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I sit on the edge of his bed, my heart pounding so hard I’m scared he can tell. “I only want to eat gift basket food from now on.”
Hudson chuckles, then says, “And here I was worried I put you off basket food earlier.”
“Because of the spider,” I answer, nodding. “I’m able to separate my fear of arachnids from delicious food.”
“I’m glad.” He stares at me for a second. “I um, couldn’t help but notice you had a strange reaction to that spider.”
My face heats up. “You mean the gagging?”
“Yeah… I’ve never seen someone do that before.”
“I have a bit of a phobia,” I say, tugging on the hem of my sleeve a little.
“I gathered as much. Anything happen to you or is it just because they’re generally creepy?”
“A particularly nasty cousin of mine thought it would be hilarious to hide an egg sack in my sock drawer when I was a kid. I didn’t notice until it was the middle of the night and my room was crawling with them.”
“Whoa, that was crappy of him.”
“Yeah, he was twelve. I was eight and probably irritated the hell out of him.”
“But I’m sure you didn’t deserve that.”
“Definitely not. To this day, he is not on my Christmas card list.”
“I can see why,” he answers. “You should make him pay for therapy for you.”
I laugh at the idea and shrug. “He was twelve. Twelve-year-olds are idiots. I mean, I’m sure you weren’t, but most of them.”
“No, I was pretty much an idiot.” He dips a cracker into some cream cheese, and when he pulls it out, a corner breaks off. “Still am for the most part.”
“No, you’re not,” I tell him, carefully plucking the errant piece out and popping it in my mouth.
“I’m not exactly Einstein,” he says. “To be honest, I’m a little worried about my time at the SETI Research Institute.”
“Why? You’re fine.”
Shaking his head, he says, “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to grasp the finer points of astronomy. Physics isn’t exactly my thing.”
“The fact that you know astronomy has anything to do with physics puts you miles ahead of the game.”
He purses his lips for a second, then says, “I watched a NASA video for kids.”
“That’s okay,” I answer, plucking another cracker out of the sleeve. “They make highly informative videos.”
“They really do.” Hudson has another bite, and we both eat in a contented silence for a minute. It’s oddly comfortable, the two of us hanging out in bed like this, even though we barely know each other, he’s injured, and we’re in a hospital.
He has a sip of ginger ale, then says, “So what made you want to become an astronomer?”
“Curiosity, I suppose. There’s just so much out there that has never been discovered or explored,” I tell him, feeling overly excited to be sharing this side of myself with someone who seems so interested to hear it. “I mean, I get that there are a lot of places on earth that haven’t been discovered yet—especially the oceans—but for me, there’s just something about space. The stars, the moon, the other planets we can see. The billions we can’t see. The sheer vastness of it. It’s nearly impossible to wrap your head around it. And I want to know everything—what’s out there, how it all fits together, how we can get to places in other galaxies, who we’ll meet when we get there…”
He smiles at me for a second without saying anything.
“What? Do I have food on my face or something?” I ask, feeling around my mouth.
“No, you’re just so lit up. It’s nice.”
“Really?”
