usefulness.

She was the capsule here, serenely making her orbits, while he was the rocket casing, jettisoned to burn up in the long fall back to earth.

She lifted her leg, set her fine-boned foot on the chair, and rolled her stockings up. First one leg, then the other. It might have been a performance for him, if not for her air of utter impenetrability.

On went her dress next, her arms twisting behind her back as she pulled the zipper up. She didn’t ask for help. He didn’t offer.

He ought to get ready himself. He propped himself up on his elbows, the sheet falling away as he did. The world came back into sharp focus as he slipped on his glasses.

She chose that moment to stare into the mirror, giving herself that look. Assessing. Judging. As if cataloging her faults for future eradication.

He never quite understood that look. What did she see wrong with herself? He could find no flaws. And he was a man who was never satisfied.

Although it was eleven at night, she began to reapply her makeup. This was an intimacy he’d never shared with a woman before her. He’d seen women with makeup and women without, but he’d never before seen the transformation from one state to the next.

When she was done, the woman who’d been tangled in the sheets with him a few minutes ago was entirely gone. She caught his gaze in the mirror then.

“We were in the middle of a mission.” Her words bounced off the mirror. “Why did you want me to do that…
busy work
right then?”

He snapped the sheet off his legs and swung them over the side of the bed. “The agreement was that we don’t talk about that here.”

They didn’t talk about work here, and they didn’t talk about
this
at work. They’d both made that clear, they’d both understood. Or at least he thought they had.

Never once did her air of impassivity waver. “I’m only trying to understand your reasoning.”

His reasoning for giving her the task? Or for coming here? He couldn’t tell which she meant. He could answer one, but not the other. For man as rational, as rigid as he was, that terrified him, the blank space where his reason should have been where she was concerned.

“I have to be back in a few hours.” He reached for his pants lying crumpled on the floor. “So do you.”

He pulled his pants on with a jerk, keeping his back to her all the while.

The latch of the door shutting behind her was the only goodbye he got from her.

Thirteen Months Earlier

January 1961

Eugene Parsons checked the clock, the gesture as unconscious as the beating of his heart. Five minutes until the interview. He picked up the CV on his desk and scanned it one final time.

Charlie Eason. Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Swarthmore, granted summa cum laude. Doctorate of philosophy in mathematics, done at the University of Illinois. A fellowship working on the FORTRAN language, where Eason had developed a compiler twice as fast as any existing one.

Oh, and the little matter of tinkering with von Neumann himself on a computer at Princeton when Eason was only sixteen.

The director of the computing department, Hal Reed, had already signed off based on the CV, and Parsons’s mind was already made up—the hiring was a done deal. The interview was merely a formality. Parsons wanted the finest in this computing program, and that was Eason.

The minute hand clicked over to the twelve on the clock face. Half a second later, there was a knock at the door.

“Come in.”

The door swung open, and Parsons’s heart stopped.

He’d been expecting Charlie Eason to be a woman. But he wasn’t expecting her to be utterly stunning.

There, framed in his office door, was a body and face that could have taken her to stardom in Hollywood. Loose curls that were not quite black but not quite brown were pulled back from an oval-shaped face. Her brows were bold frames for the deep honey of her eyes. And her lips—a man could dive into that lushness and never leave.

His body came to hard, sparking attention at the sight of her, and he hated his involuntary reaction.

“Mr. Parsons?” She had a voice to match her looks, her words trailing along his skin.

He snapped her CV onto his desk. “Dr. Eason?”

“Yes.” She came forward and arranged herself in the chair across from his desk, setting one slim ankle on the other, the curves of her calves drawing his eyes up to where her legs disappeared beneath her skirt.

Now he was really angry. Because he needed her to do this job, and his body refused to stop noticing hers.

“Your CV is impressive.” He couldn’t help spitting the words out.

She didn’t express any gratitude; she simply inclined her head as if she knew that was her due. Then she seemed to catch herself and said, “Thank you,” rather hastily.

“You prefer to go by Charlie? Is that on your birth certificate?”

She colored, and his anger ticked up another notch. The source was himself this time. He knew why she put Charlie on her CV, and he couldn’t fault her for it—with her accomplishments, being turned away from a job for simply being a woman ought to be a damn crime.

“I use Charlie privately. I prefer Dr. Eason.” A hint of irritation there, but mostly it was a set-down. She wasn’t going to simper or apologize. And she didn’t tell him her given name.

“I see.”

“Is this going to be a problem?”

For a heart-stopping moment, he thought she meant his unruly reaction to her. “Pardon?”