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Erin never thought it would actually happen.
She didn’t think it was possible.
She didn’t take it seriously.
She didn’t think Holtzmann would actually do it. Could actually do it.
Leave.
Leave them.
Leave Erin.
Leave.
“You would’ve said yes if it was you,” Abby says.
Erin knows she would have. That’s the problem.
How is she supposed to hold it against Holtzmann when she would’ve done the same thing in a heartbeat?
Well, maybe not a heartbeat. She made that mistake before. She learned her lesson. She knows how much it would hurt the rest of them.
Holtzmann doesn’t seem to. Or she doesn’t care.
Erin can’t imagine Holtz not caring.
How could she not know, though, that leaving them behind for a research project in California would hurt?
Erin knows she’s making a bigger deal of it than she needs to. It’s temporary. Only a year. An incredible career opportunity.
She’s glad that Holtzmann said yes. She deserves it.
But it hurts.
Oh, god it hurts.
At first it doesn’t feel real at all that she’s gone. Erin expects her to just be there. Dancing and inventing and teasing and flirting. Blowing things up accidentally. Blowing things up on purpose. Bustling around the lab and making a racket and irritating her in the best way possible.
It’s the silence that gets to her. It makes her head pound. She has to go home early several days just because it’s too much for her. Not that her apartment is any better.
It’s actually worse.
But at least she can cry in peace.
Cry, and remember what it was like when Holtzmann was still here. Before she left. Before she took everything with her.
“You got yourself a pretty nice place here, Gilbert,” Holtzmann says, one hand on the arch of Erin’s bedroom door. “Real sturdy construction.”
“That’s not usually what people notice first.”
“Well, it’s what I notice first,” Holtzmann says. She knocks on the wood of the frame and grins. “Not that I really noticed anything in here at first. I was a little distracted when we came inside.”
Erin hugs her knees to her chest under the covers, a blush spreading across her cheeks. She picks at a loose thread on her blanket. “You could stay,” she whispers, not meeting Holtz’s eyes.
There’s a pause. Holtzmann zips up her pants. The sound is very final.
“I shouldn’t,” she says. “Thanks, though.”
Erin feels stupid for even suggesting it. Of course Holtz wouldn’t want to stay. Why would she? That’s not what this was.
This was…
Indescribable.
Temporary.
“Have a good night, Er,” Holtzmann says.
“Yeah,” Erin says, trying to keep the thickness from her voice. “You too.”
Holtz smiles and slips from the door.
Erin listens to the sound of her crossing the apartment, and then the soft click of the door shutting.
She waits a few seconds before getting out of bed, wrapping her robe around her naked body, and padding out into the living room. She locks her door and surveys the room.
It should look different. How can it look the same when something so monumental has happened?
It looks untouched, no trace that Holtzmann was ever here at all. Except—
In the centre of the otherwise bare kitchen counter. A single bottle cap.
Erin flips it over with the tip of her finger like it might explode if she’s not careful. Scrawled on the top of it in black Sharpie: a smiley face. Holtz does it to every one.
This one is from the Coke she was drinking earlier that night. They had just been ambling, wandering the city. She had bought it from a bodega that they passed. She bought Erin a bag of Sour Patch Kids too. They shared them as they walked, fingertips sticky with sour sugar.
There was no logical jump to what happened next. No drunken bar escapades that lead them back to Erin’s apartment. No rhyme or reason for it. Just a question, and an answer, and sheets grasped in fists.
Erin’s palm closes over the bottle cap.
She carries it back to her bedroom, ridged edges digging into her skin, and she locks it in the drawer of her nightstand.
The first time they Skype with Holtzmann, she bounces in and out of the frame like a puppy, showing them around her lab, thrusting random objects and gadgets in front of the camera and talking a mile a minute about everything and anything. She moves so fast that Erin nearly gets motion sickness, the picture freezing several times because it can’t keep up. The prodigal engineer even drops her laptop at one point and swears loudly before picking it up, dusting it off, and proclaiming it unscathed.
Abby asks her questions about her research with Dr. Gorin. Patty asks her about California. Erin asks her about nothing.
It’s over before they know it, Holtzmann signing off as abruptly as ever, suddenly remembering a place she has to be. The feed cuts out before Erin has a chance to say goodbye.
“Well, she seems like she’s living her best life,” Abby comments as she closes the laptop they were using for the video call.
