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“No. I wouldn’t.”
“I knew you would say that.” A huge and dramatic sigh escapes Dr. Grace’s lips. He falls back on the couch as if he were a Victorian woman having a fainting spell.
“I don’t know why you asked, I hardly feel that way for you now.”
“That’s not the point.”
A small sigh. A thumb and an index finger try to alleviate a migraine by pressing down hard on the bone ridge just above Director Stratt’s eyes.
“What is the point then, Dr. Grace?”
“That you would still love me if I turned into a worm! You would just—what—leave me on the floor to be stomped down by Dimitri’s crocs?”
“Why would I love you as anything else if I love you because you are this version of yourself? Isn’t that what leads to divorce and ‘friendship break-ups,’ as you call them? Because people change?” A pause as she scribbles something down. “Hypothetically speaking, in this scenario of yours. Of course.”
He ignores the correction. She loves him, he knows. Loves to pretend to be annoyed by him, too.
“So the moment I become a worm, you would say: ‘That’s not Grace anymore, let his fate be decided by boots instead of the helping hand of a friend?!’ I’d still be me! Just a worm me! I’d be a super cute worm, too.”
She looks up from the report she’s editing. Her eyes are a little wide with surprise as she continues to stare at him without blinking.
“What?” He pouts defensively. Alright, so what if he was taking this a bit more personally than he wanted to? This was how the conversation was supposed to go:
“Stratt, would you still love me if I was a worm?”
“Yes, I would buy you a worm farm and keep it in my kitchen until you died. Then, I would use your dead worm body as fertilizer for my plants.”
But no! She had to go ahead and be Stratt and give him a big fat no. He crosses his arms and slumps down even further into the couch. You make first-contact with one alien, learn how to breed it and suddenly, two years later you’re old news! He bets she’d make a worm farm for Worm-Dimitri.
Stratt is still looking at him with her slightly unhinged eyes. Her mouth is parted a bit open.
“What?” He whines a little more forcefully.
“You are under the assumption that we are friends?”
His jaw drops. He scrambles to sit up properly but the couch sinks in so nicely that it’s a struggle to even bring his head up higher than the height of the back of couch.
“Well, duh! You’re not?!” He awkwardly pushes the hair that fell in front of his eyes back to its proper place and breathes heavily as he finally manages to unearth himself from the pillow fort Stratt calls a couch.
She cautiously puts her pen down and arranges it so it’s parallel to her papers. “I am your boss.”
“So? You’re everybody’s boss. Are you telling me you don’t consider any of them your friends?”
She never leaves the aircraft without him. And she doesn’t visit family or have long personal conversations. Unless she has them behind doors while she’s supposed to be sleeping. But Stratt takes her sleeping very seriously ever since he skipped too many naps and collapsed going down the stairs and twisted his ankle. (She had ran over and admonished, “what if that had been your hand?! You’d be out of work for weeks!” Yeah, he can see why she’s confused about them being friends.)
“Not really. It is important to keep a professional relationship at all times, Dr. Grace. Otherwise it could interfere with the project.” She realigns the already perfectly aligned pen again.
“Bull.”
“Pardon?”
“Yeah, you should be sorry, cause I see some pants on fire, Liar Liar.”
She stares at him with slightly less wide eyes, but now there’s concern floating somewhere in there. He sighs when the little frown between her eyes deepens. This is what happens when he tries to introduce too many new phrases to her too quickly. Her brain glitches and then she thinks he is having a stroke.
“Liar, liar, pants on fire? Bull? Bull…” he pauses as he tilts his head to his left pointedly. “Bleep.”
Her face clears and she nods slowly. He knows she’s indulging him as if he were a child handing her a random object as a gift—he recognizes the signs now. They stare at each other for a concerning amount of time. Her right eyebrow twitches. His glasses slide down his nose.
“Did you just say ‘bleep’ to replace the word shit?” Both of her eyebrows rise up in astonishment.
He groans and rolls his eye. “It just wouldn’t have the same effect if I used my normal substitutes.”
She loses the battle against her muscles and she smiles at him. He can see her bottom tooth that’s stained darker right as it meets the gum and unfortunately, it makes him lose track of the conversation. She remembers her tooth a couple of seconds later, as it always happens when she smiles like this, and her lips press together tightly after that. She will never admit it, but she is self-conscious about it. Grace knows that it comes from childhood malnutrition but has never brought it up. How do you reassure your boss—who is apparently not your friend—that you think her smile with her stained teeth is lovelier than any smile with perfect white teeth? Without making it weird, like he just did?
He doesn’t want to find out any time soon. Maybe when they’re friends…
He scoffs and stares at her as she dismisses the whole conversation by picking up her pen. Scoffs in indignation when he remembers something else.
“Wait! You’re friends with Dimitri!” That’s what the Russian says, anyway. They’ve gone drinking together. At bars. In the outside world.
