Seed Bank Reunion

I've been up here on Spitsbergen for two years now, and I can tell you the airport in Longyearbyen is not built for drama. It's one room, one baggage belt, and a coffee machine that's always broken. So when I walked in that Friday to pick up a visiting scientist and saw a whole wedding party crowded by the doors in matching green parkas, I actually laughed out loud.

Then I stopped laughing, because one of them turned around.

Darius Ford. Twenty-nine now, three years since I'd last seen him, and still built like someone who carries his own lighting rigs up stairs for a living. He was arguing with the groom about a duffel bag, and he looked good. Better than good. My stomach did something I hadn't felt it do since I was twenty-five.

"You have got to be kidding me," I said, mostly to myself.

But he heard me. His head came up like a hunting dog's and he stared at me across that little airport for a solid three seconds before he said my name.

"Lindsay?"

"Hey, Darius."

He crossed the room fast, and for a second I thought he was going to hug me, and for a second I was going to let him. But he stopped short and just did this awkward wave, and honestly that was worse.

"You work here? At the seed vault?"

"Security supervisor. Two years now." I stuck my hand out like an idiot. He shook it. His palm was warm and mine was not.

"This is incredible. We're here for Brent's bachelor thing, and I literally did not know you lived here."

"Nobody knows anybody lives here. It's six hundred people and a polar bear problem."

Brent came over and stuck his hand out too, and I shook that one as well, and the whole time Darius stood there watching me like I was going to evaporate. I introduced myself to the groomsmen, told them the bar in town did a reindeer burger that would change their lives, and walked out to my truck feeling like the ground was slightly tilted.

Here's what you need to know about me. I'm twenty-eight, I like my job, I like the dark months, and I have not been on a date since the Darius era ended. Three years. He wanted to chase festivals around the world and I wanted to plant roots somewhere cold and quiet, and we both figured love could survive a breakup. It could not. I'd made my peace with that about a year and a half ago. Or so I thought.

The trouble was, the rental company only had one vehicle left for the wedding party, a little stick-shift wagon, and the roads that week were pure ice. And apparently Darius was the only one of the five of them who could drive a manual.

"You're kidding," I said, when he told me this at the campground office an hour later. I'd come back to drop off their permits, which was a lie I told myself, since a runner could have brought them.

"Dead serious. Brent learned on an automatic and broke a knee doing it. These guys are all city boys."

"So you're driving."

"So I'm driving." He grinned at me, and that grin used to be my whole weekend. "You doubt me?"

"I remember your driving, Darius. I remember a ditch outside Tromso."

"That was black ice and a rental, and you laughed about it for two years, which is fair. But I've gotten good since. Festivals, man. I drive box trucks up mountain roads at two in the morning."

"Okay, prove it."

He did prove it, is the annoying part. I rode shotgun, because somebody had to direct them to the campground anyway, and I watched him take the rental out of the lot and onto the coast road like he'd grown up on it. Heel-toe on the downshifts. Gentle on the clutch. The wagon didn't fishtail once, even on the hill where I slide every winter.

"Okay," I admitted, somewhere around the third gear change. "You're good."

"Say it louder for the boys in back."

"We heard her," Brent called from the back seat. "She's blushing."

"I am not blushing, it's minus twelve in this car."

Darius glanced over, quiet, just for a second, the way he used to look at me when he was deciding whether to push. "It's good to see you, Linds. Genuinely."

"You too. You look... good. Strong. Are you still eating only gas station food?"

"I've evolved. I own a vegetable now."

I laughed, a real one, and the guys in back started heckling him about the vegetable, and the rest of the drive was easy. Too easy. I kept catching myself turning toward him at red lights.

That night was the bachelor party, which on Spitsbergen means a campfire behind the tents and whatever the local bar had left in stock. The groomsmen were loud and friendly and kept feeding the fire things it should not eat, and I sat on a log with my hands around a cup of gløgg and tried not to watch Darius across the flames. I failed at that roughly every nine seconds.

Around midnight the group collapsed into arguments about whether a husky sled counts as a bachelor activity, and Darius got up, stretched, and wandered toward the edge of the campground where the dark takes over completely. He stopped a few steps out and looked back at me.

