Cutting Edge

“Because if they did, we were having a very serious miscommunication.”

“No, no. Your, uh, our, communication was fine. Great, actually—”

“So when, and why, do you believe I would have gotten offended?”

“Angry,” he clarified.

“Whatever,” she said.

Nimec looked at her a moment, then sighed.

“When you got so quiet afterward,” he said, “I wondered if it could have anything to do with my asking you to take Chris and Jonathan to see the Mariners next weekend. Which I wouldn’t have done, except that I promised to take them myself, and got Gord to swing those lower box tickets for me.”

A moment passed. Annie chin-nodded at the pancake cooking on the skillet. Nimec tossed it.

“Pete,” she said. “Why in the world would I mind going to a ball game with my own son?”

“Well, Jon’s my son…”

“Our respective sons, then,” she said, and suddenly hesitated. “Jon doesn’t have a problem with me, does he?”

“Annie, you know Jon’s wild about you.”

“I thought I knew…”

“He is. Crazy wild, in fact. Don’t ever worry about that.”

“So what exactly do you feel would be the problem?”

Nimec shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Though I figured you might not appreciate having to fly all the way to the West Coast with me gone. Or maybe just having to sit through nine innings of baseball, not really being that familiar with the game…”

“The boys are always happy to explain its ins and outs to me,” she said. “Last time I got the lecture on the cutoff man, backup cutoff man, and the superduper Zimmer-Jeter rover play for when they both miss a throw. And I’ll be sure to use lingo like ‘lights-out’ and ‘good stuff’ and yell like a maniac whenever Ichiro’s at bat.”

That produced a faint grin on Nimec’s face.

“Guess you are pretty good,” he said.

“Guess I am.” She smiled a little, too, and gestured at the range. “We’d better get the next pancake on.”

They did. Nimec watched Annie go through the simple routine of dipping the ladle into her mixing bowl, and pouring the batter into the center of the pan, and rotating the ladle to spread the batter evenly. He watched her and noticed the golden highlights in her hair from the flood of morning sun through the window, and recalled all at once how those accents had seemed a deeper burnished color when he’d held her against him in the flicker of a bedside oil lamp the night before.

“Annie…” he said softly.

“Yes?”

“Please help me understand what’s bothering you.”

She looked up at Nimec’s face, and he looked down at hers, their eyes meeting, the two of them standing there by the stove in a kitchen filled with what had become a familiar yet preciously special aroma of weekends spent together after weekdays working in different cities, different states, thousands of miles apart, Annie at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, Nimec at UpLink’s main headquarters in California, thousands of miles, so many thousands of miles between them.

“Africa,” she said after a long silence. “It’s being worried about you going to Africa. To Gabon. A stone’s throw from the Congo, where tribal armies that have spent the last quarter century massacring each other in civil wars are usually also in-fighting just as brutally.”

“Annie…”

“And it’s being selfishly, clingingly worried about how much I’ll miss you.”

Silence.

Nimec looked at her, breathed.

“Annie, I’ll only be away a few weeks. There’s nothing to be afraid of—”

“Like when you were in Antarctica last year? For only a few weeks. An entire continent where people aren’t even supposed to have guns, and Cold Corners station was attacked by a small army. Hired commandos. You and Meg could have been killed. UpLink has enemies, Pete. That’s just how it is. UpLink has serious enemies around the world and I accept it. But don’t expect me not to worry.”

Nimec said nothing for a while. Then he suddenly moved closer to Annie, dropping the spatula on the counter beside the range, taking the drippy ladle from her hand to let it sink into the mixing bowl, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her to him.

“If not for us crossing paths in Antarctica, we wouldn’t be together,” he said. “That’s the other side of it.”

“I know, Pete, but—”

He gently held a finger to her lips, silenced her.

“I try to be careful,” he said. “Always. But these days I try even harder. Before, I wouldn’t care if I was in the field a week, a month, six months. In San Jose, it wasn’t much different. The job was everything, my whole life, and the rest was filling time. All I’d come home to on a Friday night was that pool room you’re always threatening to disinfect. Now, Friday afternoons at the office, I can’t wait to get to the airport. Can’t wait to get things done and come back to you. And that’s how it’ll be in Africa. I’ll get things done, and I’ll come back.”

Annie looked at him, still silent. Bright blue eyes holding on his brown ones. Blond hair shining in the sun. Then Nimec saw her smile and felt her press more tightly against him.

“I love you, Pete,” she said, her lips brushing his chin.

“I love you, Annie,” he said, his throat thickening inside.

“I smell my panny cakes!” Chris shouted from down the hallway.

Annie smiled.

“Little guy’s up,” she said in a furry voice.

Nimec winked at her.

“I hope you mean the kid,” he said, and reluctantly pulled himself back to the stove.

* * *

“ ‘Plunge telecom giant into choppy seas,’ ” Megan Breen read aloud, her head bent over the Journal piece, an errant tress of hair slipping across her cheek. “ ‘Navigate rough waters…’ ”

“ ‘Beware of sinking beneath those shifting currents’ happens to be my favorite,” Roger Gordian said.

“Ouch.” Megan tucked the loose strands behind her ear. They were the rich reddish brown color of mid- autumn leaves. “Talk about stretching a metaphor, I can almost hear this one groaning.”

“And begging in vain for a merciful end,” Gordian said.

“Until it lapses into tortured incoherence,” Megan said.

Gordian turned from where he stood by the coffee maker in a corner of his office.

“We’d better quit while we’re ahead,” he said. “You’d almost think the article was written by our old friend Reynold Armitage, wouldn’t you?”

Megan sat nodding in front of Gordian’s desk. She put her hardcopy down on it.

“Now that you mention it,” she said. “What was it he called us in print? ‘A growing monstrosity’?”

“ ‘A growing, failing monstrosity,’ ” Gordian said. “You know, I actually found myself looking for Armitage’s byline after scanning the article. But he seems to have pretty well faded from sight since we beat the Monolith takeover attempt.”

“Amen,” Megan said. “May destiny’s sails sweep him along a course far from ours—”

“Megan—”

“Sorry,” she said. “It scares me to think I’m becoming so impressionable… could be it’s all that time on the ice.”

Gordian opened a tin of green tea beside the coffee maker, spooned some into his cup’s ceramic filter, held the cup under the machine’s hot water tap, and ran steaming water over the loose tea leaves. Then he covered the teacup with its lid and looked halfway around at Megan.