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The bowling alley formerly known as Beaver Creek Lanes had seen better days. To be fair, so had everything else in the world. Jennifer stood just inside the entrance, staring at six lanes coated in two centuries of dust, three partially collapsed ceilings, a snack counter that had apparently once advertised something called Atomic Wings, and a faded mural of a smiling family whose clothes were aggressively pre-war.
She looked at Nick. Nick looked at the bowling alley.
“You promised me bowling.”
“I did.”
“This is a ruin.”
“Most things are.”
“There is a skeleton wearing bowling shoes.”
Nick glanced toward the remains sprawled beside lane four. “Means we're in the right place.”
Jennifer stared at him.
He grinned. “Come on, doll.”
She followed him inside.
It had taken them most of the morning to get here. Nick had remembered the place from before the war. Not personally, he'd clarified, but from the other Nick's memories. He'd driven past it a hundred times. Bowled here once or twice with other cops and once even took Jenny Lands on a date here. One in which he, his memories supplied, spectacularly impressed his wife-to-be.
That pre-war familiarity, especially regarding Jenny, had given Jennifer pause. She was getting better about being careful when talking Nick vs. Nick, and so was he. The memories were there. They belonged to someone who had lived and died more than two centuries ago, and they also belonged to the man walking beside her now in whatever complicated way memories could belong to anyone.
They'd stopped trying to solve it. Mostly. Nick walked behind the counter and started rummaging.
“So how does this work?”
He looked up. “Bowling?”
“Yes.”
“You throw the ball at the pins.”
Jennifer waited. Nick went back to rummaging.
“That's it?”
“More or less.”
“There has to be a technique.”
“There is.”
She narrowed her eyes. Nick found a pair of bowling shoes, held one up, reconsidered, and tossed it aside.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“The technique.”
He straightened and gave her an entirely innocent look. “Throw it thataway.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the busted up lanes.
Jennifer stared at him. “I hate you.”
“No you don't.”
“No, but I'm considering it.”
His grin widened.
It took another hour before they could actually bowl. The automatic pinsetter was dead, naturally. Nick disappeared behind it with a screwdriver between his teeth while Jennifer cleaned enough debris from the approach that neither of them would break their necks.
The ball return worked intermittently after Nick threatened it with a wrench. Jennifer found a score sheet behind the counter along with the stub of a pencil. Nick found two pairs of shoes. Neither pair matched.
Jennifer's left shoe was red and approximately half a size too large. Her right was blue and slightly too small. Nick's were both red, but one had apparently been gnawed by something he wasn't keen on thinking too much about.
Jennifer looked down at their feet. “Romantic.”
“Only the best for you, sweetheart.”
“You really know how to show a girl a good time.”
“I've been told.”
She glanced at him.
Nick coughed. “Bowling.”
“Mm-hmm.”
They chose lane two. Jennifer picked up a ball.
“No.”
She looked at Nick. “What?”
“Too heavy.”
“I can lift it.”
“Didn't say you couldn't.”
“Then why—”
“You want one you can control.”
Jennifer looked at the ball. Then at the pins. Then back at the ball.
Nick watched the process happen behind her eyes and sighed. “Jen.”
“What?”
“It's bowling.”
“I know.”
“You're investigating the ball.”
“I am not investigating the ball.”
“You've got your detective face on.”
“I do not have a detective face.”
“You absolutely have a detective face.”
She put the ball down. “Fine. Which one?”
Nick selected another.
Jennifer took it from him, tested its weight, and nodded. “Better.”
“Now put your fingers there.”
She did.
“Thumb there.”
She did.
Nick stepped behind her.
“Now—”
Jennifer glanced over her shoulder and smirked. “Is this instruction or an excuse to put your hands on me?”
“Can't it be both?”
She laughed, blushing clear to her toes.
There. That was worth the trip by itself. Nick adjusted her elbow with his flesh hand and rested the metal one lightly against her hip.
“Don't muscle it. Nice easy swing. Let the ball do the work.”
“Throw it thataway.”
“See? You're learning.”
She elbowed him. He stepped back with a quiet, fake “Oof.”
Jennifer faced the pins. She drew her arm back exactly as he'd shown her, stepped forward, and released. The ball traveled perhaps six feet before curving sharply left and dropping into the gutter. Jennifer watched it disappear.
Nick said nothing.
