Here at Last (4 page)

“
Thanks.”

Over the next several hours,
we
worked independently on different pieces of equipment.
When
David called
,
I told him that we were working at the lab. He
knew that I’d be working long hours and
on
some weekends but seemed surprised
anyway.
JT glanced up at me
as
I walked past him on my way out of the lab and
across the hall
to my office.

“It’s Saturday, Babe. What are you doing at work?”

“We’re trying to get some of
the
new equipment up and running. It’s taking a while to calibrate it and run scans.”

T
here was silence on the other end.

“David?” I asked.

“Is JT with you?”

I
sat down at my desk and
closed my eyes
. Speaking quietly, I answered him
. “Yes. He got in around seven.” I hesitated. “David, why is this even an issue? You’ve never worried about my working overtime before.”

“Dammit, Soph
, d
on’t be so naïve.
He has a reputation, and you’re there for nearly a year. You’re a beautiful woman
. All he has to do is look at your body
or those gorgeous
green eyes….
Do you think he hasn’t thought about it?
”

“We don’t need to be having this conversation,” I said.

Again, silence.

“David?”

“Listen, Babe, I’ve got to go
,
”
he said hanging up before the word “go” was fully out of his mouth.

After we hung up, I felt a headache coming on. I reached into my desk drawer and looked for some
Aleve but was out. I went to the restroom and
washed my face with cool water
before
rejoining JT a few minutes later in the lab. I could feel him watching me as I walked back to my seat. A moment later, he got up and
came
over to me.

“
Are you
okay?” he asked.

I looked
up at him and forced a smile. “I’m f
ine
, thanks
.”

He narrowed his eyes and studied my face
for a moment
. “Okay,” he said
casually
before returning to his work
, but I could tell that he was unconvinced.

When
we finished up around four o’clock and left the office together
,
JT
suggested
, “Why don’t you take a couple of days off?”

I shook my head. “
I’d rather
be here getting something done,
”
I said quietly.

He
nodded. “Okay. If that’s what you want.”

“I do.”
W
e said goodbye
,
and
he had just taken a step in the direction of his car
when
I
said,
“JT?”

He turned around.

“Thank you for caring,” I said
gently
.

He
came
back to me. “Listen, Sophia, I know that something’s going on,” he began. “If you need to talk….”

I shook my head. “I’ll be okay.”

“Okay,” he said quietly. “I just know how hard it can be in a new city when you don’t know anyone.”

“Really, I’ll be okay
,
”
I assured him.

He accepted my final answer with a slight nod of his head. Then, we said goodbye, again, before
walking to our cars and driving to our respective homes. Once there, I stopped at the medicine cabinet for an Aleve and went straight to bed.

That night, I had another dream of Him. It was the same as before. A man with brown hair but slightly blurry features was smiling at me. I felt a tremendous amount of love from him
,
and I wondered if it wasn’t some angelic or spiritual presence that was trying to tell me to deepen my relationship with David. When I awoke the next morning, the residual feeling of love from the dream was so strong and tangible that I wondered if David and I would ever be able to transform our relationship enough to
make it
feel like this.

Chapter
4

The night before I
returned
to New Jersey
for the second time
a few weeks later
, I had a beautiful c
onversation with
David
.
He told me that he loved me and missed me and
was
lonely with
out
me. We expressed our love for one another
and how much we wanted to support one another's goals and needs.

When I returned home the following day,
that
David was gone.
The one that stood facing me in New Jersey
was argumentative and demanded that I come home from San Diego even though he wouldn't have been able to support the two of us financially.
I
told him that I
loved my work and
didn’t want to leave it
.

David yelled about wanting to start a family and told me that he didn’t
want me
going
on
any more
lengthy
business
trips,
begging me
to come home and stay. My head wa
s swimming, and I
felt a knot in my stomach
.
Then
, I remember
ed
the man in my dreams.
Closing my
eyes
while David was shouting
,
I
recalled how
safe and loved
I’d felt
with him.

I hear
d
myself say, "We need to let this go."

“What?”
David
froze
. “What
are
you talking about? You're talking crazy now. You're tired from the flight."

