Let’s meet at 11 at the Cal Academy, April had texted last night, while he stood beneath the too-hot spray of his hotel shower and let it scald him. I’ve been meaning to check out the natural history exhibits, and I thought you might enjoy the planetarium. (Resisted making a star joke there. Yay me.) We can grab lunch at the café. Sound good?
After emerging from the shower, he’d read her text, toweled his hair, and considered the logistics. Sounds good. Why don’t we meet at the café for lots of coffee before we look at rocks and recline in a dark theater? j/k
I think I can manage to keep you awake in the dark, she’d returned. But yes, coffee first.
He’d blinked at that message for a minute, wishing he’d made his shower cold instead.
Flirtation. That was definite flirtation.
For the rest of the night, it was enough to take the edge off the slice of pain in his chest every time he thought about how he’d hurt her as Book!AeneasWouldNever, how he’d miss the Lavineas community, and how his parents had watched him in disappointment and disapproval from across that small table.
Now here he was, standing outside a science museum café on a Monday morning, embarrassingly excited about the prospect of seeing literal stars. Even though he appeared to be the only person in sight not towing along at least one child.
“Hey!” Her voice, breathless and husky, came from behind him. “Sorry. BART and Muni were running a bit late this morning, which meant I ran late too.”
When he swung around, his own breath whooshed out a bit too forcefully.
“Hey,” he wheezed. “No problem. I just got here myself.”
Her jeans, so skinny they were basically leggings beneath her mustard-yellow tunic, outlined the generous curves of her thighs with loving exactitude. Caught in a high ponytail, her gorgeous red-gold hair glinted in the light from the windows, and her thick-framed tortoiseshell glasses emphasized the soft brown of her eyes.
He’d dressed for discretion. Jeans. Sneakers. A basic blue henley. A baseball cap.
By all rights, no one should look twice at him today, not when April stood nearby. It was a wonder she didn’t have paparazzi following her everywhere she went, simply to document the blazing glory of it all.
“You look beautiful.” Simple fact. It had to be said.
Her mouth, soft and slightly downturned upon her arrival, twitched upward into a sweet smile. “Thank you.”
When she opened her arms for a hug of greeting, he fell into them. Tugged her close, one hand spread on her back, another resting at her bare nape, where silky little hairs tickled his fingers. Rested his cheek on her crown and breathed in roses and spring. April.
Her warm, lush body conformed to his, yielding and filling in gaps he hadn’t even known existed. At his own back, her individual fingertips pressed into him, their pressure noticeable. To his pleasure, she was hugging him fully as much as he was hugging her.
She clung longer than he’d have expected, her breath hitching once. When he finally pulled back a few inches, her eyes were a little too bright behind those glasses.
“Thanks,” she said. “I needed that.”
Dammit.
Cupping the back of her head in his palm, he pressed a gentle kiss to the pale, freckled skin of her temple, above the arm of her glasses. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.” After one last squeeze, she stepped away from him and offered a smile that looked only somewhat strained. “Let’s get some coffee and look at some rocks.”
He groaned in mock-torment, but took her hand and allowed her to lead him toward the coffee bar.
“Some of them will be shiiiiiiiny,” she singsonged, then reached her free hand to tug a strand of his hair as they stood in line. “Just like you.”
He glanced at his sneakers for a moment.
A pretty face, Ron had said. We couldn’t have found prettier.
“Despite my years in the dirt, I have a weakness for shiny things. I’m a magpie, really.” She flicked her earlobe, where looping strands of silver cascaded to her shoulders. “I’m especially fascinated by how some shiny things come to be.”
It was a lure. An effective one.
His eyes returned to hers. “Tell me.”
The curve of her lips had turned gentle. “Certain minerals are created under enormous pressure over vast stretches of time, making them as tough as they are beautiful.”
His parents hadn’t found science interesting, but he wasn’t ignorant, either.
He let out a slow breath.
“Diamonds.” “Diamonds,” she agreed.
His laugh was a little shaky.
“‘Vast stretches of time’?” He arched a brow at her. “Did you just call me old?”
She snickered. “I said what I said.”
In companionable silence, they paid for their coffee and doctored it to their tastes. A splash of cream for him, milk and a generous waterfall of sugar for her.
