Goodbye for Now (3 page)

“Me?” she said.

“Yes you,” said Sam, scooting a little bit closer still. “Maybe
you’re
too scared to kiss
me
. Maybe you’re lily-livered.”

“What does that even mean?” she said. “Like your liver is flowery? Like a little girl? Like all the toxins it filters out of your blood are flora?”

“It’s from humors. You know, bile, blood, phlegm,” Sam murmured romantically. “You lack enough to color your liver, so it’s all white and pale and cowardly, hanging out down there in your digestive tract talking you out of kissing me.”

“You know a lot of things, Sam,” she said.

“Is that a bad thing?” he asked, coming upright. He’d been leaning so far toward her, eyes half-closed, he felt almost dizzy. Or maybe that wasn’t why.

She considered. “I do like my men smart, but perhaps the less talk of phlegm right before our first kiss, the better.”

“I didn’t know it would be right before our first kiss,” Sam said.

“Well then, I guess you don’t know everything after all.”

Did she kiss him then or did he kiss her? Or were they so close by that point that the next inhale pulled their mouths together, that the ferocious beating of Sam’s heart rocked him actually into her? Or was it fate or compatibility or chemistry or computer science? Sam forgot to care. Sam forgot to think about it. Sam forgot to think about anything at all.

They kissed for a while. Then they stopped kissing for a while and just sat and breathed together. Meredith’s apartment was decorated with model airplanes hanging all over the ceiling. The shadows they flickered in the candlelight made Sam feel like he was flying. Or maybe that wasn’t why. Then Meredith said, “Well that was nice. What took you so long?”

Sam tried to say lightly, “What took
you
so long?” He tried to work “lily-livered” back into conversation while his heart rate came down. Instead he accidentally answered honestly. “I think … I’m pretty sure this will be my last first kiss. Ever. I wanted to savor it.”

“How’d it go?” asked Meredith.

“I forget,” said Sam, and she smiled, but that was accidentally honest as well. “Let me try again.”

LONDON CALLING

S
am rolled over the next morning to fully consider the still-asleep, teeth-unbrushed, bed-headed Meredith for a minute or two before he said, “So, should I move in or what?”

“What?”

“Should I move in now? Or do you want to wait?”

“I was thinking brunch,” said Meredith.

“Then packing?”

“I was thinking brunch then maybe a walk. Are you kidding?”

“It’s a top-notch algorithm, Merde,” said Sam.

“Top-notch?”

“It’s not wrong. I made it myself, you know. You’re dealing with a quality product here.”

“Still. I think I’d like to be more than twelve hours out from our first kiss before you move in.”

Sam thought about it. “Should you move in with me then?”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly the issue here, but don’t be insane—I’m not moving into your studio apartment.”

“Why not?”

“Your bedroom is a platform. Your kitchen is a burner. I have two dogs.”

“And a lot of tiny airplanes. Here it is then.”

“Go to London. Then we’ll talk.”

Sam was going to London for the annual international social networking technology conference, this one dubbed, “London, City of Love: This Is Your Heart on Tech,” a title which was both stupid and confusing,
London being the city of many things (tea, mummies, and jacket potatoes sprang immediately to mind), but not, per se, love. The meeting had been scheduled, of course, long before he knew that this would be the week he would fall in love himself. He lobbied to bring Meredith with him. “Marketing should have a presence,” he said to Jamie and then tried, “My presentation’s on the algorithm. We’d be a great advertisement for it.” But these requests were denied. “I believe I will have more of your undivided attention if you come alone,” Jamie said.

This was only sort of true. It was a busy trip. There were endless meetings and investors to present to, talks to attend, cocktail hours and breakfasts at which to make an appearance, plus all the technology glitches to fix, the ones that are inevitable on borrowed equipment far from home when lots of money and clout are at stake and all your competition is looking on and everything has to go exactly right. It didn’t make a lot of sense to Sam that there should be so many technical glitches—and that so many of them should be his problem—when everyone in a three-block radius was a computer person and the whole point of the conference was technology, but there wasn’t much time to ponder that. There was all of that to do plus museums to explore, churches to visit, markets to wander, pints to drink, and theater to see. There was all of that plus wandering city streets in the rain and gazing into the river and drinking tea in cafés while longing for Meredith. He felt bereft to be apart from her for even two weeks. He felt her absence physically. He felt as if he were missing a lung. And he was loving every minute of it.

He stopped for late-night Chinese food on Tottenham Court Road on the way back to his hotel the first night and got a fortune cookie that read, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” This he texted to Meredith.

“They’re wrong,” she wrote back. “Absence makes you insane.”

He floated back to the hotel. Then he got ready for bed and called her.

“Insane how?” he said.

“I’m at work,” she said.

“Really? It’s after five there. Go home and call me.”

“I’m going out with Natalie. Can we chat tomorrow?”

“Only if you tell me insane how,” said Sam.

“Tomorrow,” she said, and he went to sleep. At five thirty in the morning, his video chat rang. It had been ringing for some time before he woke
up, morphing Sam’s dream about being trapped in an underwater obstacle course into being trapped in an underwater obstacle course where he got a prize at the end by ringing a bell.

“Mmm …’lo?” he managed.

“Heyyyy,” she sang, all sweet and soft. And drunk.