As soon as I said it, I knew it was true
so
I sa
id
it again. "David
,
we love each other
, b
ut we don't want the same things. I love my work. I don't want to come home and
have
babies. I need to free you so you can find someone who does. If I don't let you go, you'll never be happy, and you'll just end up resenting me."

He was staring at me as though he had seen a ghost. "I can't believe what you're saying. Four years. After four years?
J
ust like that?”

I felt more certain about this than I had about anything in a very long time.
I said calmly,
“David, we need to let each other go. If we don't, we'll both be miserable."

"I'm already miserable," he
yelled
and stormed out of the room.

Even though
I would return to San Diego in a couple of days
and he’d
have the house to himself
,
he couldn't wait to get out
and had
moved everything into
an apartment
before the weekend was
over
. I tr
ied
to talk to him before he left on Sunday,
but his only words to me were, "Here's the key."

Had I just
end
ed
a perfectly good relationship for a kind of l
ove that I
could
only hope exists?
I was beginning to wonder if I was
being highly unrealistic
.
However, I knew that I had to try to find that kind of love and that my life with David would have been shallow by comparison.

Chapter
5

Over the
next
several weeks
, JT and I stayed
at
the office
late to
continue
set
ting
up
the equipment and run
ning
tests. We were both workaholics who had no inc
entive to go home when everyone
else left.
Although we never discussed it, o
ur
shared
love of
work
and
the feeling
that there was nothing else in our lives that
we should be doing
created
a sense of
camaraderie
between us
. W
e
worked late
often
enough that we began having
Dragon Chef deliver dinner
to our office at six o’clock every evening
.

Unlike most of my friends, who worked in other fields,
JT was someone
with whom I could discuss physics.
We talked about the crisis-ridden journey from classical physics to quantum mechanics, which began with a nearly triumphant “theory of everything”
to
the erosion of its
very
underpinnings in the late 19
th
century.

Prussian physicist Max Planck had always been one of my heroes. Hardly fitting
the stereotype of a
revolutionary, he had unwittingly proposed
a new way to
conceptualize
energy
.
Planck didn’t view himself as a particularly talented physicist and found the six weeks during which he developed his new radiation law to be one of the most strenuous periods in his life. When h
e presented
his new theory
at
a meeting of the German Physical Society
on December 14, 1
900
,
little did he realize that he was sowing the seed
for a new
quantum mechanics
and unhinging the very assumptions on which the field of physics had been
founded
.

Although Planck realized that he was advancing a new theory of energy, it wasn’t until JT’s favorite genius
,
Einstein
,
realized what its implications were for classical physics
that everything started
to fall
apart
.
Of course, that opened a rift
that physicists desperately sought
to fill
, which spurred
the creation of new
quantum theories and
related
mathematical
models.

As much as we loved talk
ing
with one another
about work
,
JT and I
discussed our personal lives very little.
Aside from previously mentioning his divorce
and offering me support on a few occasions
, the
only
time
that
he said
anything
remotely personal
was
one evening while we were eating Chinese
dinner
over my desk.

"Sophia
,
I'm not going to pry, and I'm not asking you to tell me anything.
” He chose his words carefully.
“
I heard that you and David split up. I told you that if you needed extra time to work things out….”

I put my hand up and cut him off. “JT, I appreciate it. I really do.
David and I
had
two fundamental
issues that extra time wasn't going to solve.
Thank you though.
"

He looked at me, nodded once, a
nd stabbed his fork into his lo
mein as we renewed our conversation on
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and whether
the
Higgs
boson
“God” particle
really existed
.
He never raised the subject
of David
again
…
at least, not
while we were
in San Diego.

Chapter
6

As JT had told me when I
’d
first
arrived
, I would need to attend
a large
science
tradeshow on behalf of the
San Diego
office.
It would begin with a cocktail party on Friday evening, and the show would run on Saturday and Sunday.
Although
I
was
supposed to
fly out
with
Melissa
on Thursday
, she came down with the flu
on Wednesday
.
Cliff
couldn’t
replace her
because he
was
at a
sales and marketing
conference
in Seattle, and
Olivia
was out of town on personal business
. JT booked a flight and met me
in
Las
Vegas
on Friday
.