Surprise, again, surprisingly; the same barely-mastered disbelief Robin had worn to Branson Davis's office, and now in Sully's, the same expression, as if there had been any doubt in John's invitation, as if the details of time and place hadn't been explicit. There was no reason for Robin to look so startled, not when he'd come all the way here on his own free will. Yet he had stopped in his tracks, stunned out of locomotion. "John, you're…here." It probably wasn't supposed to sound so much like a question. "I wasn't sure you…" he glanced around the diner, as if the empty booths could tell him something, "but you did. I mean, you are. Here." He flinched, seeming to recognize the redundancy in the statement. "Clearly."
By the fluorescent light of Sully's, Robin was painfully sober. The bravado from the poker game was gone; the liquid courage from Friday's bender had run its course—another unspoken prerequisite for the meeting, another reason John had picked Wednesday, the mundane middle of the week. And it had worked: Robin had dried up enough to be nervous, and he was nervous, a weakness John would have picked apart at Harvard because he'd always gone for the jugular: that was Business. That was Harvard. It had been easy then, and he'd been good at it, had enjoyed being ruthless and sharp and pitiless as the sun.
But it wasn't easy now, when Robin stood a few feet from him, and the conversation John had vaguely imagined lodged somewhere in his upper diaphragm. He made some sort of gesture at the empty seat across from him, and Robin took the invitation and approached, a brief, uncertain pause before he slid stiffly into the seat across from John, looking slightly like he'd sat on something sharp.
John had meant to open with something neutral, a buffer of harmless small talk to flesh out the conversation, but there was no Venn diagram of common ground between them, no overlap of social circles, except for the party in the Hamptons, which was too faded to mine for information anyway, and all John could really remember of that day was Virgil burning himself to a crisp in the hotel pool and Scott buying out the gift shop's supply of aloe. So it was a surprise when John heard himself say, completely without preamble, "You didn't think I'd be here?"
"Ah. Well." Robin didn't look at him directly. "Yeah. Kinda."
"Why?"
"Oh, you know. You're a busy guy."
Not that busy. "But I asked you to come."
Robin nodded once, slowly. "So you did." He clasped his hands on the table, a little too tightly to be relaxed. "I just didn't know if there was anything left to say after our…stirring reunion."
That was too vague for John to know which day he meant, but there wasn't time to clarify because Gloria had drifted from her position behind the counter, a cup and saucer in one hand, the same plain ceramic cup John had sitting in front of him. She placed the cup and saucer in front of Robin and glanced at John, who suddenly felt a pressing obligation to finish the coffee at the bottom of his cup.
"Can I get you boys anything?" Gloria fished a pen and notebook from her apron pocket. "Another decaf?"
Decaf. The word seemed louder than the others. Decaf because it was Gordon's idea to go off uppers completely, even the socially sanctioned ones. Decaf, in any other setting a minor detail, unobtrusive, perhaps a lifestyle change, or maybe just the best option at this time of night. But sitting across from Robin, it seemed more conspicuous somehow, as if it would sound the alarm and signal the way back to Harvard. Which was ridiculous, admittedly. John downed the cold dregs of his coffee, and they were predictably terrible. He set the cup back on the saucer, hoping the motion came across as offhand and indifferent. "Please."
Gloria turned her attention to Robin. "And what about you, Mr. Big Spender?"
Robin frowned in confusion. "Huh?"
"We've met."
"We have?"
"A few weeks ago. You ordered a cheeseburger at four in the morning."
"I did?"
"Left a five-hundred-dollar tip. You asked me to dance but I declined, on account of the fact that you'd probably fall over." Gloria clicked her pen, unruffled. "Coffee, then?"
Robin looked like he'd bitten into a lemon. "Sure."
"Decaf?"
Robin didn't answer this time so Gloria took his silence for accord and turned to John. "Anything else I can get you, hun? Milk? Sugar?"
It would probably be rude to decline the offer. "Cream?"
Gloria slipped the notebook and pen back into her apron pocket. "Coffee for the two gentlemen. I'll be back," she dead-eyed them both, "if only to be part of this scintillating conversation."
She departed, and John watched her amble over to the counter with the ease of someone taking their time. Robin had grabbed the menu, and John probably shouldn't ask but—"Does that happen a lot?"
