Chapter Text
It is not, Helena tries to admonish herself into believing, that she minds seeing Pete and Claudia. It is not that at all. It is not even that she minds eating lunch with Pete and Claudia, despite the abysmal table manners exhibited by both of them. It is simply that she and Myka have been alone for four days, and had anticipated being alone for four more. Yet here Pete and Claudia are.
She hears Myka tell them, “San Francisco is lovely. We’re enjoying it.”
“San Francisco is lovely,” Helena affirms. “We are enjoying it.”
They gaze across the table at Pete and Claudia, who both wince. Claudia says, “If you’re gonna be all weird and formal, you should’ve just told us to buzz off. We would’ve understood.”
“That would have been impolite,” Helena points out.
Pete snorts. “Like that ever stops you.”
Helena entertains the notion of proving his point by stabbing him with her butter knife, but Myka grabs her arm and says, “It’s just that, you know, we’d sort of gotten out of the whole Warehouse… thing.”
“It’s not like anybody planned that ping in Cupertino,” Claudia says. “And you should probably be happy that Artie didn’t make you two take care of it, seeing as how you were already left-coastally located.”
“We’re on vacation. We wouldn’t have taken care of it,” Myka tells Claudia. Helena is gratified by the speed with which that response came. She sets her butter knife down and takes Myka’s hand. She is gratified once again by the speed with which a smile engulfs Myka’s face.
****
They have, in these short four days, managed to settle into a decadently lovely morning routine: Myka gets up first—early, as she is constitutionally unable to sleep late—and makes coffee; she showers. Helena drowses. Then Myka drinks her coffee while Helena takes a turn in the bathroom, mainly to use the facilities and brush her teeth. Then they return to bed, and that first kiss of the morning, one that combines coffee and mint, is delicious.
This morning, Helena had moved particularly lazily, heavily, to such an extent that Myka said, “This doesn’t seem to be fully working for you.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying it.”
“Are you tired?”
“A bit.” She tried to stifle a yawn.
Myka smiled. “We’re not on any schedule, for this or anything else. Go back to sleep. I’ll just read for a while, okay?”
Helena reposed against Myka’s shoulder, not asleep, not awake, feeling a whisper of air every time Myka turned a page. She drifted, tasting mint, smelling coffee. Her eyelids opened, closed, opened again; it must have been the brush of her eyelashes that made Myka chuckle, deep in her chest, and say, “That tickles.” They breathed together for a moment. Then Myka said, “I’ve never been able to do this very well.”
“Do what? Read? You’ve certainly faked it impressively, then; I’ve always believed you were quite good at it.”
“Intimacy. This kind of intimacy.” She waved her book over their draped-together bodies.
“What is that term Claudia uses when I act as if I understand something about modernity that I do not in fact understand?”
“She says you’re fronting.”
“So I would say that you seem to be fronting quite well in the intimacy arena, also.”
“It’s a silly word. Fronting. Especially when you say it.”
“Silly but descriptive. Perhaps you’d prefer façading?”
Myka shrugged. “I thought maybe I was. Fronting, I mean. Façading? Maybe not intentionally, but… anyway. Now we’ve had four days in a hotel room.”
“We’ve left the hotel room. Not to mention, we’ve had four days in a hotel room on a case.”
“You know what I mean. It’s different.”
“Four days in a hotel room and counting,” Helena reminded her. “I haven’t been able to do it well either. In the past. I have perhaps façaded. Intentionally.”
“Are you now?”
“No. Well. Not as far as I am consciously aware.”
“What’s different now?”
“I don’t want to speculate too wildly, but I suspect it’s you.”
“Yeah… me too. I mean vice versa. I was suspecting it was you.”
“Wild speculation on your part as well.”
“Mm.” Myka set her book aside. “Are you still tired?”
“Experience indicates that if I am, you’ll be able to tell.”
“And if you’re not?”
“Oh, I think that, too, will be reasonably clear.”
Helena was not, in fact, still tired. But they moved slowly all the same, taking their time, their sweet time, with teasing words about reading and fronting and façading—but also words about love and beauty and luck—flowing treacle-sweet from their mouths.
