16
Saturday. Sunday.
No new messages populated his phone’s sparse personal conversations. (He sent the usual chastising call from the Meyers about missing family dinner to voicemail.) No typing notifications appeared beneath his latest message with Forster.
With Erin.
Not that he checked their thread. Much.
What would she have said? Anyhow, they’d agreed to keep all communication professional, so she would’ve used SVLAC’s instant messaging system, not text, if she’d needed to contact him. There was no reason to monitor their discussion for a bubbling ellipsis—evidence that she was thinking of him like he was thinking of her. He tried not to think about her. He attempted to focus on sudoku, and when that didn’t help, he ran himself to exhaustion with Bunsen along a lattice of exposed trails at the Baylands Nature Preserve. He created the framework for Dr. Kramer’s status report on their quantum gravity work. He tried to distract himself, to redirect his brain into safe channels of productivity. He did. But—
The bold laughter in her eyes.
The flick of her tongue.
The taste of her mouth.
The weight of her silence.
Aaron Forster.
Erin Monaghan.
Her.
His fingers itched, but he didn’t tap into the reply field beneath her texts. What would he have said? And his phone’s lock screen read 11:28 p.m. So, he reached for a sketch pad; with a sigh, Bunsen dragged his bed beside Ethan’s desk and settled down to wait. He drew past midnight. Galaxies spooled in coils across the paper and through the lines of a discarded sudoku grid. Flecks of pigment smeared his desk. No calm symmetry of ruled lines or perspective could secure guardrails around his inconvenient emotions. His memories. Her. He drew and drew until his pen ran dry, until its desiccated nib scratched through the drawing pad.
Her fingers on his throat, her nails on his spine—
Groaning, he scrubbed his hands over his face.
When his alarm blared at six fifteen the next morning, he was already alert and staring at his ceiling, mouth sandy, teeth gritty, skin damp, stomach knotted, and heartbeat loud in his skull. He’d hardly slept. He hadn’t expected to.
He swung his legs out of bed and strapped on his watch. A monitor on its band immediately beeped a warning.
Heart rate exceeds safe limit! Slow down!
“We’re going running again.”
Mesh shorts, zip-up jacket, running shoes, Green Day, and he was out the door with Bunsen. He didn’t treat himself to a warm-up jog but pushed straight into a sprint down the sidewalk toward Stulsaft Park. The retriever galloped across Farm Hill Boulevard and onto the trail beside him, occasionally halting their momentum when he braked to lift his leg or to ferret for something tasty under a barbecue grate. After twenty minutes of mindless exertion on the path, they returned to the condo for breakfast. Seven o’clock. He was behind schedule. But he shaved after his shower. He answered a few questions from Szymanski in SVLAC’s messaging system. He set a timer for coffee, scrambled an egg, then brushed his teeth with attention to each molar. He flossed. He even took his temperature. He could call in sick and avoid the cause of his pounding heart and wet palms, couldn’t he? But when had he ever missed work? His leave went unused, and expired each year. Was there a single day when he could’ve afforded to take it, though? With Dr. Kramer heading his department, with the never-ending race for peer-reviewed results and publication—races against expectation, against his competitors, against himself—and with Erin Monaghan in the bullpen?
7:49 a.m.
She was probably already at her desk. Dr. Kramer was likely in the office, too.
He didn’t call in sick. He got into his car, into traffic, and eventually into the Modern Physics parking lot. Erin’s bicycle was in its rack by the doors, with SVLAC’s scooters. Instead of heading for his office and his inbox, his feet took him to the kitchenette. He needed more coffee. Or better yet, too much espresso. To anyone watching, the shots would explain the jitter in his hands. Though what if Erin was at the machine? What if she was standing there with a carton of oat milk, her expression unreadable behind glasses fogged by the frother, heat lifting the perfume off her wrists—
He tripped over an unsecured extension cord near the hallway copier: a direct violation of Human Resources’ chartreuse flyers. An intern testing the spigots on the nearest water dispenser—he and Erin had switched those hot and cold outputs several times over the last three years, and senior employees must’ve warned the cohort to check the temperatures before filling plastic cups or metal bottles—saw him stumble through his late arrival. So did Szymanski, coming down the corridor with a coffee mug. However, his colleague was absorbed enough in his LED research or kind enough to say nothing except, “Thank you for your responses, Dr. Meyer,”
and to walk past.
But the intern?