Robin was studying the dessert section with the intense interest of someone avoiding the topic. "I don't usually get decaf." Maybe there was a certain sense of futility about defending the obvious, because he cleared his throat and tried to clarify, "To be fair, it was probably a Friday. I mean, not that last Friday was representative of all Fridays. Because that wouldn't be—" he didn't know how to finish the thought, so he started a new one. "For the record, Locke Labs does not associate itself with that kind of attention. It's just not an image conducive to the brand."
That sounded like a disclaimer, some latent PR training surfacing from the murky depths, and it occurred to John there might have been consequences on Robin's end of things, which was a new thought entirely—that Robin might have been given the lecture John was spared, because John was always being spared the full force of anything these days. Dad hadn't welcomed the idea of his sons being plastered across the front page of a gaudy rag, but he hadn't said anything. Gordon, after his four-month misadventure, had been subjected to a crash course in media training with Kyrano, a lesson Gordon had only described as 'comprehensive', suspiciously scant of detail for someone who'd spend half an hour eulogizing his lunch.
"Actually," said John, "that's why I asked you here. It's about Friday." Friday specifically, not Thursday, because Thursday was a knot John didn't want to unpick, not until he'd gotten a better read off Robin, collected a few more details, figured out how much he remembered of the poker game. "It wasn't ideal."
Robin winced. "Not really, no."
John took a breath, bracing himself. "The meeting with Branson Davis—you have to know it wasn't on purpose. We honestly didn't know you were going to be there."
Robin wasn't expecting the change in subject. "What?"
"I realize it might have come across like some…grand scheme or something, especially after—after what happened. But I swear it wasn't." That was vague, so diplomatically all-encompassing John could feel himself blush. "And I just wanted to say I'm sorry for the way things turned out. I don't feel good about it."
"What?"
"I'm sorry," John repeated, slower this time because Robin looked as if he might have lost the thread of the conversation, "Really, I am. And you don't have to believe me, but I need to say it."
Robin seemed to suffer from a minor technical malfunction, freezing with the menu in his hands, and it was probably a good thing Gloria returned, intermission made flesh, a coffee pot in one hand and a small jug of cream in the other. She set the jug down on the table, exactly halfway between them, and glanced at Robin. "You all right there, sugar?" She raised one thin, penciled-in eyebrow. "Bowled over by our all-day breakfast specials, no doubt. Glad to see fine dining hasn't been lost on the youth." She filled their cups. "Decaf, as requested. And there's your cream. Pairs well with our commercially ground coffee beans."
The interruption was brief, and Gloria left almost as soon as she had appeared, a last, unconcerned 'take your time, boys' and she was already sauntering back to her spot behind the counter at a pace that would give even Robin enough time to figure out what to say next. John reached for the cream jug and poured a substantial amount into his cup, more than necessary, the ribbon of cream snaking its way through the black ether, a tiny microcosm of a nebula, Hubble gazing upon the Pillars of Creation, and that's how long this was taking—time had dilated, mushrooming out into a stillness where the grease-stained clock had stopped, and a thousand years had passed, and John had been sitting at this table forever, in the deep infinity of nothing, a cosmic gulf of time where he waited for Robin to speak.
Deliberately careful, Robin set the menu aside. "I wasn't expecting that."
John took the spoon from his saucer and stirred his coffee, a staged performance. "What were you expecting?"
"Honestly?" A slight shift in posture, an easing around the shoulders. "I don't know. I just assumed we'd come to a natural parting of ways." There was a delicate subtlety to the understatement. Robin glanced away to some unfixed point by the counter, gaze eventually wandering over to the far end of the diner and back. "And I wasn't sure I had the place right. Isn't Sully's a bit off the beaten track for a Tracy?"
John took a sip of his coffee, if only to have something to do with his hands, and it was slightly less terrible hot. Brains had given him a thorough, unsolicited introduction to the moral failings of diner coffee, starting with the old, stale Robusta grounds lingering tastelessly in the calcium-build up and flat water of the mass-market brewer. "Maybe. It's pretty close to the office, and my boss took me here a few months ago. We come sometimes after work."
Something about the statement made Robin squint. "You have a boss?"
"Doesn't everyone?"
"Well, yeah," said Robin, "but most don't take their minions out to dinner on the regular."
"It's not formal or anything. Just pancakes. And coffee." Empirical measurements would show no greater mysteries of the universe were solved in the span of time it took to eat an order of short stack and sides. Admittedly it didn't sound like much when he said it out loud. But it was.
"I didn't know you had a job," said Robin.