They had still been in bed when Pete called.
“He says that he and Claudia are in the neighborhood,” Myka reported to Helena.
“What could that possibly mean. Ignore him. We aren’t finished here.”
“It could possibly mean that they’re downstairs in the lobby.”
“That is ridiculous.”
“They want to take us to lunch.”
Helena yawned loudly in the direction of the telephone and said loudly, also in its direction, “At this hour of the morning?” From the telephone, Pete said, equally loudly, “It’s almost one, you lazy sloths!”
“Sloths,” Helena muttered. She pushed at Myka’s hair. “Speaking of sloths, have I mentioned that you have adorably small ears?”
Myka pulled her hair back down over her ear. “Don’t try to distract me—he’s right, it’s almost one. And my ears are perfectly normal.”
“I didn’t say they weren’t normal. I said they were adorably small.”
“Normal-sized.”
Pete squawked, “Ears, schmears! And hey, speaking of schmears, it’s lunchtime!”
“Aren’t bagels more a breakfast item?” Myka asked him, though Helena congratulated herself on making it very difficult for Myka to actually direct her mouth toward the telephone.
“It’s all food,” Pete said.
“It’s true that we didn’t have breakfast today. Okay, we’ll be down in fifteen minutes,” Myka said.
But Helena grabbed the telephone, said “twenty minutes and not one instant sooner,” and disconnected. She then let the telephone fall from her hand to the floor and levered herself atop Myka, who blinked up at her and said, “What’s going to take twenty minutes? Your hair looks fine. A little artfully messy, thanks to me, but fine.”
“I do not doubt it. But you were foolish enough not to hang up on Pete immediately, so I intend to make you regret it. By demonstrating what you will be missing.”
“You’re awful,” Myka said. But she smiled.
“You’ll be saying different words twenty minutes from now,” Helena promised.
Twenty minutes later, in the elevator:
“I stand very effectively corrected,” Myka said. “‘Awful’ is in no way the word for what just happened.” She wound an arm around Helena, which Helena knew to understand as quite a gesture, even for this only potentially semi-public space. Even for this only potentially semi-public space in San Francisco.
Helena smiled. “First: true. Second: thank you. And finally: you owe me.”
“That is… also correct.”
Helena widened her smile, but she also managed to kiss the adorably small ear that she found nearest her mouth.
****
Myka now asks the two non-vacationers: “So how was the weather in Cupertino?”
“Seriously, weather?” Claudia rolls her eyes.
Myka rolls hers right back. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
“I’m so glad you asked. Let’s go with all the ways this entire Warehouse operation needs to join the twenty-first century.”
“God, not this again,” Pete says. “I think maybe Cupertino itself’s an artifact… she’s been nonstop ‘more tech’ since yesterday.”
“I’m just saying, if I’m eventually gonna be the one looking down from some kind of on high with this thing, I’d like to think I could look at people not carbon-footprinting around like dinosaurs. Like for example let’s help Pete kick his SUV addiction and start using Uber.” She takes an enormous bite of her smoked duck sandwich. Helena is fairly certain that sandwich is intended to be far too refined a dish to be bolted down. “Tell him I’m right, H.G.”
“I am enjoying a lovely tea soup,” Helena says, “and I don’t care.”
“Tell him I’m right, Myka.”
“I don’t actually care either,” Myka says.
Pete complains, “It’s not an addiction—I’m a big guy, I need a big car. And Uber’s stupid.”
Claudia is still chewing her previous bite of sandwich as she says, “Uber happens to be next-level transportation. I feel like a grandma standing at that rental counter with you.”
“I think you’re forgetting one thing, young Jedi,” Pete says. He too is eating a sandwich unmindfully, in his case chicken salad.
“That you get all manly and weird about not being the one who drives?”
He makes a buzzer noise. “Car chases! Can’t do that in an Uber!”
“When was the last time you were actually in a car chase?” Claudia asks him.