"You coming, or are you warm enough?"

"On what grounds would I follow you into the dark?"

"Old times' grounds. Ten minutes. I promise to stay visible and behave."

I looked at the fire. I looked at him. "Ten minutes."

We walked out past the last tent to the low stone wall above the shore. The sky was doing that thing it does here, enormous and clear, stars all the way down to the horizon. He lit a small lantern because of course he did, lighting guy, and set it low so it wouldn't ruin the night vision.

"You still do that," I said. "Stagecraft everywhere you go."

"Occupational hazard." He sat on the wall. "Three years, Linds."

"Three years. How's the career? You famous yet?"

"Comfortable. Busy. I turned down the touring gig, actually. The one that goes two years straight."

That landed somewhere in my chest, because that gig had been the whole fight. "You turned it down?"

"Yeah. Turns out I like having a base. Turns out I figured that out a couple of years too late, after I lost the best thing my base had in it." He said it plain, no performance in it, which was always his tell. When Darius performed, he was fine. When he was quiet and plain, he meant it.

I sat down next to him, an arm's length of space, which felt both too far and not nearly far enough. "Darius."

"I'm not trying anything. I swear. I just couldn't fly out of this island without telling you that I think about you, and that I was an idiot at twenty-six, and that seeing you in that airport today was the best thing that's happened to me in a year."

"You saw me for ninety seconds at an airport."

"And it ruined my whole afternoon. I couldn't focus on Brent's rehearsal toast at dinner and he'd practiced it."

I laughed again, damn him. The lantern hissed. Somewhere behind us the fire popped and Brent shouted something about a husky.

"Okay," I said. "Honest answer?"

"Please."

"I have thought about you too. More than I meant to. I built a whole quiet life up here and it's a good life, and you walked into one room with a duffel bag and now I can't think straight. And it annoys me."

"Good annoyed or bad annoyed?"

"Annoyed annoyed. The kind where you're mad at yourself for being happy."

He turned to face me. The lantern lit half of him, the good half, all of him. "So what do we do with that?"

"I don't know. I've been out of practice for three years. I'm rusty at everything."

"Rusty at what?"

"At this. At wanting somebody." I took a breath. "I missed you, Darius. I still miss you, and you've been sitting across a fire from me for six hours."

For a second he didn't say anything, and then he reached out very slowly and took my hand, and I let him.

"Can I tell you a plan I've been not-saying out loud since the airport?" he asked.

"That depends on the plan."

"Tomorrow, the group does the glacier hike. Six hours. I could mysteriously develop a sore knee and you could mysteriously have paperwork."

"That's a terrible plan."

"It's a bad plan," he agreed.

I looked at our hands on the wall between us, his thumb moving once across my knuckles, and felt twenty-eight years of good sense losing an argument to twenty-five.

"Ask me properly," I said, "and I'll think about it."

"Okay. Officially, I have a sore knee," Darius said the next morning, loudly enough for Brent to hear it over the coffee.

"Officially," I said, "I have paperwork."

"You two are the worst liars I have ever met," Brent said, zipping his parka. "Fine. Darius, stay off the glacier. Lindsay, take him up to the viewpoint instead, it's flat and boring and perfect for injured men."

So that's how the five of them went east up the ice with a guide, and Darius and I went the other way, along the coast path toward the vault. I give tours to visitors sometimes, so I talked the whole first hour, the entrance, the tunnel, the concrete wedged into the mountain like a safety deposit box for the whole planet. He listened the way he always listened, actually listening, asking real questions.

"How cold is it in there?"

"Minus eighteen in the seed hall. Year round. It stays that cold even if the power dies."

"That's the most romantic building I've ever heard of."

"It's a seed bank."

"It's a building whose entire job is keeping things alive until someone comes back for them. Come on, Linds."

I gave up arguing with him around the bend past the viewpoint, which is where the path dropped into a small cove, sheltered on three sides by rock, out of the wind completely. He stopped there and just looked, and I stopped and mostly looked at him. He'd taken off his hat and his hair was doing the thing it always did after a