Page 61 of Every Almost

"I want to tell you something, but I need you to do your absolute best to not argue with me about it for once in your life, as difficult as that may seem."

Charlie opened her mouth to respond, but then closed it. Joss took a step closer.

"I wasn't wrong about the telemetry," Joss said. "The pressure sensors are calibrated to a tighter tolerance."

Charlie blinked. "Are you seriously bringing up the combustion chamber problem right now, in a fuckingparking lot, at eleven o'clock at?—"

Joss kissed her.

It wasn't long, and it wasn't dramatic. It was just Joss's hand on the collar of Charlie's flannel, pulling her forward, and then enveloping warmth.

As if a burst of stars happened right in the middle of Charlie's chest, it was then she understood all the songs and books and movies about what it felt like to have butterflies in your stomach, what it was like tofeelromance. Every phrase and utterance and declaration made sense now.

And Charlie was experiencing all the thrills firsthand for the first time in her life.

When she pulled back, Charlie's brain had stalled out completely. Her mouth was open and no words were coming out of it, which was a first.

"Bu that," Joss said, "I can agree, is what happens when you stop trusting the data and get close enough to the machine."

Charlie stared at her. Then she laughed, a real, helpless, ridiculous laugh that came from somewhere she didn't know she had. Then Joss was laughing too, and the parking lotlight buzzed above them like it had been waiting for this exact moment to finally make itself useful.

"You're impossible," Charlie managed.

"And you're an engineer who argues with her hands and references timing chains in a graduate seminar." Joss smiled. "We're a good match."

Charlie knew everything had changed, standing with her heart hammering and a woman who kissed with absolute conviction. But Charlie couldn't find a single flaw in the logic. And it was the first time the logic was measured by something other than data.

Charlie drove home that night with her windows down and the radio on. Her hands were shaking on the steering wheel and her lips were tingling with the warmth left there by Joss. Her brain was still somewhere in that parking lot, trying to catch up to what her heart had already decided.

"Hey all you night howlers out there in the great City of Angels on this Saturday night. It's almost midnight, and we're helping you wind down and settle in, or get up and get your night going. Either way, stick it here. Next up, we have a song for one of our listeners saying he's so happy he found you, Ellen, for you're the one he's been waiting for. Here's 'Waiting for a Girl Like You' by Foreigner. I'm Ted Ziegenbusch, and you're listening to KOST 103... Continuous Soft Hits for a Saturday night."

When the song came on, Charlie turned it up.

Charlie listened to it intently, the intro reeling her in. As it moved through the first few bars, Charlie felt the beat move through her, thumping against her chest to match her heartbeat. Charlie laid her arm against the window ledge, then held her hand up against the wind, dipping it up and down like a rollercoaster, riding the waves of fear and excitement. She feltthe wind lift and drag against her skin, the feeling of the cool air tickling against her fingertips and wrist.

The song continued and it spoke about waiting without knowing what you were waiting for, about the moment when someone walks in and the waiting stops. It spoke about when you realize you were never incomplete, just unfinished. The melody climbed and Charlie's chest opened with it. When the chorus hit, Charlie felt the swell expand in her chest as she continued to drive through Pasadena. She was startled to find she had tears streaming down her face, the sudden realization that they had nothing to do with sadness at all, but had everything to do with feeling the music feed her soul.

When she drove into her apartment driveway and made her way to the spot reserved for the Plymouth, the song ended, and Charlie was mesmerized. She vowed to go and find the album or, hell, even just the single, tomorrow. But for now, she sat with it, feeling its power pulse through her.

It was another rare song in her life that had ever spoken for Charlie. The one that had found her in the garage with Katie, learning that love was worth fighting for, even for just one day. The one on a garage floor at thirteen, heartbroken and alone. But this one found her in a parking lot at twenty-two, properly kissed and properly terrified, but happy in a way she'd always wanted but didn't know she was allowed to be.

Joss ended up as Charlie's first real relationship. In their time together, Charlie learned that Joss was brilliant, always argumentative, but laughed with her whole body. Charlie loved her in the way first loves can fully capture our hearts. Charlie would always remember Joss fondly for the rest of her life, and for all the firsts that they shared together.

One evening, Charlie put on Frank's copy ofRumoursin her apartment and played it for Joss from start to finish. Side A and then side B. Joss sat on the floor and listened, letting the albumwash over her. When "Songbird" came on, Charlie closed her eyes. When it was over, Joss looked at her and said, "That one means something to you."

"My Dad first played it for me when I was sixteen, the day we got this exact vinyl" Charlie said, holding up theRumourscover. "To this day, it is still the most beautiful song I've ever heard."

Joss didn't ask any more questions after that. She just nodded.

In the springof her first year of graduate school, a man named Steve Jobs came to Caltech to demo something called the Macintosh. Charlie sat in the back of the auditorium and watched a man who believed that building things could change the world. That engineering wasn't just function but highly relied on imagination as well. That night, the man taught Charlie that the machine and the art were the same thing. He stood on that stage and talked about computers like they were alive, like they mattered, like the act of making them was the closest a person could get to magic.

She didn't meet him. She was one face in a crowd of hundreds. But she walked out of that auditorium with something confirmed that she'd carried since the toaster and the Cutlass and the Continental A-65.

That the people who build things are the people who change the world. And she planned to be one of them.

Later that same year,Charlie built herself a coffee machine. She'd grown to love the stuff since Caltech, a complete reversalfrom the face she'd made at Frank's table at thirteen. But the machines in the graduate labs were always broken or producing something that tasted as though it had been filtered through a tailpipe. So she took apart a Mr. Coffee she'd found at a yard sale, rebuilt the heating element, replaced the tubing, and reassembled it into something that brewed coffee strong enough to strip paint. She loved it. Joss had loved it. Her friends in the department loved it. It became a fixture of her apartment, the first thing anyone mentioned when they walked through the door. Charlie treated it the way she treated all machines she'd fixed, a companion that had earned its place. It was also the first piece of machinery that she made that her sister couldnotstand.

Katie visited the summer she turned seventeen, right before she would start her senior year of high school. She took the bus from Indianapolis to Los Angeles, a trip that took two days and that Charlie had tried to talk her out of no fewer than six times.