“Mmfff,” he said.

“Are you there?”

“Mmmffff.”

“It looks like you’re in a cave.”

“Not in a cave.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“It’s dark.”

“Why?”

“It’s night.”

“No, it’s night here. It must be morning there.”

“Technically, perhaps,” said Sam, dawning slowly into consciousness. “But not like the sun’s up.”

“It’s summer in London,” Meredith protested. “The sun is always up.”

“I think you might be missing the point here,” said Sam. “It’s dark because I have the curtains closed. Because it’s night.”

“Shouldn’t you be jet-lagging?”

“I am a gifted sleeper.”

“Shouldn’t you be more excited to talk to me?”

“There are very few things that make me excited at five thirty in the morning.”

“Want to know how absence makes you insane?”

“Sure. How?”

“Turn on a light so I can see you.”

He rolled over and did, squinting hopelessly at her from around the globe and half a day away.

“It makes you insane because you go out with your favorite girlfriend who you haven’t seen in weeks to your favorite bar where you haven’t been in months to watch your favorite baseball team beat the Yankees eleven to one, and you still feel like something huge is missing all night long.”

“Missing me is not insane. It’s just good sense.”

“Good night, Sam.”

“Easy for you to say. You don’t have a wake-up call coming in half an hour.”

“Your presentation is tomorrow?”

“Today. Yeah.”

“Your Major Presentation?”

“That’s the one.”

“In front of hundreds of really smart people?”

“Maybe thousands.”

“With the whole future of the company
—our
company—at stake?”

“I am very important.”

“Are you nervous?”

“More and more.”

“Jeez, Sam,” said Meredith. “You should really be getting some sleep.”

When Sam drew the blinds not very much later, he found his room wasn’t much lighter than it had been when they were closed. An hour later, he met Jamie in the lobby. Jamie was from London. He’d come to Seattle at the direct behest of BB to run Sam’s department a year ago. Jamie claimed it was because of his superior leadership talent and technological know-how. Sam suspected BB was lulled into liking Jamie by his British accent, which made him sound smart and worldly as he gently explained the practical impossibilities of BB’s pompous, overblown ideas. He’d trained as a Shakespearean actor before he turned to computers, and so he voiced the minutiae of everyday business ins and outs with a drama, cadence, and gravitas BB found appropriate to his own sense of importance. On this trip, Jamie was playing both boss and tour guide. And defender of the queen.

“Your weather’s shite, dude,” Sam greeted him in his best Monty Python accent.

“Your weather’s shite,
mate
,” Jamie corrected. “And what do you know? You live in Seattle. Your weather’s just as shite as ours.”

“But we deal with it better.”

“Pray tell how so.”

“Coffee shops,” said Sam.

“Pubs,” Jamie countered.

“Right, because what you need on top of all the rain is cold beer and depressant.”

“Beer’s not cold here,” said Jamie.

“I rest my case,” said Sam.

“We can get you a coffee,” said Jamie as they walked toward the tube stop.

“Yeah, a shite coffee.”

Jamie shoved him into a puddle, and Sam had to give his Major Presentation in sodden shoes. Despite this fact, Sam and his algorithm were greeted with raucous applause and Q & A that had to be cut off after an hour and a half because someone else (to whom Sam was eternally grateful) needed the room.

Jamie took him out for a celebratory lunch at a gastropub near St. Paul’s where Sam drank a room-temp pint of what he had to admit was the best beer he’d ever had in his life. Then they walked across the bridge to the Tate Modern to have a look at the exhibit filling its giant-size entry hall: a scale model of the city of London. It was made from foam, so if you found yourself accidentally tempted to tread on the National Theatre or literally tripped up by Big Ben, you wouldn’t hurt the art or yourself. It was about waist-high and so exquisitely detailed that they could see the scale model of London through the windows of the Turbine Hall of the mini-Tate. They wandered its city streets, much drier than the ones outside, until Jamie found the flat he’d grown up in and accidentally snagged his jacket on a restaurant he’d forgotten about entirely but was now convinced he had to take Sam to for dinner.

“Aren’t I a good boss?” he noted.

“You are.”

“You gave a great presentation, Sam. Very smart. Genius, even.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll be fine,” said Jamie.

“I will?”

“Oh yes, you’ll be just fine.” Then he wandered over to check out the Tower of London.

In an upstairs gallery, Sam got a text from Meredith that read, “You’re busted. I looked down during the morning meeting this a.m. and saw that I was wearing one navy shoe and one black shoe.”

“How is that my fault?” wrote Sam.

“Absence makes you insane,” wrote Meredith.

It was about like that for the rest of the trip. Conference in the morning. Bumming around London in the afternoon with Jamie. Waiting for Meredith to wake up back home and call/text/chat/e-mail/otherwise reassure him that she was alive and well and thinking of him too. She was sending him a running list of ways she was being made insane by his absence.

3) Accidentally called the barista “Mom.”

4) Neglected to bring baggies to the dog park and had to pick up dog poop with a leaf.

5) Picked up dog poop with a leaf even though no one was watching and it wasn’t like it was the middle of the sidewalk or anything, and really people should just be a little careful where they walk and save all those plastic bags from filling up landfills though okay, yes, mine are biodegradable, not that that helps when I leave them at home.