That night, when Erin is trying hopelessly to fall asleep, her phone rings.
She looks blearily at the call display before answering.
“Holtz?”
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Holtzmann, it’s—” She checks the glowing digital clock on her nightstand— “after midnight.”
“Ah, shit. Timezones.”
“You forgot?”
“It’s easy to forget I’m not there.”
Is it?
“What’s going on?” Erin asks, pushing past the lump in her throat. “Why are you calling?”
A pause. “We didn’t really get to talk earlier. I mean, it was nice to see your face, but you didn’t say much.”
“Didn’t really get a chance to.”
“Yeah, I guess it was a little abrupt.” Another pause. “How are you?”
Erin rolls onto her back, her range of motion slightly limited by the phone being tethered to its charging cord. “I’m okay. How are you?”
“Peachy keen.”
The silence falls heavy.
“I miss you guys,” Holtzmann says, voice smaller than usual.
Erin is having a hard time breathing. “We miss you too.”
I, Erin means. I miss you.
“Kevin’s really taking it hard, huh?” Holtzmann teases, back to joking like the flick of a switch.
Okay, so she sees right through Erin.
“Oh yeah,” Erin says, voice full of false bravado, “he’s barely holding himself together.”
Another heavy pause.
“What has good ole Kev been up to since I left?” Holtz asks lightly, clearly trying to bring them back to safer territory. “What hilarity have I missed?”
“Did you hear that he deleted our website?”
“How?”
Erin laughs. “We’re still trying to figure that out. Patty has this theory that…”
And on they go.
Hours slip by. The next time Erin looks at the clock, it’s almost 3:00am. She swears under her breath and scrambles upright in her bed.
“Did you just say ‘fuck’? Did Erin Gilbert just say ‘fuck’?” Holtzmann sounds positively giddy.
“Erin Gilbert did, in fact, just say ‘fuck,’” Erin mutters. “It’s 3:00am, Holtz.”
“Whoops,” Holtz says, but she doesn’t sound sorry at all.
Erin isn’t either, not really.
“I’m gonna miss you, you know.” Holtzmann hip-checks her softly. “I can tell that you think I won’t.”
“You’re just…so excited to go,” Erin says glumly. “I thought you liked our work here.”
Their work. That’s what she thought Holtz liked.
She’s not sure how Holtz can leave…their work.
“I do like our work here,” Holtz says. “I love our work,” she says, quieter.
Erin swallows.
She looks out at the city in front of her. They’re on the roof, taking a breather from Holtzmann’s going-away party downstairs.
“Then how are you leaving?”
Holtzmann shrugs one shoulder. “It’s a sweet opportunity. It’s only for a little bit. I’ll be back before you know it, Gilbert.”
But what if she’s not? What if she gets there and she likes her new work so much that she never comes back?
“Okay,” Erin says, and it’s not what she wants to say at all.
What she wants to say is that even a little bit of time apart from Holtzmann is too long.
What she wants to say is that she doesn’t think she should go. She should stay. Here. With Erin.
What she wants to say is that she likes their work, too.
She thinks she might even be in love with their work.
Patty sits down across from Erin and slides a plate across the work bench to her.
“I’m not hungry,” Erin mumbles without bothering to check what’s on the plate. She fiddles absentmindedly with a screwdriver. Holtz’s screwdriver. This whole station is Holtz’s. This whole lab.
“Tough,” Patty says. “You gotta eat.”
“I can’t,” Erin says, voice pained.
“Baby, she’s not dead,” Patty says. “Didn’t you just talk to her yesterday?”
Erin did. They spent five hours on the phone together, Erin on speakerphone while Holtz worked. Listening to the sounds of her tinkering had been strangely comforting.
“Do you think she’s ever coming back?” Erin asks instead of answering Patty’s question.
“Of course she’s coming back,” Patty says with a laugh. “She could never stay away forever.”
“She seems to love it there,” Erin says.
“Not as much as she loves it here,” Patty says. “She’ll come home to her family eventually.”
“Her family is in Chicago,” Erin says.
“Cleveland,” Patty corrects. “And you know that’s not what I meant.”
Is it Cleveland? Erin has no idea. Holtzmann has only mentioned it once. She doesn’t talk about her life much.