Myka jumps in with, “Claudia might have a point here, Pete. Taking car chases off the table, I mean.” She stops. “Then again, there’s the problem of communication. Can’t speak freely in the back of a cab, Uber or otherwise. And I never understand Pete when he’s trying to speak in code.”
“Plus all those drivers are as bad at it as H.G. is,” Pete says.
This makes Helena look up from her soup. “I object.”
“Why?” Myka asks. Now she is mid-bite. Hers, however, is of a salad.
“He insulted my driving skills!”
“Everybody insults your driving skills,” Myka says, and if this is meant to be reassuring—
Claudia adds, “Because you don’t have any.”
At this, Helena puts down her spoon. “Steve has never.”
“Steve’s just a really nice guy,” Pete says.
Now Helena pushes her soup away. “Steve is my favorite.”
Myka pulls Helena’s soup toward her, with a questioning look, and Helena nods. “Steve’s your favorite, huh?” she asks, then takes a sip. Helena nods again. Myka smiles. “So neither my love for you nor your supposed love for me outweighs the fact that Steve has never insulted your driving skills. Okay.” She nudges her own plate at Helena.
“Also Uber would be cheaper,” Claudia says.
“Wouldn’t that depend on how much legwork the case involves?” Myka asks.
Helena tries a forkful of salad. What remains is primarily, and quite substantially, slivers of beetroot. Myka does not prefer beetroot… “Although,” Helena says, “you might weigh more heavily the need for legwork, in the event that you had to pay for each leg separately.”
“Ha!” Claudia sandwiches. “You know, that might be the winning argument with Artie.”
“It won’t be,” Myka tells her. Then she tells Helena, “You were right. I should’ve got the soup.”
“I did draw your attention to the beets,” Helena says, and “pour more tea over it,” she suggests.
“You two,” Claudia sighs. “Thank god you aren’t always like this. And I’m gonna call Artie, on the basis of I think he’ll agree with me.”
“He won’t,” Myka says. She pours more tea over the soup.
“Bet me. I dare you.”
“Fine. I’ll bet you a dollar.”
“What am I supposed to do with a dollar?”
Pete says, “Frame it. With a little engraved plaque that says ‘I won this off Myka.’”
“She won’t,” Myka says.
Just then, Claudia’s Farnsworth buzzes. She looks at it in amazement. “See now, I thought I got to turn into the psychic one. Hey Art Moderne, what’s your take on Uber?”
“Price gouging,” is the immediate response.
“It’s dy-na-mic pri-cing,” Claudia articulates carefully.
“AKA price gouging,” Artie says.
Myka holds out her hand, and Claudia snorts. “Like I carry cash.”
Tinnily, Artie says, “I don’t care what you carry other than a Farnsworth and a Tesla! There’s a ping!”
Claudia shakes her head at Helena, Myka, and Pete, as if to convey what a shame it is that Artie is in his dotage. Into the Farnsworth, she says, “There was a ping. Me and Pete took care of it, remember? Now we’re just relaxing with our good friends Myka and H.G. before we catch our Uber to the airport… no, wait, we have to waste a bunch of time turning in a rental car. Because we flew in from 1985.”
“Will you be quiet!” Artie thunders, and Helena is just as happy to be across the table, unable to see his face on the screen. “There is a ping. Another ping, right there in San Francisco. Get on it! Steve’s sending you the particulars, but it has something to do with reports of people claiming to have been abducted by aliens.”
“Isn’t that just ‘a regular day’?” Claudia asks. “Particularly here in the city of brotherly crazy people? Nothing against the vibe, but it’s—”
“No more editorializing! Get to work! I’m just relieved you’re already there and I won’t have to pay for more airline tickets.”
“But see, Artie, this is my Uber point, that it’d be cheaper if—” She looks at the now-dead Farnsworth. She gives it a halfhearted shake. “He hung up on me.”
“Shocking,” Helena says. “Unprecedented.” But she is breathing easy—perhaps the first time she has ever truly done so at the news of a curiosity. For now, at last, Pete and Claudia will take wing via whatever mode of transportation they prefer, and she and Myka will be left to return to—
“I’ve got an idea,” Claudia says.
TBC