Laura Gilman - Heart of Briar

He stared, fascinated. “What?”

“Yours. Yours and mine, together. We will make it stronger.” That too-white smile disappeared, and her face went still. “Come,” she said again, her fingers hard against his own, and together, they stepped through.

* * *

Jan was dreaming. She knew it was a dream: it wasn’t a nice dream, it was the same dream she always had when she was stressed, about not being able to breathe and nobody hearing her call for help, but she let it carry her along, anyway, unable to stop it until the alarm went off, and she woke up.

Over the years, she had perfected a basic morning routine, Monday through Friday. Roll out of bed two minutes before the alarm went off, take the litany of pills waiting on her nightstand—birth control, asthma meds, iron supplements—then stagger into the kitchen and pour herself a glass of grapefruit juice while the coffeemaker—set to go off exactly at six in the morning—started its spluttering little song. Pour that first cup of coffee, feel her neurons start to fire, and head back across the apartment to her office. Flip open the laptop, start the email download to see what fresh hell her office had sent her overnight. Sometimes she missed having a commute, an office, coworkers to gossip with. The rest of the time she thanked god for telecommuting. She could start work at seven and get a head start on whatever was going on.

And for the past three—almost four—months if she had woken up alone, she had added another early morning routine. The first words of the day, typed into the small text box in the upper left hand of the screen: Hello, lover.

Normally, her screen would show a reply almost immediately. But today, the text box on her screen remained blank, save for her words.

She waited a minute, then another. Nothing.

Well. Maybe he was in the bathroom. Or dealing with a work thing. Tyler did contract work for the university, which meant there was almost always a crisis happening—academics were worse than corporations for wanting something changed and then not understanding why it couldn’t be done. But it also meant he wasn’t away from his monitor, when he was on the clock. Not for long, anyway.

They’d met in one of those dating-site chat rooms, ironically self-conscious and, she admitted, a little desperate. She hadn’t expected anything; so many of the guys would chat, email, they might even call once or twice, and then disappear. But Tyler had suggested they meet for coffee, almost immediately. They’d both been awkward, almost shy, for about ten minutes. Then...magic.

It wasn’t because they were so alike—they weren’t. And it wasn’t because they were total opposites, either. There was just enough overlap that they didn’t run out of things to talk about that night, or after, for that matter.

Jan frowned at the screen. Maybe he had gone onto campus today, rather than working from home? He hadn’t mentioned anything about it yesterday, but something might have come up after he left.

He’d gone home the night before around eight o’clock; they both were busiest in the morning, so Monday through Thursday they tended to sleep in their own beds, work until around two in the afternoon, and then hook up again. She might have liked waking up with someone snuggled against her more often, but Jan admitted that she liked her space, too.

So, yeah. That was probably it: he was on the bus heading toward campus, and he’d check in later. Reassured, she opened her work in-box and got hit with an urgent email from a client in Ireland whose site had apparently gone FUBAR, “and she swears she didn’t touch it, didn’t do anything,” according to the email from the project manager.

“Yeah. Sure you didn’t.” Jan shook her head and got to work, digging through the code.

By the time she’d restored the site, finished her first pot of coffee and refilled it, there was still no message from Tyler in her text box. She frowned, chewing on her thumbnail, then—after glancing to make sure no new mail had come in red-flagged for an emergency—typed again.

You there?

No response. She looked at the time display: 10:40. More than enough time for him to have gotten into the office—maybe it was a really massive crisis?

She opened another browser and brought up the university’s site. It seemed to be running fine, although god knew what was going on with the intranet, which was Ty’s baby.

“Okay, then,” she said, and typed, catch up with you later, then, mmmkay? It wasn’t as if he had to check in, after all. She was just used to it. Spoiled, after three months. Odds were, the project he’d been working on yesterday had gotten more panicked, and he was head down in that. He’d resurface later, apologize, or just show up, filled with news of how he’d licked the problem. The vague sense of disappointment she felt was silly, and she pushed it aside.

The worry didn’t set in for another six hours, when he didn’t show up after work, and nobody in the campus office had seen or talked to him all day.

By twenty-four hours, the worry had become panic.

* * *

The next morning, Jan needed to talk with someone, preferably someone who could talk her down off her nerves.

“Come on, come on, pick up....” Jan drummed her fingers on the desk and stared at the monitor, where the icon was circling around, the faint, antiquated noise of a phone ringing accompanying the visual.

Finally, it stopped, and the screen cleared. “Hey, there. You rang?”

Glory’s tousled black curls suggested that she’d just gotten out of bed, and her accent was a blurred version of her usual clear tones.

Jan frowned at the screen, taking in the backdrop. “It’s lunchtime there. You should be at work now, not just waking up. Oh, Glory, did you get fired again?”

Her friend lifted her coffee mug in salute. “How’d you guess? Yeah, guess calling the boss’s pet a puss-bucket wasn’t the best thing to do.”

Jan was momentarily distracted from her own woes. “Glory...”

“Ah, don’t lecture me, Janny-girl.”

Glory worked in the UK; they had met through a “women in tech” mailing list back when those were the hot thing, and when the list died, they stayed friends. That didn’t mean they always approved of each other’s choices, though.

Jan couldn’t help herself: “Some day you’re not going to find another job.” The economy still hadn’t entirely recovered, and she knew Glory didn’t have any savings left.

“Ah, I’m too good at my job to not find work, and hiring a black woman fills two slots on their to-do list. But you, you’re not looking good, and you’re doing that keening thing again. Sweetie, stop it, it makes my stomach hurt watching you. What’s wrong?”

Saying it made it real. “Tyler’s missing.”

“What?” Glory’s coffee mug slammed down on her desk hard enough to slosh the liquid over the side, unnoticed. “Did that SOB dump you? I swear...”

“No! No, I mean, he’s missing, he’s gone. He didn’t go to work, and it’s been twenty-four hours, and I haven’t heard a thing from him.”

Jan leaned forward, and then back again, unable to stop the slow rhythmic rocking motion that bothered Glory. “He’s never not responded for this long. We talk every day, Glor, every day we’re not together. And he’s never once missed a good morning.”

“Yeah, I know. But, sweetie, you’ve only been together, what, three months? Guy’s what, thirty-two? He probably has a lot of bad habits he hasn’t shown you yet.”

Jan tried to still herself, focusing on the screen where her friend’s image was looking out at her. Miles away in distance, but Glory was still one of her best friends, the person she’d told about Tyler, punch-happy from their first date, when she’d finally thought that maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t doomed to go through life alone. And then again after the third date, when he’d told her he’d felt the same way.