Page 49 of The Hard Launch

“Yes. Okay, I’m having a wardrobe crisis.”

“Fascinating,” she says. “I didn’t know guys did this ,too.”

“Ella. Fix it, please.”

She laughs condescendingly. “Oh honey. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Are you going to say that the problem is in my head? I don’t want to hear that.”

She stands up and rifles through my closet, digs out a blue button-down, and tosses it on my bed.

“Fine. Just wear this and roll up the sleeves,” she says. “And don’t tuck it in!”

I walk up the steps of Lacey’s building and press the doorbell next to LANG, remembering the first time I was here, when I let her walk inside because I was afraid of the consequences kissing her might have. Consequences I’m still afraid of, but currently choosing not to think about.

Lacey buzzes me in but I look at the camera and shake my head.

“You don’t want to come up?” she asks through the intercom.

“I won’t want to leave if I do,” I tell her, and when she doesn’t reply I wonder if it was a presumptuous thing to say.

I wait for her on the sidewalk in my blue button-down, overthinking. It’s been like this since we got back from the hackathon: when I’m with her I’m fine, when we’re texting I’m funny, when I’m away from her for more than three hours I’m in my head and a nervous weirdo when I’m about to see her again.

“Hi,” she says, from the top of the steps.

“Hi.”

“I feel strangely shy,” she tells me. “And I don’t know how we greet each other when we’re not in the office.”

“Same,” I tell her. She skips down the steps and raises her fist for a bump and I kiss her instead. All the worries go away. I kind of like this shirt, it turns out.

Our first stop is coffee, and I hold her hand while we’re waiting in line.

“Thank you for asking me on a five-hour date,” she says. “It made me realize that more people should put end times on social events.”

“Stop. You know why I did that,” I tell her.

“Ahhhhh. No. No breaking your own rule.”

She’s right. The release doesn’t have a green light, and there are absolutely things we could or should be doing today. But I’ve barely slept in a week, we’ll be shoving something out the door on Monday, and a person can’t work forty-eight hours of a weekend. So when I texted and asked her to spend five of them with me, I said they had to be work-free hours. We can look at our phones and message people if we need to, but the two of us will not be walking through Golden Gate Park discussing roadmaps or bugs or internal rates of return.

Her rule was that we couldn’t go anywhere with a ceiling, which means we skip the Conservatory of Flowers and take an Uber to the Japanese Tea Garden. We talk about our parents and sisters while we visit Buddha and walk through the Zen garden. While we sit at the tea house, Lacey makes a list of all the Japanese novels that are going to change my life when I get around to reading them.

We rent a pedal boat at Stow Lake, and after a pair of middle-schoolers bump into us and tell us we’re slow—we were busy kissing—we make it a point to lap them, even though they’re not paying attention.

“Alright. Significant exes?” she asks when we return to dry land.

“None,” I say. “Some promising starts that fizzled out before they turned into anything. And yes, I know I’m the common denominator.”

I watch as she considers the red flag that I’m waving.

“Is it insulting if I say I can see how that would be the case?” she asks, smirking.

By the time we make it to the very end of the park, past the Bison Paddock and the windmills, Lacey knows where on her Michigan-map-hand I grew up, and where my grandparents’ lake house was. I hear a little about her stupid ex who cheated on her. I know the four hamsters she had as a kid were named Peanut, Cupcake, Nibbles and Gwen, and that Nibbles came very close to being buried alive.

We sit outside at the Beach Chalet for an oddly late lunch.

While we wait for our food to arrive, Lacey asks me, “So are you going to report the results of your experiment or are you keeping them confidential?”