The door opened and Sebastian entered, carrying two water bottles. He handed me one. It was ice-cold.
“Thanks.” I unscrewed the lid and took a swig.
“No problem.”
He settled on the chair next to mine. The backrest creaked as he leaned against it, stretching his legs out in front of him.
“You look comfortable. Nice day?” I took another sip of water.
“Decent.”
I cocked my head. “What exactly is it that you do?”
He gave me a half smile. “Basically? I write code. All day, most days.”
“That’s it? You work at NASA. I expected at least one robot or a secret moon landing.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, everyone pictures astronauts or rocket launches. But someone has to make sure the satellites keep talking to the ground.” He leaned back, looking almost bashful. “I’m a software engineer at NASA’s Goddard Institute, over by Columbia. I help build tools that process satellite data—climate modeling, mostly. Evapotranspiration rates, drought tracking, water conservation systems. Stuff that helps scientists, farmers, policymakers…”
He trailed off, but there was a quiet conviction in his tone that pulled me in.
“So you code for Earth?” I asked, my voice softer now.
He nodded. “Exactly. I build interfaces that help turn raw satellite data into usable insights—how much water a crop field loses, where drought’s hitting hardest, how we can manage it smarter. Some of our tools get picked up by open-source communities, even other countries.”
“You sound like you love it.”
His smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. “I really do. I’ve always wanted to do something that mattered. I’ll never go into space, but if a line of code I wrote helps feed people or save a river… that’s enough.”
My chest warmed, unexpectedly. There was something disarming about the way he said it—not showy, just honest. A man who coded to save the world, one algorithm at a time.
His eyes were full of depth and intelligence as he stared at something only he could see. Galaxies far away? Algorithms and space coordinates so far out of my understanding as a trip to the Moon? For the first time since we’d met, I didn’t see a shallow womanizer. Instead, I feasted my eyes on a man of science. A man I could respect. A man I did respect.
“Did you always want to work for NASA?”
He pursed his lips in thought for a second. “I guess I did.”
“Why?”
His answer came slowly, pensively. “Various reasons. I wanted to be useful to the world. And also… I wanted to learn all there is about the universe, to find answers about divinity and why things happen.” He moistened his lips. “Especially why bad things happen, and if there’s a way to prevent them.”
There was something there, something deep, something hidden in the depths of his eyes. I wondered what bad things had happened to him, but I didn’t dare pry. Not yet. I didn’t feel I’d earned the right to explore more layers of this man. But I wanted to.
I caught myself staring at him, my lips parted in admiration.
He frowned. “Something wrong?”
We were facing each other, our knees touching.
I shook my head slowly. “Nothing’s wrong. I just… For a moment there, I saw you in a new light.”
His mouth curved into a smile. “Is that new light good or bad?” His voice was low, intimate, barely audible above the hum of the washers.
“It’s good.” I moistened my lips.
His eyes lowered to my mouth, and his pupils dilated, darkening the brown irises.
“Let me guess,” he said. “You’ve just realized you’re sapiosexual.”
