Work Text:
No matter how many customizations one makes to a vehicle – no matter the number of cameras and sensors added in the name of safety – there is one factor for which no one can ever fully account: the weather.
Rain had been falling throughout the day, mostly as indecisive spittle. Only now, when they sat stalled in a never-ending line on the interstate, did the slate-gray clouds properly give way. The brake lights of the sedan in front of them dimmed to a feeble red glow as they were curtained off by a deluge. In this state, Jimmy could almost pretend there was no traffic. Almost.
He spared a glance across to the passenger seat. Cindy sat there, still as she’d been for the past two hours, watching raindrops pelt the window. How he wished she’d break this oppressive silence. Of the two of them, she was far better with articulating her thoughts, no matter how venomous or cutting. At this point, he’d welcome a barrage of insults, whether eloquent or ill-formed. At least she’d be saying something.
The sedan ahead of them lurched forward, and so did he with a quick release of the brake pedal. Not good. This traffic needed to open up, if only so the nervous prickling in his forearms could be tamped down by activity. Someone behind them honked, and he noticed Cindy cast her gaze toward the barely-visible side view mirror, lips rolled over her bottom teeth. Was she really about to cuss out a badly timed horn and say nothing to him? But then, the moment passed, and the silence remained.
A short time later, Jimmy got his wish. They’d crawled their way toward an exit ramp, and cars peeled out of their lanes to seek relief from the highway, regardless of their destinations. Jimmy made his move toward the ramp as well, hoping he’d get halfway up before the traffic signal at the top changed back to red.
There is another factor for which no one can truly account while driving: the behavior of other drivers.
Jimmy had his turn signal on – he knew this. He was also certain that he’d had enough clearance. What he was ignorant of, as all drivers are, was the intent of the person behind him.
By all metrics, the rear collision was little more than a soft tap. With the wet pavement, though, it was enough to send Jimmy’s car fishtailing up the ramp. Then the front passenger tire caught on something in the road – what it was, he couldn’t say – and he found himself careening head-on toward the guardrail. Before impact, he threw his right arm across Cindy’s chest.
There was no way she was getting home tonight. The traffic had been bad enough, but then they had to go and get in a wreck.
Thankfully, the crash wasn’t severe: none of the airbags deployed, and the car was still drivable, albeit with one knocked-out headlight. Cindy had jerked forward against her seatbelt, which probably would have been the end of it if Jimmy hadn’t tried to play at heroics and throw his arm out like that. He’d ended up giving her a sort of sideways punch to the chest, but he’d always been able to do that, hadn’t he? Even without meaning it.
Once off the interstate, they’d pulled into the lot of a six-story hotel intended more for business travelers than stranded motorists. Jimmy must have done the mental calculus and figured she would have complained if they’d ended up someplace cheaper by comparison. And maybe if this was like old times, she would have, if only because she knew it would start some heated banter. But this was not like old times, and nothing could be like them again.
At the front desk, the clerk had asked if they wanted adjoining rooms. Before Cindy could unstick her vocal cords from each other and speak for the first time in hours, Jimmy murmured that a single room was fine, but if two beds could be managed, that would be preferable. Cindy silently thanked him. With a nightstand and a gap of carpet between them, the threat of spontaneous combustion in his presence should be greatly diminished. In theory.
No sooner had Cindy set her bag down in the room than Jimmy disappeared, presumably to more closely inspect the damage to his car. She was about to tell him just how stupid of an idea that was, in the rain and everything, but he was gone before she could get a word out. She stood staring at the laminate wood of the door for the longest time, memorizing the artificial grain, until she found the wherewithal to move for the tan insulated bucket sitting on the entryway table and go out to the ice machine.
How appropriate, she thought as crushed ice tumbled into the bucket. The Ice Queen fetching her namesake.
He still wasn’t back when she returned to the room, not that she expected him to be. She knew him well enough to know he’d make a big deal of pulling at every tiny wire and poking every plastic cover, no matter how insignificant or irrelevant, so that he could say with confidence he’d checked everything. Even if that meant risking a head cold to do it.
