The Things We Do After Shift

I get home at six, which feels like a crime already because I have been traveling since Tuesday and all I want in the world is a shower and my girlfriend and maybe a whole pizza, in whatever order they show up. The apartment smells like the same dust it smelled like when I left six months ago, which is somehow comforting and depressing at the same time, and her laptop is gone off the couch, which is not comforting at all. I text her. Hey, landed, I'm home, I'm alive, in case anyone was wondering. She texts back three minutes later like someone who read it and forgot to answer, which is very her, sorry babe, lab thing, Bo needs the data tonight, I'll be home by nine I swear.

So I shower, I order the pizza, I eat half of it standing at the counter like an animal, and at nine I put two beers in the fridge and sit on the arm of the couch with the lamp on like some kind of waiting wife in a movie, and I am twenty-eight years old and I just spent six months getting shot at indirectly and directly, and here I am watching the door like it owes me money.

At ten the door finally opens and Dahlia comes in with her hair pulled back and her bag sliding off her shoulder and she smells like seawater and formaldehyde, that weird lab pickle smell that gets into everything down at the marine sciences building, and I say, "You're late," before I can stop myself, and it comes out flatter and meaner than I meant it.

"I know," she says, kicking her shoes off by the door because she has never once in two years used the shoe rack I bought, "I know, babe, I'm sorry, Bo is losing his mind over this grant deadline and the sensor array dumped bad data all week and someone had to sit there and re-run the counts, and I said I'd go because he's my advisor and if he doesn't get the data set the whole lab loses funding, and I know, I know that's not your problem." She drops the bag on the floor and comes over and puts her forehead against my shoulder, and she smells like the ocean and dead fish and chemicals, and I hate that I love it.

I put my arms around her anyway, because I have been holding this hug in my chest for six months and it is going to happen whether I am petty or not. "You said nine," I say into her hair.

"I said nine and then Bo called again at eight thirty." She pulls back and looks at me, and she looks tired in that specific grad student way where the tiredness has settled into her face like sediment, and she is twenty-six and beautiful and I have missed her so much it actually hurts to look at her. "Hi, by the way. Welcome home. You look good."

"I look like someone who ate a whole pizza alone."

"Hot," she says, and grabs a beer out of the fridge, and we sit on the couch, and for about forty minutes it is actually good, she asks about the deployment and I tell her the parts I'm allowed to tell and a couple I'm not, and she laughs at my impression of the supply sergeant, and I think, okay, this is the week, this is what I came home for. Then her phone buzzes on the armrest and she looks at it and her whole face does the thing, the little flinch, and I know before she says it.

"Bo?" I say.

"Bo," she says. "He wants me in at dawn. The tide window is early and the samples have to go in the analyzer before ten or the whole day is wasted and he's already behind." She says it all in one breath, like she's rehearsed the defense, and maybe she has, because we have had versions of this conversation before, on the phone, across six thousand miles, and I have heard it from a tent in a place I can't name with a satellite delay between us.

"Okay," I say, and I hear how flat my voice is again, and I try to fix it and I don't quite manage.

"Katy." She takes my hand. "It's one week. You're home for one week and I want it to be good, I swear, I just, this deadline is real, if I blow it he'll have me doing literature reviews for a year."

"I know. I know it's real. I just spent six months being real somewhere else and I wanted one week that wasn't."

* * *

Thursday night Kurt drags me to The Spoke, which is the same dump it was when we met, same pool table with the torn felt, same bartender who is maybe fifty and maybe immortal, and Kurt is thirty and loud and has already bought the second round before I sit down, because that is how Kurt does everything, before you sit down.

"So let me get this straight," he says, racking the balls, "you're home one week, one, and she's scheduled tighter than convoy briefings."

"She's not scheduling on purpose, it's her advisor, the guy's got a grant deadline and apparently the entire ocean stops existing if she doesn't count plankton at dawn."

"Plankton," Kurt says, and shoots, and scratches, because Kurt is bad at pool and always has been. "Babe, I love you, but you're competing with a microscope."

"I'm not competing with a microscope, that's insane." I take my shot and miss everything. "I'm losing to a microscope, which is worse."

He laughs at that, big and stupid the way he does, and I laugh too, and it does help, I will admit that, drinking bad beer and losing at pool with a guy I've known four years, and for a while I feel almost human instead of a person waiting. Then my phone rings on the table and it's Dahlia and I know, I just know, and I answer anyway.

"Hey," she says, and her voice has that tight busy sound. "So I'm already at the lab, I came in early to get ahead of it, but the analyzer is throwing errors and Bo wants me to stay with it until it runs clean, which could be midnight, could be later, and I didn't want you to wait up."

"Right," I say. "No, sure. Thanks for the heads up."

"Katy, don't do the flat voice."

"I'm not doing the flat voice."

"You're doing the flat voice." There's a pause, and some clattering in the background, glassware or something. "I'll make it up to you, okay? I promise. Saturday. Saturday I'm all yours, the whole day, I already told Bo."

I hang up and Kurt is looking at me with his cue across his shoulders like a yoke. "Saturday," he says. "You fly out Monday."

"Monday," I say. "Thanks, yeah, I know my own leave dates."

