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Signy visibly hated it.

“So, um, how did”—Cora was interrupted by a sharp screech of feedback from the speakers as the poet who had just spent ten minutes comparing various politicians to different kinds of toenail fungus handed the mic back to the lanky stagehand, who could not have been more than seventeen, tops—“how did you get into plants? Did you study botany?”

“I did,” Signy said tightly. Someone bumped into her shoulder with a muttered apology as they made their way to go pee. The side-eye Signy shot them was scalpel sharp. She said nothing further about her studies, or about anything else.

Cora took a sip of her chicory, trying to swallow her increasing anxiety. Fuck. This had been so easy at the stables. Why was everything easier in space? She persevered. “Did you study at the university, or—”

“Yes, but I didn’t—” Signy winced as the speakers shrieked again. “I didn’t finish.”

Cora noted with sinking dread that some guy with a guitar was taking the mic. Why was there always some fucking guy with a guitar? She leaned forward on the too-small table, trying to block out everything that wasn’t Signy. “How come?” she asked. “School just wasn’t for you?”

Signy opened her mouth to answer, but the talent beat her to it. “Hey, everybody, my name’s Josh, and—oh, shit.” The mic slipped out of the stand and clattered to the stage. The impact was earsplitting, as was the chorus of profanity that arose from the crowd.

Signy shut her eyes and exhaled through her nose.

Again, Cora persevered. Goddammit, she was going to salvage this. “Hey,” she said, looking seriously at Signy. “Do you want to go somewhere else? I think I saw a noodle place a few doors down—”

“I already had dinner,” Signy said.

Josh with the guitar strummed a clumsy chord and began to sing about a girl named Lena who wouldn’t pick up her phone. He was not on key.

Again, Cora persevered. “Yeah, no worries, um—I know you said you didn’t want to drink, but there is a bar on Triton Street if you don’t mind the—”

Signy looked at Cora with a clarity that would shut anybody under any circumstances up. “I don’t live in Midtown,” she said, shouting over the music. “I just work there.”

“Oh,” Cora said, blinking once, shouting back. She did not see the connection. “Uh, that’s cool.”

“I have an apartment on raft sixteen.”

Cora could tell by the way Signy was looking at her that she was trying to communicate something. Cora had no idea what. “Okay?”

Signy drained her cup and set it on the table. “It’s fifteen minutes on the ferry, plus a five-minute walk. Let’s go there.”

“Oh!” Cora blinked again. “Uh, yeah, yeah, let’s, um—”

Signy was already leaving.

Cora snagged one last sip of chicory, ditched the rest, and hurried after.

The music remained loud, so neither of them said anything as they put their outer gear back on. The wind outside was bad, so neither of them said anything as they walked head-down against it. It wasn’t until they were seated on the ferry, side by side on a bench shared by no other people, that Cora saw Signy finally relax.

“I didn’t finish university because I didn’t need it anymore,” Signy said. She didn’t look at Cora as she spoke. She just continued the conversation they’d abandoned, as though it had been waiting patiently in a queue. “Maybe that sounds arrogant. Maybe it is. But the only jobs waiting for me as a botanist were either at the farms or in canvas plants. Growing someone else’s designs, in other words. I might get to alter designs if I got lucky and stuck it out, but like everything, it would depend on money and politics. And I hate both. So.”

Cora rolled with this tangent, a little thrown but listening carefully. “Surely they would’ve given you a good job,” she said.

Signy glanced at her. “Your faith in my work is appreciated,” she said. “Especially because you’ve never seen it. But no, it wasn’t about the job market, it was a matter of methodology.”

“How so?”

A heavy sigh. “One day, I was in this awful lecture where the professor was talking about genetic drift as though it were some evil to be avoided at all costs. Inefficient, he called it. Inefficient!” Signy shook her head. “He was so—so small-minded. Ignorant. And I knew he was an idiot, I knew not everybody in the field thought that way, but I thought about having to work under people like him, how I’d have to bite my tongue for years if I wanted even a chance of doing what I actually wanted to do, and I just . . . walked out. I picked up my tablet and my bag, and I walked out, and I never went back.”

Cora processed that, as best as she could. “Sorry if this is a stupid question, but—what’s genetic drift?”

For the first time since they’d said hello at the door to Hopscotch, Signy smiled. Behind her breathing mask, her face was warm and pleased. “I would love to explain it to you,” she said. “But first, when we get to my place, would you like to have sex?”

It was a very good thing they were no longer drinking chicory, because Cora would have choked. “Uh—um—”

“We don’t have to, obviously,” Signy said. “But I’d like to, and I think you’d like to. It’s very sweet of you to be all chicory and noodles about it, but . . . I mean, that is why you asked me out, right?” She adjusted the wrist strap around her right glove, idly. “And if it turns out to be a bad idea or it ends terribly, it’s not going to get in the way of our business arrangement. I’d never withhold care just because things got awkward. I’ve never done this with a customer before, but I’ve been thinking about it, and that’s a boundary I can keep to.” She folded her hands in her lap and looked at Cora. “So don’t let that worry you. You’ll still get what you need, regardless.”