Cindy grabbed sleep shorts and a tank from her bag, wandered into the bathroom, and changed. She yanked out her ponytail and used the tiny, underpowered dryer hanging on the wall to coax some of the dampness from her hair. After about ten minutes, she quit, mostly because she couldn’t stand the sight of her reflection in the mirror anymore.
When everything goes to hell, go to sleep. That was the advice her father had given her years ago, ironically in the midst of her parents’ divorce. She’d tried to follow that advice then, often in vain since their yelling could be heard down the block, and she’d follow it now. Especially since her other option to make her brain go offline was to get steaming drunk, something she hadn’t done in years. Not since that night in the lab.
She slipped into one of the queen-size beds, the rough sheets tugging at her clothes as she wiggled down, and snapped off the lamp on the nightstand.
Flashlight in hand, Jimmy peered under the hood one last time, checking that everything was in order. The passenger headlight lens had popped out of place and cracked clean in two against the guardrail, the bulb had shattered, and there were definite scrapes on the bumper and quarter panel that hadn’t been there before. He’d been able to finesse the quarter panel back into position with a few well-placed thumps with the heel of his hand, but any further adjustments would have to wait until he got home. All in all, it could have been much worse.
I’m glad it wasn’t, he thought. I’m glad Cindy is okay.
He hadn’t asked her outright if she was, but assumed as much based upon her lack of verbal complaints. Then again, maybe that wasn’t fair. She hadn’t so much as spoken a word to him since they left the first hotel together this morning. She’d been set to take a cab back home, and the thought of her racking up such an absurd taxi fare made Jimmy offer her a ride. What a decision that had turned out to be.
Nothing more to do now. He slammed the hood shut and grabbed for the key fob in his pocket, only for something else to tumble out and smack the toe of his shoe. Jimmy pivoted the flashlight down to the pavement, where a dark velvet box lay with rain pooling around it.
He should have taken that box out of his pocket months ago, after that night in the restaurant, but he found himself unable to do it. To stash that box away, in his dresser or on a bookshelf or anywhere else, would be an admission that nothing more could ever be done about them as an entity. Somewhere, in the recesses of his mind and heart, hope lived to the contrary.
Jimmy snatched up the damp box, stowed it in the inner pocket of his jacket for safekeeping, and locked his car. He then turned and headed inside the hotel, the autumn chill sinking deeper into him.
What he’d expected to find when he got back up to the room, Jimmy couldn’t say. What he wasn’t expecting was complete darkness, save for the yellow nightlight glowing from the bathroom. The lump under one of the comforters told him Cindy had gone to bed for the night, but she definitely wasn’t sleeping. He couldn’t have been gone more than twenty minutes at most, and he knew her well enough to know that she took far longer than that to fall asleep.
Jimmy kicked his wet shoes off while he locked the door, then scooped up his bag and shuffled into the bathroom. He re-emerged a few minutes later in a T-shirt and boxers, hair ruffled up like a startled hedgehog. With a quiet sigh, he sat on the vacant bed, elbows on his knees.
“I know you’re awake,” he whispered.
She didn’t answer him, keeping her breathing steady.
“Nice acting.” He ran a hand through his hair, stopping at the nape of his neck to scratch there. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s—it’s not fine, but I’d like if you listened.”
“I can talk.”
The sound of her voice jarred him, raspy as it was. He watched as she sat up, comforter rustling around her, and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The stretch of carpet between them seemed infinite in the dark.
“I think…I need to start with ‘I’m sorry’,” Jimmy ventured.
“Why?”
“For one thing, it’s a phrase broadly applicable to numerous instances in our relationship. But most immediately, I’m sorry for what happened tonight.”
“Wasn’t your fault. That idiot improperly changed lanes, and it was wet. I’m fine, by the way. Won’t even send your insurance the bill for whiplash.”
“Much appreciated.”
“Not a problem.”
“I also…” Jimmy hesitated. “Do you remember the night in the lab?”