She turned.
He was very carefully not smiling.
“Don't.”
“Didn't say anything.”
“You're thinking something.”
“Can't arrest a man for thinking.”
“Give me time.”
The second ball hit three pins. The third hit five. By the sixth frame, Jennifer had developed a theory. Nick knew this because she had started adjusting the placement of her feet.
“Oh, no.”
“What?”
“You're doing science.”
“I'm compensating.”
“For bowling.”
“Yes.”
“People used to drink while doing this.”
“Maybe that's why they were bad at it.”
Nick leaned against the scoring table. “Human civilization died for this.”
“Shut up.”
She picked up the ball. She had figured something out about the lane. The floor wasn't perfectly level. The ball consistently drifted left, but if she changed her release slightly—
She threw. The ball rolled straight down the lane.
Nick straightened.
It struck the pocket. Pins exploded in every direction. All ten went down.
Jennifer froze. For one second she simply stood there. Then she spun around. Her face was incandescent. “Did you see that?”
Nick was smiling. Not the crooked grin he wore when he was teasing her. Not the sardonic little smirk that usually preceded some terrible joke. The other one. The rare one.
The one that softened everything.
Jennifer's own smile faltered because suddenly she remembered sitting in Ellie's chair late one night, staring at him beneath the green-shaded lamp.
Have you ever looked at someone and never wanted to stop looking?
Nick tilted his head. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That's a hell of a look for nothing.”
Jennifer smiled again. “Your turn, Detective.”
He studied her another moment, but let it go. “All right. Stand back and watch a professional.”
“Oh, you're a professional now?”
“Doll, I've got decades of experience.”
“Someone else's decades.”
Nick stopped.
Jennifer immediately wondered if she'd gone too far.
Then his eyes narrowed. “Talking mighty big for somebody who's thrown exactly one strike in her entire life.”
She grinned, half relief and half sheer amusement.
Nick selected his ball. He approached the lane with considerably more swagger than the situation warranted.
Jennifer folded her arms. “I'm watching.”
“Prepare to be impressed.”
He threw. The ball rolled beautifully. Straight. Fast. It struck the pins with an impressive crack.
Six fell. Four remained standing.
Silence.
Jennifer looked at the pins. Then at Nick.
Nick remained facing the lane.
Jennifer's mouth twitched.
He turned slowly.
She lost the battle and burst out laughing. “Human Nick was better at this, wasn't he?”
Nick stared at her. “That's classified.”
Jennifer laughed so hard she doubled over, one hand braced against the scoring table, the other clutching her stomach. “Oh my God.”
“Keep it up.”
“Decades of experience!”
“Lane's crooked.”
“You fixed the lane!”
“Apparently not well enough.”
“Professional!”
Nick pointed at her. “Your score is currently thirty-two.”
“I got a strike!”
“One strike does not make you good at bowling.”
“It makes me better than you.”
“It objectively does not.”
Jennifer laughed harder.
Nick tried to maintain the glare. He lasted perhaps three seconds. Then that smile appeared again.
Jennifer saw it. Of course she did. She always did.
Eventually her laughter subsided. She wiped her eyes and straightened.
Outside, the afternoon light was beginning to fade. Soon they'd have to start back. There were things waiting for them. There were always things waiting for them.
The Institute was changing. Synths were choosing what to do with lives that belonged to them for the first time. The Commonwealth was trying to understand a future nobody had expected. There were cases on Nick's desk. Settlements that needed help. A Brotherhood that still wanted both their hides, dead or alive. And questions Jennifer still couldn't answer.
There would always be something.
But not right now. Right now there was a crooked bowling lane. Right now there were two ridiculous pairs of mistmatched shoes, a handwritten scorecard, and Nick Fucking Valentine standing beneath the weak glow of a half-dead ceiling light, resetting four pins by hand because the machinery had failed again.
Jennifer watched him.
He noticed. “What?”
“Nothing.”
He pointed at her without looking away from the pins. “You keep saying that.”
“I know.”
“You planning on helping?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I'm busy.”
That made him turn. “Doing what?”
Jennifer rested her chin in her hand, a smile on her face that looked wistful if he had to label it. “Looking.”
Nick went still just for a moment, then he understood. His expression softened. He didn't tell her not to. He didn't remind her that there would be other days. He didn't promise something neither of them could know. He simply stood there and let her look.