"Sorry, that was rude." He sinks a ball by accident. "So what are you gonna do about it?"

And I don't have an answer right then, I just drink my beer and lose another game, but the question sits in me like a stone in a boot, and around midnight I put my glass down and say, "You know what, I'm gonna go do something about it," and Kurt says, "There she is," and that is all the send-off I need.

* * *

The marine sciences building at two in the morning is a whole different animal than it is at noon, all the lights off except one on the second floor, the hallway smelling faintly of salt, my boots loud on the tile in a way that feels transgressive even though I have a key to her lab because she gave it to me two years ago and never asked for it back. I climb the stairs quiet anyway, out of some old habit, and there she is, alone in the lab, hair down now, sitting on a stool in front of a machine that is blinking red at her, and there are sample jars everywhere and a whiteboard covered in her handwriting, and she looks so young to me in that fluorescent light, my twenty-six year old grad student, hunched over a machine that hates her.

"Your analyzer is blinking at you like it wants a fight," I say, and she spins around on the stool so fast she nearly tips.

"Katy? What the hell, it's two in the morning, how did you, oh my god." She's up and across the room and then she stops short, a foot away, hands out like she's not sure she's allowed. "I'm so sorry about tonight. I'm sorry about all of it. I feel like I've been apologizing to you over the phone for six months."

"You have," I say. "And I've been doing the flat voice for six months. I'm tired of it. Both of us, tired of it."

"Yes," she says, and her voice drops. "Yes, I'm tired of it too."

"Then tell me to stay," I say, stepping in close, close enough that I can smell the salt off her skin, "because I walked across town in the dark to hear you say it."

"Stay," she says, right against my mouth, "please stay," and I take her by the waist and walk her back two steps until the counter hits her and she tips her head back and lets me, and I kiss her hard enough that I feel the counter edge press into her through her shirt, and she makes a sound into my mouth that six months of bad audio calls never gave me, and her hands come up and fist in my jacket like she's afraid I'll leave before she's done with me.

I don't know how long we stand there like that, her back against the counter and my hands sliding under the hem of her shirt to find the warm skin of her sides, and it's good, it's so good, six months of a screen and a satellite connection finally collapsing into the actual heat of her mouth against mine, and then her phone buzzes on the stool where she left it and we both ignore it, and it buzzes again, and again, patient and mean, like a dripping faucet, and on the fourth buzz she makes a small sound against my lips that I recognize because I've heard it a hundred times before, the sound of a person losing a fight with their own conscience.

"Don't," I say into her neck. "It's two in the morning. Whatever it is, it can blink red at you until sunrise."

"It's the email alert," she says, and she's already reaching, her body twisting out of my arms with that apologetic half-smile that somehow makes it worse. "If it's Bo I have to look, Katy, if the data came back clean I could actually leave, I could, I could come home right now."

"And if it didn't come back clean?"

"Then I stay until it does." She reads the screen and her shoulders do the thing they do, the little drop, and she turns the phone around so I can see it, which I guess is her version of honesty. Errors again. Bo's message underneath it, all caps in two places, needing her at dawn, needing her now, needing.

"Okay," I say, and I step back and the cold air where her body was feels like a verdict. "Okay. Tell me if this sounds crazy. Tell me honestly if this sounds crazy, because I've had two beers and a six-month deployment and I genuinely cannot tell anymore."

"Katy."

"I flew home from a war on Wednesday. I landed, I texted you, you said nine. Nine came and went. Thursday comes and goes. It is now Friday, technically, it is two in the morning on Friday, and I am standing in a lab that smells of algae and stale water, and I am asking my girlfriend to stop touching her phone for one hour. One hour, Dahlia. That's all I put on the board."

"Bo needs the data before the grant deadline, it's not, it's not optional, the whole lab's funding goes through this, my assistantship goes through this, I can't just."

"I know what he needs. I've heard what he needs every night since I got home." I hear my own voice getting flat and I hate it and I keep going anyway. "You know what I did for six months? I drove a truck through a province where people want the truck to stop existing. And the whole time, the whole six months, the thing I held onto, the thing that kept it from being just dust and heat and waiting, was that there was a person at the end of it. A person with a couch and a shoe rack she never uses. And I get here, and the person exists, technically, I see her in passing, at nine-ish, sometimes, if the analyzer permits it."

"That's not fair."

"No, it's not fair, you're right, it's not fair to you either, he's working you like you're three people." I rub my face with both hands, trying to find the calmer version of this speech somewhere in there. "I'm not mad at you about the job, Dahlia. I'm mad at the math. I have three days left. You have a boss who thinks three days is a rounding error. And I keep doing the math and the math keeps saying the same thing, which is that I could spend my entire leave watching the back of your head while you look at a machine."

She puts the phone face down on the counter, which is something, and she wraps her arms around herself, and she looks at the whiteboard instead of at me, and for a while the only sound is the analyzer blinking its red blink like a tiny heart attack in a box.

"You came back different," she says finally, quiet, to the whiteboard. "The calls were already hard, but you got home and you're, you're harder somehow. Edgier. You look at me like you're doing an inspection."

"I look at you like I'm starving, is what I look at you like."

"Then why does it feel like a grade?" And now she does turn and her eyes are wet and furious about being wet. "You've seen things I