Breakfast at the Edge of the Bay, Part 2

Timeline: 11 October 2381, Late Morning (Following Part 1)

Location: Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, Earth

Characters Present:

• Jean-Baptiste Dorsainvil
• Jacqueline Holder

Jean-Baptiste doesn’t look up when he asks her to tell him more about herself, and for a heartbeat the world seems to wait. Jacqueline hesitates, shy under the weight of attention, before finally speaking—about Barbados, about growing up where everyone knew everyone, about her eleven-year-old brother Arnoud who thinks she hangs the moon. JB listens, smiling, his own sisters—Angeline and Élise—momentarily vivid in his mind. Their conversation drifts like the tide, easy and unhurried.

They trade small truths: childhood ambitions, half-remembered dreams, the kinds of tethers that keep a person from drifting too far. Jacqueline deflects gently when the talk brushes too close to home, and JB lets her, reading the shift in her posture as clearly as a change in wind. He answers with humor, confessing that he’s just cleared his schedule in the name of spontaneity.

The banter turns playful. She teases him about his impossible to-do list; he counters with an invitation—to skip responsibility and disappear into a Cary Grant marathon at the Rialto in The Castro. She doesn’t know who Cary Grant is, but JB explains, eyes soft with nostalgia, that he’s an old Earth actor who made people believe love could fix anything—or at least make the mess worth it. When she finally says yes, her smile is wide, and the decision feels like the beginning of something neither of them can yet name.

Breakfast at the Edge of the Bay, Part 2 (Official Post)

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