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She sat down at her usual end of the couch. “If you were in a vacuum yourself. Sound is a pressure wave that requires matter to propagate.”
“Matter like the atmosphere in a pressurized spaceship?” He flopped down beside her with his beer.
“Exactly,” Esther said. “But it wouldn’t sound like a regular explosion. If you were close enough, you’d hear the expanding cloud of gases slamming against the vehicle, which could be pretty violent. Farther away, you might just hear projectiles and debris from the explosion colliding with the hull. Which again, could be highly dangerous, because with no gravity or air drag to slow them down, they’d travel outward virtually forever, with the same kinetic energy they had right next to the blast.”
“Yikes, okay.”
“That answer your question?”
“Yep.” He nodded and took a swig of beer. He’d brought his laptop, but he hadn’t gotten it out, and he didn’t bother writing down what she’d told him.
“You wanna watch a movie tonight?” Esther asked. “We could watch Europa Report.”
Jonathan swiveled his head in her direction, eyebrows arching. “It’s nine o’clock. I don’t want to keep you up past your bedtime.” Usually, she shooed him out of her apartment by ten on weeknights. He kept a student’s hours, which meant staying up later and sleeping in later than she had the luxury of doing with her office job.
She shrugged. “I made the mistake of stopping for Starbucks on the way home tonight and they put an extra shot in my iced coffee. I’m pretty sure I can see through the fabric of time, so there’s no way I’m getting to sleep at a decent hour tonight.”
He grinned at her. “Yeah, okay.”
She leaned forward to grab the TV remote out of the basket on the coffee table. “That reminds me, there was a woman at Starbucks who looked like Lady Gaga. But she was wearing pajama jeans, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t her.”
“I passed a guy on campus yesterday who looked like Channing Tatum.”
“Was it Channing Tatum?” Esther asked as she navigated through the Netflix menus.
“No. But I followed him for like five minutes before I figured that out.”
She shot him a glance, quirking an eyebrow. “You followed some random strange dude around campus for five minutes?”
Jonathan shrugged and stretched his arm out along the back of the couch. “Look, I’m pretty squarely on the hetero end of the Kinsey scale, but Channing Tatum is my Get Out of Straight Free card. I had to know if it was him.”
Her mouth curved into a smirk. “Channing Tatum? Seriously?”
“What’s wrong with Channing Tatum?”
“Nothing. He just never struck me as a universal sexual donor.” She went back to typing the movie title into the search bar. “Now if it was Idris Elba…”
“I’ve got nothing against Idris Elba, but Channing’s more my speed.”
“What is it about him, exactly, that appeals to you?”
“I don’t know. He seems like he would be a gentle, caring lover. Like, he’d tell you what a great job you were doing, and then put in some quality spooning time afterward.”
Esther snorted. “See? I knew you could be funny.”
“I’m writing that down,” Jonathan said, pulling his Moleskine out of his pocket.
“The spooning thing or that I said you were funny?”
He smiled at the page as he scribbled on it. “Both.”
He’d let her look inside his notebook once. It was filled with doodles, random words and phrases that appealed to him, and snippets of half-formed ideas for his scripts. He never went anywhere without it and one of his favorite pens. He had strong opinions about pens, she’d learned, and never used anything but black Pilot G2 Ultra Fines. His fingers and his face were usually dotted and smudged with black ink stains. There was a smudge on his face right now, on his cheekbone, just below his glasses.
Esther waited for him to put his notebook down before starting the movie. It had been a few years since she’d seen this one, and she worried it wouldn’t hold up—or that he wouldn’t like it as much as she did.
A few minutes into the movie, Jonathan shifted on the couch, pulling his feet up and stretching his long legs out beside her. He’d walked the few feet between their apartments barefoot, and his toes were propped against her thigh. When she looked over at him, he grinned like he was daring her to object.
Esther shook her head and turned back to the TV screen. Jonathan’s toes stayed where they were for the next hour.