Over the years, he’d received extravagant compliments. Often from people who wanted something from him—money, a brush with fame, sex with a star—but also from people who simply admired him for reasons flattering or uncomfortable or both.
Somehow, she’d managed to turn a discussion of minerals into praise as sweet as her coffee. Nerdy too, which somehow made it even sweeter.
No wonder she loved rocks. In her hands, on her tongue, they did tell stories. Ones more faceted and crystalline than any he’d managed to craft over years and years of writing fanfic.
“Diamonds shouldn’t be as expensive or rare as they are, and I hate how they’ve been extracted from the earth and used as a justification for exploitation and subjugation. So much of the diamond industry is hateful and corrupt. That said . . .” After taking a sip of her coffee, she wrinkled her nose and added more sugar. “The first time I saw the Hope Diamond in DC, I considered a life of crime.”
When he laughed, a nearby mom with a stroller took a cell photo of him.
Discreetly, he steered April toward the windows, and they looked outside as they drank and talked about favorite museums. Or, rather, he urged April to discuss hers, since she didn’t need to hear about the misery of his previous museum visits.
“Ready for rocks?” she asked, after they’d finished.
He offered his arm, and she took it. “Ready for rocks.”
They spent an hour or so rambling through the museum, first peering at and handling a startlingly bright rainbow of minerals, then visiting the penguins and studying expansive dioramas rife with vegetation and animals preserved through expert taxidermy.
At the first text-intensive informational sign they encountered, she glanced at the display. Bit her lip.
Of course she remembered, cared, and wanted to know more.
“I can read it, but it’ll take me longer than you. Just . . .” He sighed. “Please don’t get impatient.”
Her brows drew together. “Of course I won’t get impatient.”
And she didn’t, no matter how long he took, although he still tended to favor displays that didn’t require much context to appreciate them. Hands-on activities, or the enormous blue whale and T. rex skeletons, or—to April’s delight—the Shake House.
“This is my first earthquake simulator.” Grinning, she tugged him through the doorway. “We don’t get many noticeable quakes in Sacramento, so I’m excited.”
He allowed himself to be dragged toward a spot near the faux-window. “Good news, then. Now that you live in the Bay Area, you’ll feel something every year or two, at least. Hopefully not a big something, though.”
Her nose crinkled in a wince. “Well, at least we’re not in Washington or Oregon. Sooner or later, those poor people are in deep, deep—”
Just then, the museum helper began talking, and he made a mental note not to move to Seattle.
As the polo-clad woman explained what would happen next, he studied his surroundings. Beside him, April was doing the same, her eyes sharp and narrowed in scrutiny as she scanned the cloth-covered ceiling, the screen disguised as a window, the blue-patterned walls and built-in shelves.
The simulator, built to resemble a Victorian drawing room inside, didn’t boast many decorations on those walls and shelves. Some books, decorative plates and glasses, a mirror, a painting, a chandelier. A fishbowl too, amusingly enough. White-painted metal railings crisscrossed the room, providing handholds each small group of visitors would need in due course.
Along one wall, the screen showed a window’s-eye view of the Painted Ladies near Alamo Square. The city as it existed in 1989, during the Loma Prieta quake, according to the museum employee. Eventually, she told them, the image would change to the city as it appeared in 1906, before the most infamous disaster in San Francisco history.
Compared to a Gods of the Gates set, the room was sparse at best. But in today’s scene, he got to hold April’s hand and interlace their fingers, knowing he wouldn’t have to die a stupid, stupid death on camera. All in all, he’d take that trade every time. Even though more than one cell phone was now pointed toward the two of them, rather than the room or the guide explaining the gist of what would happen.
First, as the polo-clad woman explained, the room would jolt through the 1989 earthquake, then the 1906 temblor. Or at least modified versions thereof, demonstrations safe and brief enough for casual visitors. If the first, weaker, quake simulation proved too nerve-racking, they could leave before the second.
In one nonsensical scene in Gates’s fifth season, Aeneas rode a pegasus to visit Venus, his mother, in her lofty celestial abode. To film that sequence, Marcus had spent hours and hours perched precariously atop a giant green-painted rig assembled in a cavernous green-painted hangar and programmed to simulate the movements of an enormous winged horse in flight.
For all the precautions taken, for all his love of physical challenges and performing his own stunts whenever possible, he’d found the experience . . . disconcerting. At least at first, until he’d gotten used to the rhythm.