For example, none of them had any idea who Dr. Gorin was before she showed up at their lab. Well, Abby knew her—apparently she’d done the same thing to their lab at Higgins one time—but the others had no clue until she was whirling around in her lab coat with Holtz hanging off her every word, stars in her eyes.
It didn’t come as a surprise when Holtzmann told them the news: that Gorin had offered her a job and she was going to take it.
Erin saw it coming from a mile away.
It felt inevitable.
“How long have you known her?”
Holtzmann doesn’t look up from what she’s working on. She’s been in overdrive the past few days, ever since Dr. Gorin showed up and started bossing her around and telling her what improvements to make. “Eleven years.”
Erin’s hands are balled into fists. She releases them slowly, stretching out one finger at a time.
“That’s a long time,” she says.
“Yeah, I guess it is,” Holtzmann says. “That’s longer than I’ve known Abby, even. She’s a pretty important person in my life.”
“Cool,” Erin says. “That’s cool.”
She walks away.
“Oh my god, I almost forgot to tell you—we had the biggest breakthrough the other day. You remember that problem I was telling you about last week?”
“I remember,” Erin says. She stirs the tomato sauce on her stove and rests the wooden spoon on the little dish that Holtzmann sent her from California. It says Life’s a Beach on it.
“Well, we fixed it,” Holtz says, voice tinny through the speaker on Erin’s phone, which is resting on top of her cookbook, weight holding the pages open. “Well, I say we. It was all Rebecca.”
“Rebecca,” Erin repeats. “Is that what you call her now?”
“God, she’s a genius,” Holtzmann says with a dreamy sigh. “It was incredible. She figured it out just like that. I’ve been working on that problem for weeks. Even you were having trouble with it.”
“Yeah,” Erin says, voice clipped. “That’s great, Holtz. I’m glad she could solve it when I couldn’t.”
A pause. “You know I didn’t mean—”
“How is Rebecca, anyway?” Erin’s voice is unnecessarily cold. She knows that.
Another pause. “She’s good.”
The other pot on the stove is boiling. She lifts the lid and sets it aside, prying open the box of pasta. She starts to pour the noodles in.
“Why do you hate her?” Holtz asks in a small voice.
Erin’s hand slips and she accidentally pours the rest of the pasta into the pot too fast. Boiling water splashes up and scalds her wrist.
She drops the box. “Fuck.”
She runs over to the sink and cranks the water on, holding her wrist underneath the freezing stream. She can faintly hear Holtzmann calling her name over the rush of the water.
She hears hissing behind her and whirls around to see the pot of pasta boiling over.
“Fuck,” she repeats again. “Fuck.”
She leaves the water still running and grabs the pot off the element, setting it down on one of the free ones instead. The skin on her wrist is bright red.
“Erin?”
“I’m here,” she says. “I burnt myself.”
“Shit,” Holtz says quietly. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Erin lies. She returns to the sink and closes her eyes while the tap runs over the burn.
Why does she hate Dr. Gorin?
How is she supposed to answer that? What is she supposed to say?
She opens her eyes, shuts off the water, dries her wrist on the tea towel hanging from her oven door. She picks up her phone and the pages of the cookbook spring back, burying the recipe.
She ignores the pots on the stove and sinks to the tiled floor, back against the drawer where she keeps her Tupperware.
“Are you still there?” Holtzmann asks.
“Yeah,” Erin says. “Yeah. I’m still here.”
Silence. The hood fan whirs overhead. Her pasta sauce bubbles.
“Are you okay?” Holtzmann repeats.
“No, Holtz. Why would I be okay?”
Holtz is quiet. “I thought maybe…”
Erin lets her head fall back against the wood behind her. She looks at the ceiling and tries not to cry.
“Do you love her?” she asks.
She has to. She has to know.
She expects Holtzmann to play dumb, ask who she means.
“I used to,” she says.
Erin nods even though Holtzmann is 2,400 miles away and will never see it.
“Do you love me?” she asks.
She has to know.
There’s a pause. Not a long pause. But long enough.
“Erin…”
“Maybe you should stay in California,” Erin says, and as she says the words she feels them ripping her in half, but she can’t stop herself. “You seem really happy there, Holtzmann. Maybe you don’t need to come back. Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Is that what you want?” Holtz asks, and she sounds broken.
“It’s not about me,” Erin says, and then she hangs up the phone.
She sits there on the floor, not moving, not crying, for so long that her spaghetti sauce burns to the bottom of her pot and the pasta softens to mush.