After a while, Jennifer smiled. “Your turn again, Detective.”
Nick reached for the ball. “Prepare to be impressed.”
“You already used that line.”
“Still applies.”
“You knocked down six pins.”
“Warm-up.”
“Uh-huh.”
He stepped onto the approach. Jennifer picked up her pencil. And beneath the last frame of the scorecard, where there was no reason to write anything at all, she wrote the date. Just the date.
Then she looked up. Nick threw. And missed every single pin.
Only this time, Jennifer didn’t laugh. This time, when he turned to face her, fully prepared to eat his hat if she demanded it as payment for all his blustering and boasting, he didn’t find her still at the little table with its ratty little bench seat.
She was standing before him. And the look on her face was a look Nick Valentine had never imagined would rest on the face of any woman when they had eyes on him.
It was not a time for words.
He felt a stirring deep within, something he couldn’t name, didn’t fully understand, but had become sort of used to feeling now and again when confronted with the girl outta the Midwest Commonwealth who’d changed everything about his life and how he thought about it.
And so he stepped forward. Her hands were already coming up so that when he completed his step, they rested palm flat on his chest, over top of his suspenders. They still hadn’t gotten him a replacement coat.
But a coat wasn’t what was on his mind when she reached up and gently removed his hat, placing it on her own head. His hands rested on her shoulders, then slid up her neck and cupped her face before he leaned down and she stretched onto her tiptoes and their lips met like they always did: softly. Gently. Carefully. As though they both felt they were interacting with something fragile and precious.
And for them it was. Because life in the Commonwealth was fragile and precious. And that was why, despite everything that was waiting for them beyond the walls of Beaver Creek Lanes, they remained right where they were.
And when they parted so Jennifer could catch her breath, her cheeks were blushed, the tips of her ears were red and her lips were swollen and wet and that was when Nick absolutely felt something he’d never felt before. Something stir so immediately and deeply inside his chassis that it made him gasp.
“Nick?” Not worry. Not yet.
“I…” He blinked. Then blinked some more.
“You okay?” Concern now. Just a bit.
And suddenly the faded memories of another man’s life overlayed his synthetic successor’s present and Nick’s eyes widened. Oh.
Oh.
“You’ve got a funny look on your face,” she said with a gentle nudge of arm to chest.
“Just had an epiphany.”
“Sounds painful.”
He barked out a laugh. “It’s not. At least, I don’t think it is.”
She moved back in and snaked her arms around his neck. “Gonna share?”
“It’s classified.”
Jennifer’s eyes narrowed, then she pressed her body fully into his. For a moment her eyes widened and then her entire face went the color of a tomato. Oh.
Oh.
He raised an eyebrow, and the smirk that tugged his mouth sideways could’ve lit up the room like a pre-war Christmas display.
He cleared his throat, leaned down and whispered into her ear, “Date’s not over yet, sweetheart.”
She grinned. “Well, then. Lead the way, Mister Valentine.”
He straightened, put his hands in his pants pockets and then moved his right arm out so she could take it. She did. But they didn’t either one of them move. Not yet.
“Jen?”
“Yeah?” She looked up at him.
“Never mind.”
She cocked her head. “What?”
“I’ve…well…this is all kinda new to me. I mean, ya know, in this body.”
It was her turn to smirk. “Well, then. Looks like you’re in good company.”
His eyes widened comically. “You mean…” Off her face turning even more red, he clamped his mouth shut, then said, “Oh.”
Once she managed to find her voice again, Jennifer asked in a somewhat higher-pitched voice, “So what usually happens after bowling?”
At last he began moving toward the exit, her coming right along with him, hand still gripping his arm. “Don’t rightly recall,” he replied, hand reaching for the door. “What say we figure it out as we go along?”
She smiled. “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
When the door oened into the early evening hours of the Island, he escorted her out, hand at the small of her back. And when they began heading toward Far Harbor, she leaned her head on his shoulder.
Nick wasn’t entirely sure how to handle this latest development. But rather than such uncertainty being terrifying, for the first time in his life, he felt…well, he felt well and truly alive.
His arm came around her as they made their way through the parking lot and back to the road, and she slotted into the specific Jennifer-shaped space that had somehow existed for an entire century before the puzzle piece herself discovered it.
Not a bad way to end a date.
Not that it was entirely over yet…