17. From Fossils to Neo-Darwinism
FROM FOSSILS TO NEO-DARWINISM
*Andreas*
S leep would not come. Not for lack of exhaustion. Nor for lack of opportunity.
The real, unpalatable explanation: Samantha slept here, under my roof, and now every nerve within my body had chosen to organize itself around her proximity, like a citywide blackout except for the single column of light that burned for her, and only her.
There existed not enough darkness in the world to convince my body to power down.
Two hours since she’d retired to her room, two hours since I’d heard her methodically moving her shampoo and other items into the hall bathroom, and yet the sum of my progress toward sleep was nil.
I lay on my back, eyes fixed on the stippled darkness of the ceiling, and forced myself to replay old chess matches, then count backward from one hundred, then a thousand, then attempt the old trick of imagining myself on a frozen lake, letting the silent cold and emptiness smooth my thoughts into nothing.
Didn’t work. In the end, I tried imagining myself as the ice, and she was the body of water below, forever churning, breaking, threatening to warm, melt, and consume me.
Unsurprisingly, this did nothing to propel me toward sleep.
Every five minutes, I checked my phone, hoping for a trivial update from any of the night staff, or, failing that, some sign of familial unrest that might require my attention and thus distract me from the problem at hand. My notifications remained empty.
Earlier, when I wasn’t cataloguing the sounds of Sam’s movements—shower, teeth, changing, light on, light off—I reviewed the order of the previous night’s events as we’d faked our engagement, frame by frame, rewinding over every minute detail.
The way she looked at me across the table, the tremor in her hands, her voice when she told me to expect tongue, the impossible heat of her body in my lap at her apartment. Her eyes and smile when she laughed.
She’d always laughed easily. As a child, she’d howled at every low-effort joke, even the ones meant to sting, tossed at her by my brothers. But that laughter had been a type of rebellion.
Making her laugh—truly laugh—used to be the most reliable method of pulling her out of a dark mood.
I’d spent hours, sometimes days, strategizing and arranging situations to make her laugh.
And when she did, when my well-laid plans came to fruition, it had always made me feel .
.. powerful. In a way that wasn’t about control, but about being seen.
And appreciated. And enjoyed. Useful. Now, I missed it.
I missed her.
Last night, I’d caught only glimpses of it—her laugh, her joy—through a wineglass filled with rosé, darkly, and only when she felt safe enough to lower her guard.
The rest of our time together, she’d been tense, wary.
I remained convinced she still distrusted me.
Or, at the very least, she did not wish to be alone with me.
If she’d asked, I would’ve left the city, the country, the planet, just to prove she could feel safe here.
She’d chosen the farthest bedroom from mine. The “service suite,” a twenty-square-meter room designed for a housekeeper or a guest I’d never invited. She’d taken her suitcase across the threshold and closed the door with a finality that felt less like a boundary and more like a verdict.
I wasn’t a fool. My opening strategy had been clumsy, assumed too much after too many years apart. But this second strategy, adopting her as my plan B, had backfired. I shouldn’t have cared about the distance between our bedroom doors, but I did.
I wanted her to want this room. It had been stripped and redecorated.
I’d arranged for a designer while I attended meetings, interviews, and practice sessions yesterday and today.
I’d instructed them to discard anything Samantha might notice or object to, to make the space a blank slate for her.
I wanted her to feel comfortable changing anything and everything to her liking, paint the walls, break the windows, gut the closet.
I wanted her to possess whatever wanted, including a sense of control.
Including me, in the unlikely event. . .
Abruptly, I realized I was hard, embarrassingly so, and rolled to my side to hide it from no one.
I told myself I should go for a run downstairs in the gym, burn off the excess energy, or take a cold shower.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. Thoughts of her in that black dress from two nights ago had me reaching under the covers and inside my pants.
A door shut softly, somewhere down the hall. I stilled and listened. A beat passed. The silence like a held breath.
Waiting, rigid and alert, all my attention funneled down the hallway, anticipating her next move. Nothing happened. A full fifteen minutes passed, maybe more. Time became elastic, every second stretching into an eternity.
It must’ve been after two when I heard the creak of a floorboard beyond my door.
Not loud enough for the average person to notice, but I’d spent enough hours in this apartment to form a familiarity with every minor defect.
My heart doubled its pace, then tripled.
I endeavored to control my breathing, to calm the surging blood in my veins.
The knob on my door turned, ever so slowly. The door opened enough to allow a slip of dim light from the living room, which added to the city lights coming in from the large window. For a second, nothing. Then she was there.
