“Iced tea, please.”
He walks away without a word and I look at Ian once again. I’m itching to text Mara. Your cousin looks like a slightly jacked version of Prince Harry. Maybe you should have kept in touch?
“So.” I cross my hands and lean my elbows on the table. “What does she have on you?”
He tilts his head. “She?”
“Great-Aunt Delphina.” He blinks twice. I smile and continue, “I mean, it’s a Thursday afternoon. You’re in California for a handful of days. I’m sure you have something better to do than meet up with your long-lost cousin’s friend.”
His eyes widen for a split second. Then his expression levels back to neutral. “It’s fine.”
“Is it an embarrassing baby pic?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t mind helping out.”
“I see. A baby video, then?”
He’s silent for a moment before saying, “As I said, it’s not a problem.” He looks like he isn’t used to people pushing him, which is unsurprising. There is something subtly removed about him. Vaguely distant and intimidating. Like he’s not quite reachable. It makes me want to get closer and poke.
“A baby video of you . . . running around in the kiddie pool? Picking your nose? Rummaging around the back of your diaper?”
“I—”
Sudoku Boy drops off my iced tea in a plastic cup. Ian’s eyes follow him for a few seconds, then return to mine with an interesting mix of stoic resignation. “It was more of a toddler video,” he says cautiously, like he’s surprising even himself.
“Ah.” I grin into my tea. It’s both too sweet and too sour. With a subtle aftertaste of gross. “Do tell.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Oh, I’m positive I do.”
“It’s bad.”
“You’re really selling it to me.”
The left corner of his mouth curves upward, a small hint of amusement that’s not quite fully there yet. I have an odd stray thought: I bet his smile is lopsided. Beautiful, too. “The video was taken at a Lowe’s. With my older brother’s new camcorder, sometime in the late ’90s,” he tells me.
“At a Lowe’s? Can’t be that bad, then.”
He sighs, impassive. “I was around three or four. And they had one of those bathroom displays. The ones with model sinks and showers and vanities. And toilets, naturally.”
I press my lips together. This is going to be fun. “Naturally.”
“I don’t really remember what happened, but apparently I needed to use the restroom. And when I saw the display I was . . . inspired.”
“No way.”
“In my defense, I was very young.”
He scratches his nose, and I laugh. “Oh my God.”
“With no concept of sewage systems.”
“Right. Sure. Honest mistake.” I cannot stop laughing. “How did Great-Aunt Delphina get a copy of the video?”
“Officially: unclear. But I’m fairly sure my brother made CDs of it. Sent them to local TV stations and whatnot.” He gestures vaguely, and his forearm is dusted with freckles and pale-red hair. I want to grab his wrist, hold it in front of my eyes, study it at my leisure. Trace, smell, touch. “I haven’t spent a holiday with the Floyd side of the family in twenty years, but I’m told that the video is a source of great entertainment for all age groups at Thanksgiving.”
“I bet it’s the pièce de résistance. I bet they press play right after the turducken comes out.”
“Yeah. You’d probably win.” He seems quietly resigned. A big man with a put-upon-but-enduring air. In an utterly charming way.
“But how do you blackmail someone from this? How much worse can it get?”
He sighs again. His broad shoulders lift, then fall. “When my aunt called, she briefly mentioned uploading it on Facebook. Tagging the NASA official page.”
I gasp into my hand. I shouldn’t laugh. This is horrible. But. “Are you serious?”
“It’s not a healthy family.”
“No shit.”
He shrugs, like he’s past caring. “At least they’re not trying to extort money out of me yet.”
“Right.” I nod solemnly and collect my features into what hopefully passes for a compassionate, respectful expression. “The assignment I told you about is for my Water Resources class, so this is surprisingly on topic. And I am truly sorry that you got stuck with meeting your little cousin’s friend because you publicly urinated in a Lowe’s when you barely knew how to talk.”
Ian’s eyes settle on me, as if to size me up. I thought I had his full attention from the moment I sat down, but I realize that I was wrong. For the first time, he’s looking at me like he’s interested in actually seeing me. He studies me, assesses me, and my first impression of him—detached, distant—instantly evaporates. There is something nearly palpable about his presence: a warm, tingling sensation climbing up my spine.
“I don’t mind,” he says again. I smile, because I know that this time he means it.
“Good.” I push my tea to the side. “So, what would you be doing right now, if three-year-old you had known about sanitary sewers?”
This time his smile is a tad more defined. I’m winning him over, which is good, very good, because I’m rapidly developing a thing for the contrast between his eyelashes （red!） and his deep-set eyes （blue!）。 “I’d probably be running a bunch of tests.”
“At the Jet Propulsion Lab?”
He nods.
“Tests on . . . ?”
“A rover.”
“Oh.” My heart skips three beats. “For space exploration?”
“Mars.”
I lean closer, not even bothering to play it like I’m not avidly interested. “Is that your current project?”
“One of them, yeah.”
“And what are the tests for?”
“Mostly attitude, figuring out where the ship is positioned in three-dimensional space. Pointing, too.”
“You work on a gyroscope?”
“Yes. My team is perfecting the gyroscope so that once the rover is on Mars, it knows where it is, what it’s looking at. Informs the other systems about its coordinates and movements, too.”
My heart is now fully pitter-pattering. This sounds . . . wow. Pornographic, almost. Exactly my jam. “And you do this in Houston? At the Space Center?”
“Usually. But I come up here when there are issues. I’ve been struggling with the imagery, and the feed update keeps lagging even though it shouldn’t, and—” He shakes his head, as if catching himself halfway through a rant that’s been playing over and over in his mind. But I finally know what he’d rather be doing.
And I sure can’t blame him.
“Did they send your entire team here?” I ask.
He tilts his head, like he has no idea where I’m going with this. “Just me.”
“So your team leader is not around.”
“My team leader?”
“Yeah. Is your boss around?”
He is silent for a second. Two. Three. Four? What the— Ah.