Then she picks herself up and she throws it all away.
“You could stay,” Erin whispers.
They’re on the roof. Holtzmann has to leave for the airport in the morning.
Holtz turns, leaning her back against the railing and appraising Erin in that intense, all-consuming way she does.
“Do you want me to stay?”
Erin looks out at the city. “It’s not about me.”
Holtz tilts her head like a puppy, and damn it if it doesn’t go right to Erin’s heart.
“Stop that,” she says.
“Stop what?” Holtz says.
“Looking at me like that. You’re making this harder than it has to be.”
“I could stay,” Holtzmann says.
Erin sighs, long and unsteady. “No. You have to go.”
Holtzmann bites her lips and nods slowly. She peels herself off the ledge and starts to walk away, then turns back, catching Erin by the arm and pulling her around to face her. She looks at her feet, then up at Erin’s face, licking her lips like she wants to say something.
But she doesn’t.
She takes a step back, and turns.
This time it’s Erin who catches her by the arm and pulls her back.
And this time it’s Erin who takes her face in her hands and kisses her, kisses her like it’s the end, kisses her like it’s her last chance, kisses her like she’s wanted to kiss her for as long as she can remember.
Kisses her.
A question.
Holtzmann kisses her back.
An answer.
And then she leaves anyway.
Erin wakes up to incessant pounding on her door.
She checks her nightstand clock. It’s almost 3:00am.
If it was a murderer or a burglar, she doesn’t think they would knock.
She throws the covers off and pads hurriedly through her apartment, flipping on lights as she goes.
She presses her eye to the peephole to see who is on the other side of the door.
And she freezes.
It can’t be. It can’t.
For a few seconds, she contemplates the merits of going back to bed. Not answering.
But she does.
She unlocks the deadbolt with shaking fingers and tugs the door open.
“I was never in love with her,” Holtzmann says before Erin can even open her mouth.
“Hol—”
Holtz holds a hand up. “Wait. Please. I’ve spent the last several hours on a plane practicing this speech and I need you to hear it before you say anything.”
Erin falls back on her heels, nods her head just slightly.
Holtzmann makes no move to come inside.
“I was never in love with her,” she says again. “I know I said I used to be, but that was a lie. I have known Dr. Rebecca Gorin for eleven years and I spent a good portion of those eleven years thinking I was in love with her, but I wasn’t. I was young, and I admired her, and she made me a better person, and I thought she was the smartest person in the the universe and the best thing to ever happen to me and I thought, I thought, that that’s what love felt like. I was convinced of it.
“But I was wrong. I loved her. I still love her. I will always love her. She is my mentor. She is one of the most important people in my life. She is like a mother to me. A mother, Erin. That is who Dr. Rebecca Gorin is to me. That’s what I’ve come to realize over the years. It’s been a long, long time since I first realized that. I was never in love with her. I loved her. There’s a difference.
“Nothing ever happened between us. Nothing was ever going to happen between us. She was twice my age and happily married and most importantly, most importantly, that is not the relationship we were meant to have because I was never in love with her.”
Holtzmann blinks with wide, honest eyes and holds her head high.
“You know why I’m so sure of that now?”
They both stand there, chests rising and falling as they breathe.
“I know,” Holtzmann says softly, “because now I am in love. And now I know what it feels like. And now I know how young and innocent and clueless I was.”
She reaches out and covers Erin’s hand with her own, flipping it over and transferring something solid into it. Erin’s fingers curl around the object reflexively.
“Every single day since I left, there’s only one place I wanted to be,” Holtzmann says. She lets go of Erin’s hand.
Erin opens her fist to reveal a bottle cap. Blue. Maybe from a water bottle. Smiley face on the top.
Her fingers close over it again.
“I love you,” Holtzmann says.
Erin looks up.
“I love you,” Holtz repeats, “and I’ll never forgive myself for leaving.”
Erin pauses. Runs her tongue over her teeth.
“Well. I think I can,” she says.
The corner of Holtzmann’s mouth ticks up.
“Welcome home, Holtz,” Erin says.
And Holtzmann takes her, pulls her in by the waist, and the bottle cap falls from Erin’s hand and rolls into the apartment behind her as she grips Holtz’s face, and they’re kissing in the doorway, kissing like it’s not the end at all, but the beginning, the beginning of something monumental, something not temporary at all.
And this time, she stays.