Samantha stood in the doorway, silhouetted in her oversized shirt, hair down around her face and shoulders, eyes half open. Her feet bare and her posture strange, a little slack, as though this room’s gravity were heavier than the rest of the world’s. She did not speak.
I sat up in bed, all the air gone from my lungs, and managed, “Samantha?”
She did not respond, instead shuffling into the room, not quite looking at me, gaze pointed just above my head. Samantha paused at the end of the bed, hands loose at her sides, then climbed up—one knee on the mattress, then the other—and crawled over the covers until she drew even with me.
Stunned, my body did not know what to do. My brain had already been spun into glass, and now I suspected that, at any movement, the entire scene might shatter into a dream.
Samantha lay beside me, facing me, close enough that I could see the sheen of sweat on her temple.
She burrowed into the pillow. Then, with a kind of delicate desperation, curled herself against my body.
Her leg wormed between mine, and her hand found its way to my stomach beneath my shirt. Her breath was warm on my throat.
All the muscles in my body tensed at once, locked in a state of absolute incredulity.
She pressed her face against the side of my neck and let out a long, shaky exhale, then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she relaxed completely, melting into me.
I did not breathe. I did not move.
This was the opposite of anything I’d ever imagined. In every scenario where she ended up in my bed, it had been a complete fantasy, divorced from reality. What else could it have been? Sleepwalking? Which—wait.
Hold on.
Is Samantha sleepwalking?
A wave of suspicion broke over the shock and arousal. Her roommate had mentioned that Samantha sleepwalked. Certainly, she wasn’t awake now. Had she come here on purpose, to tell me something, to ask for something?
If I said her name again, would she hear me?
I swallowed, felt her arm tense at the subtle movement, and risked it. “Samantha?”
No verbal response.
Instead, she tightened her grip around my chest, and slid her hand further under the hem of my shirt such that her palm pressed flat to my stomach, hot and real. I wanted to capture her hand and move it lower. I wanted to entangle our fingers together and slide them into her underwear.
I wanted to roll on top of her, strip her naked, kneel between her thighs, and devour her whole.
But I did nothing. I remained still.
She wore a shirt—baggy, covered in cartoon blobs that were likely science based. I focused on the pattern as a mental distraction. Her thigh, bare and warm, pressed tight to my leg. The pressure of her head on my shoulder, the weight of her body draped over me, felt somehow urgent.
Samantha’s breathing evened out. After a minute, I recognized the pattern. Deep inhale, long slow exhale, with a tiny tremor at the end, as if she were recovering from an earlier bout of crying. This perplexed me.
Had she been crying? Had she come to me for comfort?
No. Samantha coming to me for comfort was wishful thinking. She was, in fact, truly sleepwalking.
I considered waking her, but the memory of her earlier admission—about trouble sleeping—kept me in place. I told myself she deserved rest. She deserved peace. If that meant I was her prisoner for a night, then so be it. I would not move until she let me go. It was a very least I could do.
Carefully, gently, I placed my arm around her shoulders and held her there. I wanted to kiss her hair, but did not. I let my lips hover a centimeter away. My cock remained hard, an unyielding iron bar between us. She did not notice.
Time passed. Maybe five minutes. Maybe an hour.
I thought about every moment of our shared history, and every time I’d failed her, and every way I wanted to make it up to her now. I wondered if she would ever know what she did to me, what she meant to me, if I’d ever get a chance to tell her. If she would one day forgive me.
But then, Samantha shifted, just a little, nuzzling her face deeper into my neck.
My eyes closed and I gritted my teeth, commanding myself not to move.
She made a sound, a quiet mewling noise, then pressed her nose to my skin and inhaled deeply, as if she were drawing something out of me. Then she stilled again.
Samantha smelled like gardenia and something else, something I could only describe as silky and warm and fucking addictive.
Her hand, still under my shirt, flexed against my stomach, and I realized I held her too tightly. I loosened my grip immediately, worried I might hurt her.
She settled again, head heavy on my bicep, hair tickling my jaw. I memorized each sensation, catalogued every detail. Her breathing grew slower. A wet patch of tears, maybe sweat, formed on my shirt where her face pressed against me.
I would not sleep tonight. I would suffer instead.
But, I reminded myself, suffering with her close seemed so much better than suffering in her absence. This kind of pain, I would pay any price for it. To have her here, in my arms, even for a single night, a luxury I did not deserve.
Oh well. Lucky me.
When the sun rose, I would make her coffee, and I would make it strong, and I would never tell her how completely she’d undone me.
I would let her believe it was nothing, no big deal.
And, eventually, I would let her go.
But not yet. Not. . . tonight.
REPRODUCTION , book #2 in the Fundamentals of Biology trilogy is coming October 16th, 2025!
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