So this is real?
A mental pause, as the fingers spread out over my breasts to tenderly cup them, then: Doesn’t it feel real? Doesn’t it sound real? She bent one of her legs at the knee, so that it broke surface with a liquid splash. Working my fingers deeper into her, gently rubbing her clit with my middle finger, I returned: Yes, and yes, but… I feel the tub, I feel your flesh, but… how do I feel within you? You’re an empath, so -
The hands on my breasts stiffened, then slid down off them, to the slightly convex roll of my belly, then down, down, to my waiting watery-drift of loose curls, and the slightly gaping ache between them. I had to lean back hard against those tiny, knoblike tiles. First she fingered me, then, after shifting around so that she was facing me, ducked her head under the surface and began tonguing me under the rippling waters until my pelvis began thrusting upward in short, hard pulses. I started to reach my arms outward, hugging the surrounding curve of the tub, while she thought: Just relax, feel it… never mind about me. Just let it flow -
And as the shivering jerks of the orgasm made my leg muscles writhe under the damp flesh, I felt her tongue narrow and burrow deep within me like a bee tunneling into a half-opened rose. When the tip of her nose brushed against my clit, I lifted my pelvis free of the water, feeling the air touch it warmly, yet with a strange completeness. When I opened my eyes and took in my own familiar bathroom, in all its familiar pink-and-whiteness, it was like being exposed to a flashing bulb, for my eyes had grown so familiar to that soothing blue-violet blackness.
But as I slid deep into my bath, letting the water rise up to my chin, my lower lip, I heard Claudia’s parting thought, slightly distant and muffled, as if shouted underwater, but nonetheless clear:
I’ll tell you the meaning of my name when you visit me…
I moved to an upright position with a noisy splash, asking: Visit… as in see-see you? In… person?
This was something almost unheard of in esper circles. The whole purpose of the newsletter, of all the esper singles newsletters all over the world, was to facilitate meaningful mental relationships. Not the petty body-dates which were based solely on looks and other uninspired, mundane aspects of our bodily trappings. Phone calls were only used as a tool to better solidify an esper transfer. For most of us, making voice contact intensified the images, made the emphatic bonds all the more tactile and real.
Since Claudia’s bond was already so strong (if lacking in my being able to read her physical responses, something I’d chalked up to some sort of shyness on her part), I already thought we had something special, something even a phone line couldn’t really improve upon. But her answer was unmistakable, if faint:
Of course… how else do people visit? Phones are for wussies. Dive in, the water’s fine here.
Before I lost all contact with her, I leaned forward in the tub, my forehead almost touching the spout, and shouted:
How do I find you??
Her reply was as faint as the distant drip-drip of a faucet left barely turned on in a far away room:
I’m in the book, Sima…
Although she wasn’t in the Manhattan directory, there were plenty of view-phone books for surrounding cities in my shop. The next morning (after a night spent wallowing in moist, blue-tinged dreams) I shoved aside the still unpacked box of Blum posters and looked under my counter, through every view-phone book on the shelf, until I finally found the name Muirfinn, C. A., in the Lake Placid directory. Hers was the only address listed for that particular street (Blue Fin Drive, appropriately enough), so I suspected that hers was either one of those spreading country-style estates, or a private cul-de-sac.
The Blum posters – and my meagre-visioned customers – would have to wait a few days… until I’d rented an old-style gas-powered car (thanks to her place being too far away for an electric car’s reserves) and personally checked out C.A. Muirfinn.
And, as if to acknowledge the Tightness of my decision, Claudia whispered in my mind: You were right the first time… it is an estate. Right near the lake, in fact, before closing off the contact, leaving only a subtle whiff of briny sweetness in my nostrils…
It was a long drive up to Lake Placid, and another five miles beyond the city to Blue Fin Drive, which was within less than one hundred yards of the twin islet-dotted lake itself. As I made the turn onto her winding, sinuous driveway, which led in lazy loops and twists toward a massive, deep blue-sided, grey-roofed deluxe ranch-style mansion, I couldn’t help but notice that the driveway looked incredibly new, as if few cars used it. There was a two-car garage near the house, but the gravel before it looked virtually pristine, as if this was the bottom of a fish tank, and not someones private driveway.
When I exited the car in front of the garage door closest to the house, I noticed that there was no actual landing before her front door, just a slightly sloping-concrete walkway which slanted subtly upwards, plus a metal hand-rail next to it, decorated with stylized verdigris-coated brass dolphins. The house seemed to grow larger as I walked up that slight incline; it had to be over one hundred and twenty feet long, and almost half that wide, not counting the garage. That the place was only one-storey didn’t detract from its sheer size: in many ways, it reminded me of an ocean of air, capped by a pale, glittering island of silvery sand.
While Claudia had remained strangely silent, even when I’d tried to use her MindByte while trying to figure out how to gas up the unfamiliar car I’d rented at the automated garage a few miles back, during my trip up here, she did choose to speak to me just as I was about to place my finger on her door-belclass="underline"
You came… you actually did come to see me.
There was an unexpected pause in her mind-voice, followed by something akin to awe in those silvery tones. Before touching the bell, I thought back: But didn’t you invite me? Tell me to look you up?
Her answer was as soft as the plash of raindrops on new grass:
Of course, of course… but I didn’t think that you wanted to so badly.
Pressing my forefinger against the bell, I was about to think her a retort when I felt a twinge of queasiness ripple through me, the first empathic touch I’d felt from her. Not a physical sensation, but a deep feeling of – what? Could it actually be fear, of me?
Bold Claudia fearing more reticent Sima? On the second ring, the door swung open on its own, revealing a cathedral-like expanse of blue-green-violet lit hallway carpeted in what had to be a soothing low-pile sandy broadloom, its surface delicately pebbled in the diffuse light. No furniture adorned that long hall, but the walls were dotted with wall-mounted fishing nets from which hung sand dollars, flat shells, and rigid starfish and dried sea horses… and as I entered that passageway, and lightly touched the various remainders of the ocean, I felt the deepness of Claudia’s affections for each object, and knew/felt that she’d gathered them all herself.
The hallway stretched out for about fifteen feet before it opened onto an extraordinary room – that same sandy-nubby flat carpeting ringed the outer parameters of the huge room (fifty by fifty, or twice that much?) whose centre was dominated by an amorphous blue-green-black tiled pool whose waters gave the room a faint but not unpleasant chlorine smell. This scent was almost masked by the hanging rattan baskets of pungent dried herbs and flowers which dangled from various hook-suspended chains all around the pool area. The area around the pool was brightly tiled, with hand-painted sea creatures fired upon their surfaces. The overhead lights cast bright, rippling ribbons of light upon the pale aquamarine waters: almost blinding in their intensity, they made me partially shield my eyes against the glare, so that I missed Claudia’s initial entrance on the opposite side of the room. But when that queasiness gave way to a sense of heart-lopping panic, I looked across those waters and saw -