Invincible Summer by Alice Adams

days since, give or take. He should have kissed her but instead he’d stepped back out of the doorway, almost but not quite brushing her body with his own, and the spell had been broken and he’d mumbled an apology and she’d darted off to her room.
    He wondered whether he’d die an old man still cursing himself for not having taken what could easily turn out to have been his best shot at happiness. After three long years of watching Eva pining for Lucien and being roundly ignored himself, he’d finally had his chance and he’d blown it. The savage rage he’d felt at himself for the first year afterwards had largely subsided, but the thought of it was still enough to make him cringe at his own inadequacy.
    He glanced up at the clock. 9pm. He might as well head home, picking up a Pot Noodle from the Spar on the way. He’d just write his data back down ready for the morning, and make a start on a reply to Eva’s message while he was waiting for the job to finish. Benedict sent the command and listened for the telltale signs from the cupboard in the corner of the room, where Boris the data-management robot would be busying himself. The sheer volume of data for his PhD on the search for first-generation leptoquarks in decay channel collisions was so enormous, petabyte upon petabyte of the stuff, that it couldn’t be stored on local computers and was instead written onto cartridges which were lifted in and out of the reader by the robotic arm. Most of what he spent his days doing was writing computer programs to sift through massive datasets looking for signature patterns of his particle, isolating traces in amongst all the other distracting and irrelevant data and allowing him to zero in on these tiny signals and separate them out from the background noise.
    He opened the email from Eva and read it again. New York, blah blah , client dinner, blah blah blah , broker night, blah-di-blah. He was losing her, that much was clear. She was jetting around the world attending important meetings, hobnobbing with movers and shakers, while he festered in a basement. She never mentioned men these days but he knew they must be there, coming and going. He probably wouldn’t know until one day a wedding invitation would plop through his letterbox, and then it really would be too late.
    A thought was coalescing in his mind as he hit Reply. If it would be too late then, didn’t that imply that it wasn’t too late now? What if some future version of himself in a parallel universe was looking back at him sitting here now and cursing him for a bloody fool, just as he was doing with the version of himself of a few years earlier?
    Eva, he began to type recklessly.
    Sounds like all you do is work! Do you have any holiday you can take this summer, and if so, do you fancy joining me in Corfu again like you did a few years ago? It’s been ages since we spent any decent time together and I don’t want to sound utterly soppy but I miss you. I never tell you that even though I often think it because I don’t know how you’d feel about it. But what the hell: I’d love to spend some time together this summer. Do you remember how great it was last time? This is going to sound crazy but there was a moment, do you remember it, when we got sort of lodged in a doorway together? I’ve kicked myself so many times for not kissing you then.
    He was distracted by a crunching noise coming from the data cupboard. Benedict glanced up but couldn’t see anything amiss, so he turned back to the screen and continued.
    Anyway, I don’t want to jeopardise our friendship so if this is totally unwelcome then just say so and I’ll never mention it again, but I’m reading your messages and realising that your life is moving on and I don’t want to end up kicking myself even more for just letting that happen and never being man enough to say what’s on my mind.
    The noise from the cupboard was growing worryingly loud now, more of a thudding than a crunching