The irony of the statement was bizarre. If anyone was going to have the accusation leveled against him, it should have been Robin. "I work for Brains," said John, carefully skirting the bigger picture of working at HQ, a low-level clerk getting by on family connections, the inescapable fact that he was, after all, working for Dad indirectly, a level removed, another office in a different part of the building, probably an innocuous detail in a world of family-owned business—fortunes passing from father to son—but he was sitting across from Robin Locke, heir to his company, and it wasn't hypothetical. John's throat felt suddenly tight. "In the lab."
"Brains?"
"Dr. Hackenbacker. Hiram Hackenbacker."
"And he buys you coffee?"
"Decaf," said John and added, "which, apparently, is sacrilege. He nearly passed out when I added Reddi-wip." Cream had been another of Gordon's suggestions, any excuse to up the calorie intake in his big brother's day, and maybe John hadn't been paying attention when Gordon had been listing off brands and acceptable percentages of butterfat content.
"So if your boss likes good coffee," said Robin, a dubious glance at the cup in front of him, "why does he take you here?"
"He's English, and he has this thing with diners. The All-American lure of the classic pancake platter. Or something. And he doesn't drink the coffee." John could feel himself detach from his body, float away far enough to witness himself from a distance, a strange dissociation from the man whose ability to make himself understood was beginning to wobble, the conversation devolving into the faintest rabbit trail about his boss's preferred choice of beverage. "He brings his own tea and just asks for hot water. And milk. Two percent." He had the wild, fleeting notion this might have all been on purpose, this deliberate spiral away from the original subject into the smallest of small talk, but that was probably giving Robin too much credit and—"Did you reschedule?"
Robin was appropriately mystified by the hairpin turn in the conversation. "Reschedule?"
Ideally John should have left a longer pause between the subjects. "The meeting. With Branson Davis."
Robin grimaced at the memory. "That ship may have sailed." The twitch of his fingers betrayed him. "I'm not sure there's a graceful return from revisiting breakfast in front of Branson Davis. And Jeff Tracy."
"Dad's been space sick," John started, not completely sure why he was volunteering the information, "and Uncle Lee threw up in a press conference once. They'd scheduled it a little too soon after touchdown."
Robin clearly didn't know where he was going with this. "Fun anecdote."
"What I'm saying is—it doesn't have to be the end. Dad's seen some stuff and he might—he would give you another chance."
"That's…nice, I guess," said Robin, "but I think it's probably better if we stick to admiring each other from afar." He finally reached for his coffee. "And besides, thermal protection systems are so last week."
"Is that what you were going to talk about?"
"I was going to talk about the core problems of traditional deflect-and-dissipate thermal protective systems in atmospheric reentry."
"Oh."
"I am all about epoxy novolac resin and fiberglass honeycomb these days."
"Are you?" The question was genuine.
"Well, it's my job, so…" Robin hesitated, "I try to be."
"It sounds interesting."
"My job?"
"The presentation."
Robin took a measured sip of his coffee. "I suppose self-perpetuating feedback structures have a certain charm to them."
"It just seems like a shame that no one's ever going to hear it." John knitted his fingers together to steady them. "Can I read it?"
"Come again?"
"The notes," said John. "For your presentation. It's the least I can do." And it really was. A negligible making of amends, the smallest gesture towards being anything other than indistinctly sorry.
Robin narrowed his eyes at him. "Are you serious?"
"I'm very serious," said John. "Ask anyone."
Robin set his cup back on the saucer. "I guess I could put something together. Where do you want me to send it?"
That was a problem: a paper trail, the indelible digital stamp of ones and zeroes leading to his inbox, proof of a correspondence out of place among the other emails from family and work and the bi-monthly e-zine subscription of Feline Fancy Gordon had signed him up for as a joke. "Could you pass it to me in person?"
It was an odd question, John knew, but it couldn't be helped when the conversation was dwindling, and there wasn't time for an artless segue into the topic, not when he had to get home before someone made the connection he wasn't at the office, where he said he'd be, and Dad called Kyrano, perpetually ready to assemble a phalanx and comb the streets of LA for wayward Tracy children.
"Uh…sure." Robin turned the cup in the saucer. "I'm kinda busy this week, but you could come by the office on Friday. Or, I'll come down, anyway. To the lobby. Around seven?"
A foot in the door, a perfectly inoffensive reason to meet again, and John nodded, the gnawing in the pit of his stomach beginning again, because it wasn't all noble, not really, not when the Question remained, and the Secret, which Robin knew, when no one else did.
Not even Alan.
(Writer's note: As always, let me know what you think. I love to hear from you.)