He heard the small click in her throat as she swallowed. She didn’t need any further elaboration than that.
“I do.” The room was flooded with light as she switched on the lamp.
If they were going to have this discussion, properly have it, Cindy was going to have the privilege of looking Jimmy in the face, no matter how painful the experience. As her eyes readjusted from the darkness, she took in just how exhausted he looked. Five o’clock shadow circled his jaw, and there were pronounced dark pouches under his eyes. His hands were clasped in front of him as though in prayer, even though she knew full well he’d never been religious. Maybe he was seeking some divine intervention to help him through this.
Cindy was sure he could see the exhaustion in her, too. She’d never been able to sleep well in hotels, leaving her shoulders and neck knotted with tension from the past few days. Wrinkled pajamas were a significant downgrade from the formal jade dress she’d worn the last time they were in the same room, as was her hair with the distinctive ring from a too-tight ponytail. Not that he’d hold any of this against her. For all his faults, Jimmy was not a judgmental person by nature. That was more her purview.
“I suppose I should ask what exactly you remember from that night,” he said cautiously, “given your inebriated state at the time.”
Every single embarrassing thing, Cindy answered in her head. “The details are fuzzy, but if I think long enough, they come back. The general stuff…” She fluttered her hand in front of her like an erratic butterfly.
“So you remember the helmet.”
Her breath froze in her chest. Did she remember the terrible device he’d threatened to use on himself, just so she’d quit spouting off bullshit? Fighting her urge for sarcasm, she nodded.
“I never should have leveraged that against you. Not when you were the one who put me right after I used it the first time.” Jimmy shook his head. “I’m sorry, Cindy.”
“You wouldn’t have pulled the helmet out if I hadn’t pounded on your door, demanding to talk to you.”
“But you clearly needed to talk to someone. Forgive the expression, but,” he gave her a wry smile, “you can’t keep everything bottled up.”
Cindy winced at the wordplay. “You’d think after watching my parents try to do that with each other for years on end, I’d know better.” She shrugged. “Clearly not.”
The faint humor on Jimmy’s face vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“I’ve analyzed that night over and over in my mind, and there’s something you said for which I’ve been unable to find a rational basis,” he said quietly. To Cindy’s horror, his eyes hazed over with unshed tears. “Dropping out of college, while nonsensical, would have fed your desire at the time for drastic change. Same with moving away to somewhere else. But why did you want to go running to him?”
No name required – they both knew who he was.
“It’s what I deserve,” she answered flatly.
“But why do you think that?”
Pressure was building to a dangerously high level behind Cindy’s eyes, and she pressed the heels of her palms into them.
“If you didn’t want to be with me, I would…understand.” The last word sounded like it was being ripped right out of Jimmy’s throat by brute force. “There are times when I’ve become so engrossed in a project that my focus goes myopic and I can barely remember I’m a person, let alone that there are other people around, but…I don’t tend to count something as impossible unless I know for certain, and one thing I know for certain is it’s impossible for me to ignore you.”
“It’s not about attention,” Cindy murmured.
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s about…” The tears were coming whether she wanted them or not. “I deserve Strych, because you deserve much better than me.”
Over the course of his life, Jimmy had experienced electric shock a handful of times. It was a natural consequence of getting overexcited when he was on the cusp of completing an invention and forgetting to triple-check his wiring connections. Still, he was only ever subject to relatively small, harmless voltages, none of which compared to the lightning zap he was feeling from Cindy’s words. He could now say he grasped the meaning of the word thunderstruck.
“I mean, do you want a list of my flaws and foibles? I have a PDF of my laptop – I can email it to you. Or do you want to sit up all night while I recount every cruel insult I’ve ever lobbed your way?”
“Cindy—”
She was trying desperately to look like she wasn’t crying. “It would be so easy for you to just be a smug, arrogant asshole with your genius, and sometimes you are, but most of the time, you are just so fucking good. You’re kind, and you’re loyal, and you’re always looking for the right thing to do, not the easy thing. And I can’t measure up to that.”
