we keep this love in a photograph

Chapter 32

August cooled the muggy city and brought overcast skies with it as a breeze shifted the stagnant air and autumn managed to creep into the trees and the shortening days. It was nearly over before it had started and Jennie spent most of it parked behind a desk or sharing tapas and movies and hours around the pool table at a dive bar with friends. It wasn't just Alice and Ashley on those nights at the bar; Irene and Suho and Jisoo joined them often, and one night two weeks after she got back from Seattle, the six of them went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark together at that rundown theatre Rosie had taken Jennie to.

Jennie found she didn't resent their company as much as she'd anticipated, allowing herself to be pulled from her wallowing more often than she would have liked, but was all the more grateful for it when she found herself laughing until her stomach hurt, despite the ache of longing
in her chest. She realised that to miss Rosie didn't mean an empty void of waiting in her life, and she was glad that she let Alice and Ashley's stubborn determination to turn her into a social butterfly slowly work its charm. Perhaps not as much as they would have liked, but Jennie was cut down to barely two late nights at the office a week now, a stark contrast to the entire weeks when she'd trek home in the early hours of the morning, only to return to her office mere hours later.

As August rolled into September, she booked Alice and Ashley a weekend getaway to Joshua Tree out of gratitude, and to give them some time to themselves - and Jennie would have been lying if she didn't say she just wanted one weekend to herself. They left on Thursday and Jennie enjoyed the quiet night in with Athena, working through the meeting minutes with a project manager from the engineering department as a documentary played in the background.

On Friday night, despite her promise to herself that she'd stay home and do minimal work, she found herself at the office late, staying behind to inspect a prototype and indulge in the empty workshop. She had her own lab, of course, but there was something about walking through the open workshops that made her long for the days she'd spent on her own research, the practical aspects that didn't revolve around arduous meetings and mountains of paperwork or the constant conversations about money and KPI's and working out which projects to proceed with. She didn't miss the long hours spent coding computer programs, nitpicking through strings of letters and symbols for tiny mistakes, but she missed the careful work of soldering and connecting wires and assembling fiddly pieces.

Most of her time now was spent signing off for other people to do that sort of work for her, hiring hundreds of people to create the products J Corporations sold throughout their various divisions, but she spent a couple of hours that night, dismantling the prototype for an image-guided robot and poring over blueprints as she inspected the parts of it. It was an upgrade of an old model Jennie had designed, trying to implement nanotechnology through nanosensors and fine-motor mechanics with its own self-renewing energy source, but so far it had been unsuccessful. She knew that once they cracked the key to it, it would be a staple at the forefront of modern medicine and engineering, making quick, precise work that human hands made errors of.

On the street below, cars inched past the dark building, dinner patrons making their way to the fine restaurants along the river at the end of the block while late commuters headed home. Above them, the setting sun smeared the sky red and gold and pink, the palm trees and cypresses swayed in the cool breeze. The hours got lost on her as she worked, the office emptying and the smell of grease and metal clinging to her blackened fingertips as she happily played away, knowing that she wasn't providing anything valuable to the effort but content to see for herself how the work was progressing.

It was past eleven when she finally became aware of herself, of the ache in her stiff shoulders from hunching over for hours, of the dry, burning sensation in her eyes and the gnawing hunger in her stomach that let her know she'd forgotten about dinner. Jennie could've stayed there for hours, but she'd already broken her promise to not stay late and caved, deciding to call it a night. She had half a mind to go and get dinner first though and checked to see if the nearby Thai place was still open.