The young woman had styled her sweater and jeans like Erin did, the knit fabric tucked into her waistband at the front and left loose at the back. She was wearing a ponytail and sneakers, too. Who knew what she’d heard about him? Or seen. Ears burning, he stepped past her into the kitchenette. Erin wasn’t there. The room was empty, and smelled of nothing but coffee grounds and old fruit. Maybe he didn’t need more caffeine after all. A glance at his watch showed that he didn’t have time for it, either. Or for wondering where she was. But didn’t he need to consult with Marco Rossi about something? Cosmic energy sources? That would suffice. The University of Amsterdam’s black hole model simulated Hawking radiation—the thermal energy emitting from black holes—so it wasn’t a stretch to have research questions for the physicist. The fact that Rossi sat near Erin in the Modern Physics bullpen was coincidental.
“Dr. Rossi.”
“Uh—”
Rossi startled, abandoning a Scientific American article on his desktop monitor and swinging around in his chair. He blinked over wire-rimmed glasses at Ethan standing outside his cubicle. A pause. Then he reached behind himself to replace the digital magazine with a spreadsheet, and offered an uncertain smile. “Dr. Meyer. How can I help you?”
“Energy sources,” he said.
“Energy sources?”
He craned his neck past Rossi’s cubicle divider instead of elaborating.
“Do you need batteries, or a… a charging port?”
“No, I have cables.”
He edged another step sideways. “Dr. Fong spoke about potential energy sources from pulsar radio waves at an all-hands earlier this year.”
“Yes. The department theorizes that these regular radio waves could provide an unlimited and reliable power source for astronauts at the International Space Station, or even on interstellar missions.”
“Long-lasting energy, like light-emitting diodes.”
“Hypothetically. But our ideas are in a very early stage.”
“Right.”
There was light in Erin’s cubicle. “How… how does their power compare to the energy from LEDs?”
“The research hasn’t progressed far enough to provide specifics.”
Rossi gave him an odd look; though Ethan registered it, he still craned farther over the bullpen’s dividers. “Do you have a particular question about the waves? Or about the pulsars?”
“Questions?”
Her light was the glow of a live monitor. He dropped back onto his heels.
“Yes. Do you have any?”
“Possibly. Or Dr. Szymanski might, since I don’t study LEDs. But maybe something later about astrophysical thermal radiation.”
Then, leaving Rossi to his Scientific American article and his understandable confusion—there would be gossip in the kitchenette and the cafeteria later today, and he’d skip lunch to avoid it—he strode down the row of bullpen desks.
Dr. Erin Monaghan, read her nameplate. Her cubicle’s walls gleamed blue from the photon output of a large desktop monitor, the pixelated illumination reflecting in her glasses. She was clicking around a series of data exports while typing annotations into the cells. With her headphones on, she was oblivious to his approach, even though he was now close enough to scan her notes: the quantum gravity project. She was analyzing reference material that both of them should be reviewing, together.
She was reviewing his own quantum unit data from the holometer.
She squinted at a data cell, nibbling her lip—and his stomach jolted. Irritation. That was the feeling, wasn’t it? This lurch in his gut was familiar: vertigo, the rapid descent into an argument. The giddiness of watching her eyes flash and her cheeks flush, fighting back against his critiques, challenging him about the quantum field’s theories—and in her very personal attacks, attributing those theories, those flaws, that work, that brilliance to him. Irritating, but also: addictive, electrifying. So he kept stoking the blaze of their conflict, eager for their clashes, for her acknowledgment, for her attention, for her blushes and bitten lips, for—
—for… her.
Oh.
If another extension cord had been nearby, he would’ve gone sprawling.
There wasn’t, so he tripped into empty air.
…oh.
Focused on her monitor rather than his silent, blinding, gravity-defying epiphany—he might’ve fallen fast for Forster, but: how long had he already been falling for Dr. Monaghan?—Erin continued to click through his data, nodding along to her music. He could demand an explanation for why she was analyzing his work, call her out for her egregious breach of research etiquette—like always. But instead… instead, now, he stepped into her cubicle and rested a hand on the back of her chair. To steady himself? An easy explanation. “Um… anything interesting?”
“Ah!”
Startled, she jerked away violently enough to wrench off her headphones and yank their cord from her computer. Indie pop switched to blare from her desktop speakers.
“Damn!”
She jabbed at her keyboard, wincing.
“Sorry!”
His voice was too loud; she’d muted the music.
“It’s…”
Maybe her ears were ringing from the noise. She just shook her head—then glanced down at his hand on her chair. Blotches of color suffused her cheeks. She pivoted around to her monitor again, addressing his data when she said, “It’s fine. Uh—morning.”