“‘Measure up’? What are you—” His brain shifted into overdrive, attempting to decode what the hell she could possibly mean, and then it hit him.
I don’t want a future playing second fiddle to your greatness, Neutron.
Those words had haunted him for so long. They were the last words she’d spoken to him face-to-face before tonight; he wasn’t counting the gala, where she’d been screaming. At the time, he’d numbly assumed that she was referring to their academic rivalry from years before, a fact that he’d brushed off as being irrelevant. They were adults – what did GPAs or class placements matter to either of them these days? But now he understood that rejection had been a cover. The real problem was something more fundamental: she thought his affections were something she had to earn, rather than something waiting for her to claim.
Aside from one basic class in undergrad to meet part of his humanities requirement, Jimmy didn’t have much familiarity with psychology. He knew enough, though, to connect the insecurities Cindy felt to how she’d been raised at home. While he didn’t have a habit of wishing harm on anyone, he could make an exception for Sasha and Lex Vortex. Love should never be conditioned on merit, yet Cindy picked up that idea somewhere.
He then remembered the biting remark he’d made to her at the gala about how she never won anything. He’d meant for that to sting, but it’d wounded deeper than he’d ever realized.
Jimmy’s legs wobbled as he stood up from the bed. “Cindy?”
She didn’t respond. Her head was bowed, and she was wiping furiously at her eyes.
“Look at me. Please.”
Cindy looked up. Her cheeks shone with half-dried tears, and the glaring red of her sclerae made her green irises pop even more than usual.
“There’s a certain irony in me saying this while I’m standing up and you’re sitting, but…” He took a deep breath. “You’ve got to knock me off the pedestal you’ve put me on. Or climb up and join me. I might be a genius, but I’m also a fucking idiot – you know that as well as anyone. You were right in what you said before: I can be a smug prick—”
“Asshole.”
“What?”
“I said you can be a smug, arrogant asshole.” Cindy stood as well. In her bare feet, they were eye-to-eye, unlike the gala where she towered in her heels. “Not a prick.”
“Oh, now we’re getting into semantics?”
“Yes.” Cindy folded her arms across her chest, and Jimmy saw mild amusement play over her face. “Two different kinds of people. Strych, for example, is a prick.”
“No argument from me there.”
“You, on the other hand, are too good to be a prick. All you can hope to achieve is the status of an asshole.”
“That might be the first time I’ve ever been told I can’t be the best at something.”
Cindy tucked her chin down and coughed her way into a wet laugh. Feeling bold, Jimmy reached for her, like he’d wanted to do back in the car, and laid a hand on her arm.
“You understand what I’m saying, though, right?” he said. “Everything I feel for you, everything I’ve ever felt…it’s freely given. You don’t have to earn it; you just have to take it.”
The cough-laughing stopped. She glanced up, hesitant, before shuffling a half-step closer. Jimmy flexed his fingers around her bicep in a gentle squeeze.
Cindy’s fingertips grazed his jaw, and he shuddered at the touch. Then came the thumb rubbing low across his cheek while her other fingers settled just above the pulse in his neck. She had to feel his heart hammering away and know that was for her, right? Yes, there was a chain of neurotransmitters and parasympathetic responses making it all happen, but what mattered was the end result.
Her other arm went down around his waist, drawing him in. One more flick of the eyes, up and down. And then her lips were on his, the softest, sweetest thing—
And then they were falling.
Over the course of her life, Cindy had learned some truly awful lessons about love. Among the worst was the idea she had to work for it, because something was deficient in her core that rendered her unable to receive it by nature of existing. Her parents, so dissatisfied and incompatible in their own marriage, passed that little belief on, and it had warped Cindy from the inside out.
That was why she’d gone to Strych again and again. Any attraction he felt for her was superficial at best, but she’d rationalized that it was fine if she knew that going in. He could give her a life of material comforts if that’s what she so desired, and the rest? All that sticky attachment only led to heartbreak, if the shrieking pre-divorce arguments of Sasha and Lex were anything to go by.
