“Is it okay?” I asked, reaching for her breasts.
“This is how it’s done.”
“Yes. This feels right,” I said, filling my mouth with her flesh. Heather slid her hands between my legs and grinned devilishly.
“I can’t wait,” I said.
“Are you sure?” She said, biting her lip.
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
Heather smiled as she slid down on top of me. I gasped as she flicked her tongue over my teeth.
“You like?”
“You feel amazing,” I moaned.
I glanced toward Isha. The idol had grown into a massive winged creature three times her size. Snake-like tentacles stretched out from its jaw, encircling her body. The creature wrenched her into the air and Isha howled with pleasure.
“I hope it’s a boy,” I said.
Heather sneered and grabbed my throat. “Isha and I will raise him well.”
Constella Espj
IPSA SCIENTIA
For the third night in a row Kara was voice-chatting with Jake.
“So you like libraries, huh?” She teased, flirting with him already. She’d found him on a science fiction website and had become immediately attracted to his incredible intelligence.
“Libraries are wonderful. They are places of learning. They all remind me of the library near my home.”
“Where’s that?”
“If you can guess correctly, I will tell you that you are right.” His accent was rich and exotic. She couldn’t place it.
She pouted. She hoped he could hear it in her voice. “Aw, well I’ll keep listening and try to figure it out. Can I at least get a hint?”
“Hmm,” if he had a pointy beard he was probably stroking it. “Well, not to give too much away, it is known to my people as the Great Library.”
“What? That’s so not helpful! There’s probably a million ‘great libraries’ in the world. I’ll be on the Internet forever trying to find it.”
“If you can find it on the Internet I would be impressed by your researching capabilities.”
Kara scoffed. “Please, I’m a master researcher! If there’s anything I love, it’s hunting things down, figuring them out.”
Jake sounded curious — at least how Kara imagined curiosity would sound on him. “What is it that you love about research?”
“I love to learn new things. It’s crazy but I love knowledge. Anyway, give me more hints.”
“Anything one could hope to learn is contained there. There you can find history, science–more knowledge than any human could absorb in a lifetime. If you love knowledge, you would like it there.”
After work the next evening, Kara was online with Jake again. This time she was reclining in bed. She was working on a short story and asked him about faster-than-light travel. If anyone knew, it would be a physicist. She’d told him that much but she hadn’t mentioned that only a thin pair of white panties was covering her brown skin. Their last chat had left her so… warm.
“It is technically impossible right now, but there is a way around it. Have you ever heard of the Alcubierre Drive?”
She had not but she was enthralled. His mellifluous voice came right through her headset and directly into her brain. Eyes half open, she stared at nothing, panting softly and squirming with excitement. She was learning something, but she wasn’t sure what, just that it was about negative energy density.
“This matter does not exist here, of course, but—”
She perked up. “But what about somewhere else? Could it exist in some other part of the universe, where our laws of physics don’t necessarily apply?”
Jake paused. “Well…”
“I guess it’s not like anyone’s been there so—”
“Not yet, no. No humans have been there yet.”
“Tell me more.”
“This is very esoteric matter, you must understand.”
He went on. Kara’s fingers slipped lower. She was dizzy, drunk on the things he was telling her. She bit her lip to keep silent.
After a month of talking to each other nearly every day, Jake mentioned he’d be nearby to pick up some equipment at the end of the year. Kara didn’t know if she could wait until then. She had a huge list of things she wanted him to teach her when they finally met, and in five months it could only become a longer list.
“I’m not sure I can learn all this while you’re here.”
“I can teach it to you. You are smart enough to learn it. I believe you can.”
She requested a vacation from her boss the next day, intent on spending every moment she could with Jake in person.
Jake wasn’t online when she got home. Dejected, she went to a physics chat room to find someone to talk to about her new passion.
“Knock knock,” said an instant message.
Kara broke into a gleeful grin and sent back a reply: “Hi! I have a million questions!”
“Voice?”
She grabbed her headset and closed the chat room window. “You know it!”
She probed him about his research. He was maddeningly vague but under her barrage of questions, mentioned that it had something to do with high-temperature superconductors. He quickly changed the subject, and refused to let her lead the conversation back in that direction.
Later, after their goodbyes, Kara was too excited to sleep. Everything Jake had told her was swirling in her head. Her heart was pounding in her chest and she was panting. Her fingertips traced the curve of her breasts, the plane of her belly, the angles of her hipbones. She giggled softly to herself, remembering how she’d told Jake that the Navier-Stokes equations made her think of navels and strokes and soon the fabric of her panties was like space-time, caved to the density of her desires.
When they finally met, Kara was so nervous she tripped over a curb as she walked up to meet him, and knocked over two glasses of water at the restaurant where they had dinner. He politely pretended not to notice. She didn’t relax until they were sitting outside on a picnic blanket, far from the Las Vegas lights, staring up at the stars.
“The sky looks so different from here.” he murmured. “That constellation, the Pleiades, was not always there.” He pointed.
Following his finger, she looked at the Seven Sisters. “I wonder what the sky looked like that long ago.”
Jake swung his arm in a wide arc. “Do you see that?” He pointed at Aries, the ram. “The sun passes across a different constellation each month. Millions of years ago they were different. Some of the stars have become novae. You cannot tell just from looking but you can use the calculated precession of the equinoxes to—”
Kara suddenly turned and kissed him. His arms hung limp at his sides for a moment and then slowly came to rest around her waist. She pulled back from the kiss and grinned breathlessly.
“I have not—” he started to say, and paused. “It’s not a skill I’ve mastered.”
“You’re too busy doing science, right? That’s okay with me. Your mind turns me on.”
In his uncertainty, Jake accepted another kiss. His touch, awkward as it was, thrilled her. She pulled him down with her, flipping over a bowl of strawberries, scattering the little fruits.
“Tell me again about flux,” she panted, her hips arching invitingly.
Lips brushing her ear, he whispered metaphors of butterfly nets, invoked Gauss and Riemann, and spoke of differential geometry. He tried to instruct her on curved surfaces, on how a triangle in space wasn’t necessarily flat. He called it “Non-Euclidean” and she rose until the heavens rushed at her.
Back at her apartment he made diagrams, annotating them with symbols she barely understood. She didn’t care as long as he kept feeding her obscure information. He obliged her with talk of quantum gravity devices and high temperature super-conductivity. Hungry for more, all she could think of was devouring his body of knowledge.