“That’s different.” She waves her hand casually. Too casually.
“Why?” She ignores him. “Stratt, whyyyyy…” He keeps elongating the word until she gives in.
“Because,” she stresses the word and he stops making noise. Immediately, her shoulders relax. Does she know she’s so easy to read nowadays? He hopes not. “We’ve known each other for a long time.”
Grace perks up and sits at full attention.
“How long?” He doesn’t sound suspicious. He’s got nothing to be suspicious of. Dimitri is also his friend. He’s a good man.
“Decades.” She shrugs. He narrows his eyes, non-suspiciously.
But does he really know Dimitri?
“Were you his boss when you met him?” Her face hardens a little and she purses her lips.
“No,” she stresses. He waits. “I was simply observing the project his company was also a part of.”
“Observing? What did you do with your observations?”
“I sent them to my boss,” she says primly, circling something on the paper.
“Who then…?”
“…sent them to Dimitri’s boss,” she confesses with a roll of her eyes.
“Aha! You were still kind of in charge of him then. And you became friends.” He’s about to launch into a soliloquy on why the two of them were still friends, when she speaks.
“Not quite. We were lovers first. Then friends.”
“What?!”
“It was a long time ago. I learned a lot.”
“You slept with Dimitri?! As in,” he brings two fists together and knocks them together awkwardly, recreating something only he could see in his mind. “Like, with your…organs? Sex organs?”
He whispers the last two words and his voice is still somehow louder and quite higher than before. His face is definitely red now. He can’t really feel it because his whole body has gone numb, but he knows it is.
A strange little sound comes out of Stratt’s open mouth. He’s still mindlessly bumping his own fists together. Then she throws her head back and laughs heartedly. He can see her stomach moving with the effort and her…chest shaking every time she exhales.
She’s laughing at him and he doesn’t even care. The sight leaves him speechless. He did that. He doesn’t know how, but she’s laughing because of him. A full belly laugh! He smiles slowly until he’s giving her a dopey grin. It takes her a while to calm down but Grace doesn’t mind—her neck and cheeks are red and her eyes are squeezed shut tightly without any care to her makeup. He likes it.
“Oh, Dr. Grace,” she shakes her head and wipes under her eyes to collect those tiny black balls that inevitably fall from a woman’s eyelashes as the day begins to end.
He learned this from Stratt, actually, when she yelled at him for not telling her that she had makeup smeared under her eyes until a long meeting ended. Now he knows what to do when she turns to him before an important public appearance and asks “How do I look?” Flyaways, eyelids (top and bottom!), and teeth. Check, check, check, he usually says or tells her she has lipstick on her teeth or her hair looks stringy. It’s terrifying because then the solution to the problem is entrusted to him.
She gives one last contented sigh and her mirth deflates out of her with an almost fond look on her face.
His smile is still big while he’s just sitting and staring at her. She doesn’t seem to mind when he stares at her like this, it’s only when she looks away and pulls the tissue under her lower lip between her teeth that he knows she’s feeling too perceived.
He looks away and tries to think of something to say…
“Woah, hold on,” his smile drops and he shakes his head disbelievingly. “You learned a lot? From Dimitri? About…sex?!”
She laughs at him again, but this time it’s very short and sounds mockingly.
“No, Dr. Grace. I learned a lot about allowing my personal and professional lives to interact.”
“Oh,” he nods happily. “Right, yeah. Totally.”
He needs to reevaluate his friendship with Dimitri.
It sounds like it blew back in their faces. What a shame, he thinks, to think of someone as a lesson learned. He tries not to smirk.
“Get back to work, Dr. Grace,” she snaps in her favored bossy tone, but she’s smiling.
He giggles quietly. He pulls the papers he previously discarded closer to him and pretends to read. When he peeks up at her through his eyelashes five minutes later, he can tell that she still has a small smile on her face. He hasn’t seen Dimitri make her smile like that, has he? He begins to frown…has he?
“Stop,” he says seriously. He holds his arms out as if he’s pushing against invisible walls pushing in on him from either sides. “Would you still love Dimitri if he turned into a worm?”
“Why is it always love? Why can’t it be ‘tolerate him’ or… ‘look at him?’”
“It’s not as dramatic. Answer the question, Stratt.”
She sighs heavily and sits back on her chair, leaning back enough to hear the leather creak. She tosses the pen on top of the papers and levels him with a disturbing look. Her lips are pursed and she’s squinting her eyes at him. He can hear her hum a little as if she’s considering something.
“Do you really believe we’re friends?”
The question takes him off guard. He thought, perhaps, that telling her he considered her a close friend was too much for her, but that she would store it away to think about at a later time. She’ll bring it up again when she was ready. Probably never.
He doesn’t know where she’s going with this so he decides to be honest.
“Yeah, of course.” He shrugs like it’s no big deal, because it isn’t. The world is ending and he wants to be friends with his boss. Has been friends with her. Who cares?