Except she just couldn’t help herself. Cindy felt love, aimed squarely at that lonely little scientist living across the street, and it scared the hell out of her. It came leaking out in awkward ways, too, so why on earth would he ever want it from her, anyway? She’d seen the kind of girls who drew his attention, and there was a type: demure, doting, and non-confrontational. Cindy ticked absolutely none of those boxes.
And yet they’d always been close. Polarized and ready to snap together in an instant if the circumstances aligned. Now was just as good a time as yesterday or three years ago.
So she’d wrapped her foot around his calf while Jimmy was distracted – so easy to do – and sent them tumbling to the bed behind her.
“Why?” he finally managed to choke out, his arms bracketing either side of her head. The flush on his face was delicious.
“Had to knock you off your pedestal. I’m too tired for climbing.”
The surprise on his face slid into naked affection. He brushed a wayward lock of hair behind her ear, and the last of her old impulse that told her end this – you don’t deserve it died on the spot.
“By the way.” Cindy caught his right hand before he put it back down to the comforter. “Just in case you get any ideas about defending my honor again.” She shaped his hand into a fist, thumb resting on the outside of the index and middle fingers. “Tuck the thumb inside your fingers, and the force of a punch will crush it.”
“Would’ve been nice to know that before the gala. My whole hand hurt for a few days afterward, and my thumb still clicks when I bend it a certain way.”
Cindy sighed heavily and kissed his thumb. Then, just to see if she could get away with it, she kissed every other knuckle on his fist before uncurling his fingers and pressing her mouth to his palm. Jimmy watched the whole routine, transfixed.
“I’m sorry about that night, too,” Cindy said. “Strych found out somehow you were gonna get that award, and he thought it’d be funny to show up with me just to rattle you. I don’t think he knew how much you’d fly off the handle.”
“He’d hurt you.” Anger flashed across Jimmy’s face at the memory. “I could see it plain as day. You do this thing where you…” he hunched his shoulders together as a demonstration, “when someone’s wounded you with their words. And the things he was saying to me over his stupid champagne flute about you, like he was bragging—”
“If he claimed we—the most we ever did was kiss. Once. Trust me, once was enough.”
“Old money tastes that bad, huh?”
“Yeah, a lot like halitosis, actually.”
Jimmy gagged and rolled off to one side, back against the pillows. Cindy turned on her side to face him.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to apologize to you enough to make up for everything,” she murmured.
“I don’t need your apologies. You may need to say them, but I don’t need them.”
“Then what do you need?”
“I need to know you believe you deserve better, Cindy. In every facet of your life.” Jimmy reached out for her hand and squeezed it. “Whether that’s with me, or with someone else—”
“Don’t be an idiot, Jimmy. It’s with you. It’s always been with you.” Cindy squeezed his hand back. “If I hadn’t been bathing in self-loathing when you put that ring on the table and had my shit together for once, I would have said yes.”
Jimmy had been able to keep his own tears at bay this whole time, but one tear slipped out in sheer wonder. “You would have?”
Cindy nodded.
“What would you say if I had the ring right now?”
Cindy stared at him, eyebrows knitted together. “Did you…did you keep it?”
“Well, I was hardly going to replicate the extreme geological conditions necessary to transform a diamond back to graphite in the confines of my lab. Challenging enough to get it the other way as it is.”
“Oh my God, you made the ring.”
“Um.” Jimmy watched as Cindy turned her head and let out a muffled scream into the comforter. “Technically, you didn’t answer my question.”
Cindy raised her head and considered him carefully. His breath caught in his throat as he waited for her to say something. Anything.
“If you gave me a ring right now, I would say…we’ve got a lot of work to do.” She squeezed his hand again. “But after enough time – six months, a year, maybe? I would say yes.”
The smile Jimmy gave her was achingly big, as was the one Cindy gave back to him. After a few moments, they shuffled together under the sheets in a cuddled mass. And when they drifted off, each had sweeter dreams about each other for the first time in a long, long time.