Page 20 of Topping Off the Alien

Then he says, “Hello, Wes,” and my heart stutters, because the voice is unmistakably his.

My hands are unsteady, so I grip the edge of the bar.

“You’re... here? Is that really you?”

He smiles then. I’ve never seen him smile like this, with his whole face, the composure wiped away and nothing but warmth underneath.

“It’s me,” he says.

The bar noise goes on around us, but none of it reaches me. I’m aware, in some back room of my brain, that I’m standing in the middle of my workplace, staring at a customer with my mouth hanging open.

I glance around for Melissa and find her at the register, running a card.

“Hey,” I say, crossing to her. “Can you cover the bar for a few minutes? I need to... There’s a thing I have to take care of.”

She glances past me at Sol, and her eyebrows climb. “A thing?”

“Five minutes. Ten, tops.”

“Holy shit, that is the tallest man I’ve ever seen in my life,” she says, still staring at him. Then she looks back at me, and I watch her put two and two together. “He’s the reason for the face, isn’t he? Not your ex.”

“Yeah,” I admit.

“Oh, babe. Go. Take fifteen.”

I don’t need to be told twice. I come around the bar, and Sol rises off the stool and unfolds to his full height. The couple nearest us stops talking to watch. I catch his sleeve and pull him toward the back hallway, past the bathrooms, to the storage room at the end. He follows without a word, ducking under the doorframe.

I pull the string on the bare bulb, shut the door behind us, and we’re alone.

For a second I just look at him, because he’s here, in the dusty yellow light, between a stack of vodka cases and a shelving unit full of clean glasses.

I give him a full once-over. “You’re really here.”

“Yes.”

“But how?” The question comes out with a week of frustration behind it. “You left. I went back to the clearing the next day, and there was nothing there, Sol, nothing at all. So how are you in my bar right now?”

All of a sudden he looks shy, the way he did in bed when he told me what he wanted.

“The wormhole didn’t close.”

I stare at him. “What do you mean it didn’t close?”

“I opened it, the ship went through, and the door should have collapsed behind us within the hour. But... it didn’t. It stabilized instead.”

“Stabilized?”

“Turned into an anchor.”

“An anchor? Like, a permanent door?”

Surprise flickers across his face. “You remember that.”

“Of course I do. I remember everything from that night.”

Color creeps up along his cheekbones.

“How, though?” I ask. “What’s keeping it open?”