She takes a sharp inhale in but doesn’t slow down. “You say ‘of course.’ You’re certain. You know when we became friends.”
“Yeah…?”
“Well? Since when?” She asks exasperatedly.
“What?”
“The date. When did I become your friend?”
He barks out a laugh and he can tell right away that it displeases her. It makes the bark turn into a low chuckle.
“I don’t know the exact moment, Stratt! You-you sneaked the last slice of the lemon meringue pie for me ‘cause you knew I liked it.” He blurts out, then remembers more of the story and grins. “Even though I already had seconds ‘cause I begged you for your piece. A fight broke out about it, remember? Some engineers were arguing about who could have the last slice and you took it from right under their noses.”
He becomes more and more animated the more he recalls. He had let her have two small bites of the pie. It was the least he could do! Still, he remembers that there hadn’t been dessert for the rest of the week and everybody had blamed the two engineers for a whole month.
Her cheeks turn a little red.
“Oh.” She clears her throat. “Yes, I remember quite well.”
He want to tease her a little more, see how red her cheeks get. “You want another example?”
“No, no—that’s not necessary.” She starts answering before he even stops talking. She sits up a little in what almost looks like controlled panic. It makes him chuckle again, at least until she gets a calculated look in her eye. “That was just months after you landed on the Gansu.”
Oh, right.
Riiiiight. Well, she grew on him pretty quickly, alright? That happens when some boundaries are ignored very early on, like not entering your newest employee’s room in the middle of the night while he’s sleeping.
He decides to play it cool and pretend it doesn’t matter. Cause it really doesn’t. His kids used to make and break friendships during the same week.
He just nods his head to confirm her suspicions. She smiles at him and it’s not dimmed by a frown, or pressed lips or—for the sake of her reputation—suppressed into a smirk.
He claps his hands once as if that decided it. “Cool, so we’re friends.”
“Yes, yes, we’re friends.” She picks up her pen but clears her papers off her desk to reveal the giant calendar that takes up the whole desk. When she starts jotting something down, he quietly makes his way over to see what it is.
She’s not fast enough to cover it when she realizes he’s close enough to see, but he pretends to be upset about the fact that she won’t tell him. Her cheeks are very red and she won’t meet his eye, but he makes sure to let her know he did not see so as not to embarrass her further.
Because that's fine, he read at least the first line.
August 06, 2023
Friendship Confirmed (Dr.RG)
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“Uh, Stratt?” Dimitri’s knock comes half a second behind his greeting. She looks up to see him shuffling his feet nervously at the entrance of her office. “Uh. I have to ask you. I mean, I need to ask you something.”
She nods and gestures to the chair in front of her desk. The man vehemently shakes his head and puts his arms behind his back.
“I have to stay here.” She hears some noises outside in the hallway. “I mean, I want to stay here. Standing.”
“Alright,” she says hesitantly. She’s never seen the man so nervous and wonders if it has anything to do with why he’s not speaking to her in Russian.
“I want to ask,” he starts again a little more confidently. “If…you would tell me. Please. When I…become a…wait. One moment, please.”
And he darts out of the open door. She blinks a couple of times. She hears more noises, a small thump and then Dimitri is back inside her office.
“Yes, what I meant to say…what I wanted to say was,” his eyes dart to the side, staring at something out in the hallway. “Would you, Stratt, still…would you still love me if I was worm?”
Eva does not hesitate. She picks up her stapler and throws it directly at Dimitri’s head. He’s had many bad hits to he head, he should be fine. But the man giggles—giggles!— and runs out of the room before it can hit him. There’s a loud noise when it hits the door and then clatters to the floor but she can still hear the sound of people chortling and failing to run away. She imagines them falling onto each other because they are laughing too hard to flee and her theory is confirmed when she hears a very Grace-like yelp and even more boisterous laughing.
She rolls her eyes and takes her phone out. Taps her thumb against the side of it. They’re friends now. Friends say such things to each other all the time, right?
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To: Dr. Ryland Grace (U.S.)
Yes, I would still love you if you were a worm. You are late on three reports. I will not ask again.
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To: Expectations For EVA-lutionary Models 💧
but u wouldn’t love Dimitri right?? He’d be an ugly worm
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To: Expectations For EVA-lutionary Models 💧
would u make me a worm farm to sleep in and carry me around in ur pockets??? 🪱
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To: Expectations For EVA-lutionary Models 💧
okay fine I sent the reports!!! ☠️
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To: Dr. Ryland Grace (U.S.) 🪱
Yes to the worm farm. No, I would leave you in your old classroom as a class pet.
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To: Expectations For EVA-lutionary Models 💧
u really do love me 💝
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To: Expectations For EVA-lutionary Models 💧
wait u didn’t answer the question about Dimitri turning into a worm eva
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