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Lorna pops up over David’s shoulder. She’s not looking at his phone, not really , but she can’t help but notice the messages app open. “You wouldn’t happen to be texting that nephew of mine, would you?” she asks too-sweetly, smirking at David.
Her teammate immediately gets flustered, but he covers it up coolly. “Who, Billy? No, I, uh, I don’t even know what he and the new hubby have been up to lately. Or where they are, for that matter.”
“Uh-huh,” Lorna says. “Wasn’t talking about him.”
“Ohhh,” David says, completely unconvincingly. “Oh, you mean, uh, you mean Speed.”
“ Speed ,” Lorna repeats, rolling her eyes. “Yes, Prodigy , I mean Speed.”
“Oh, well, you know,” David says, shrugging. “I guess we like, catch up? From time to time. I mean, we’re in a few groupchats—”
“Will you cut that out,” she finally snaps, pouting. “Stop playing dumb. I know you’re… ‘going steady’ or whatever the kids say these days.”
David squints at her. “How old are you?”
“I have an old soul,” she shrugs. “ Anyway . Tommy seems very, ah, smitten with you.” David makes a face. “Very twitterpated? Besotted? He thinks you’re poggers. You guys are endgame.”
“I’m begging you to spend just like 20 minutes on Urban Dictionary,” David groans. “Or at the very least, TikTok.” And then he seems to register what she said. “Wait… he talks to you about me?”
Lorna gets about another two seconds of looking smug before she deflates. “Well… no. He doesn’t really talk to me about anything,” she admits. “He just texts me when he wants to use my Quibi login.”
“Yeah, that tracks.”
“Anyway,” Lorna says, flipping her verdant hair over one shoulder, “I just… it’s really good to see you two crazy kids chasing your joy.” There’s a peculiar expression on her face, something anxious and delicate. David’s standing close enough to her to know how to obtain and process different mineral deposit samples from the earth, but he has no clue where she’s at emotionally. “That’s kind of the point of Krakoa, for me anyway. Living, loving, without having to worry that the rug’s gonna get yanked out from under you.”
David fidgets with his phone. “Are we still talking about me and Tommy, or… ?”
“It makes me happy to see you have the kind of options and stability I couldn’t have had at your age,” she says, jostling him by the shoulders a little. “That’s all.”
“Well,” he says, “it makes me happy that you have those things now.” Lorna smiles. David opens his camera app and holds up his phone to snap a picture of the two of them, both beaming brightly, and then he sends it to Tommy.