“Morning.”
Several curious heads popped up over cubicles around the office; he withdrew his fingers. But not far. “Did you… is there anything noteworthy in my exports?”
“Nothing so far.”
Click, went her mouse. “It’s not that I don’t trust your review—but I always do preemptive analyses on anything that might end up being collaborative reference material.”
“Why?”
“It ensures that the findings of the later formal analysis have been objectively verified. Especially when the researchers involved are notoriously secretive about their data.”
Now her lips gave a tiny quirk.
“Fine.”
Office eavesdroppers or no, he couldn’t stop himself from leaning back in, then, from leaning close to the bloom of iris and juniper behind her ear. “You’ll have noticed that the standard deviation for the discrepancy in synchronization between the recombined laser beams is low. Outlier data points are minimal, and most are due to external stressors physically affecting the holometer’s mirrors. Earthquakes or high wind events—”
“—neither of which impacts LIGO’s data collection.”
She swung around in her chair, mouth widening into a smirk.
Their knees knocked.
Hard.
“Argh!”
Bent forward over Erin’s desk, Ethan lost his balance and grabbed the back of her seat again. This time, dog hair on his vest brushed up against the zipper of her utility jacket draped over the chair. Static snapped. It leaped from the metal to his hand and Erin’s arm, shocking them together. A hiss escaped her, and—
“No.”
Had he spoken, or had she?
Remembering that first flash of energy between them in the hall.
On Friday, too.
And today, here—now, when they both knew…
But it didn’t matter, because Dr. Daan van Buskirk from the Optics group was walking past the bullpen toward a block of Modern Physics conference rooms, while paying more attention to their conversation than to his armload of papers—and Erin swiveled back to her desk with a squeal of wheels. She opened SVLAC’s instant messaging system.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
We need to keep our distance.
He straightened, locked eyes with Van Buskirk, and pulled out his phone.
Dr. Ethan Meyer
Yes.
Dr. Erin Monaghan
We should limit interactions outside of our scheduled project hours. Messaging only?
Dr. Ethan Meyer
Agreed.
The physical effect of the static shock wore off quickly enough. The electricity of his nearness took a while longer to abate. The spark of his touch, the familiar heat in his ears and lips, when her mouth knew the taste of that warmth—
She stared at the latest news from STEMinist Online until she remembered how to inhale. But he’d shaved again this morning, and the amber musk of his aftershave lingered in her cubicle, in her hair, on her skin—and had the facilities team switched the building’s air systems from cooling to heat in July? She tried to concentrate on her forum, to distract herself with the safety of outrage. After all, the post about the seedy physicist who’d appropriated his subordinates’ work had continued to rack up fresh comments.
JustAKeysm@sh0K: Is your old supervisor still at SVLAC?
DataDominatrix: Just checked the staff page. He is. Promoted to department head, too.
JustAKeysm@sh0K: Did you report him?
DataDominatrix: What good would that do? HR exists to protect the company, not the employees. He was—is—a valuable asset. I was new, so I left. Like the others.
This was new.
She shifted in her chair, jeans chafing her thighs. At least they’d agreed to keep their distance at the lab.
So she avoided Ethan for the rest of the day. Fortunately, it was now her responsibility to run the new fiscal year department meetings throughout Nadine’s maternity leave and this swallowed up most of her morning. She’d never been so grateful for the mental load of bureaucracy. Following an hour spent debating inflation-based cost of living increases with Human Resources, the disdain of the poster from STEMinist Online for that personnel department made sense. Whenever she returned to her desk to prepare for her next administrative session, however, she knew whether his door was open or closed, whether he was in meetings or working in his office. Messages sent via SVLAC’s official channel filled her desktop, laptop, and phone screens. None were from him.
He was busy.
She was busy.
But lunchtime found her desperate for distraction. After inhaling a salad at the cafeteria, she directed her scooter to an evergreen quadrangle between the Interdisciplinary and Classical Physics buildings, settling onto a bench in the comparative coolness of the redwoods’ shade and extracting her notebook from her backpack.
Breathe.
She began to write.
There was no more Earth to shatter with earth-shattering changes. We had already left our planet and our home far behind. But the phrase—“earth-shattering”
as critical, as fateful—still held true, though the change began as something quite small, so small that only in hindsight did we see. Or hear.
The change was a silence.
There was no crinkle from dehydrated ice cream packets after dinner that day.
The words weren’t quite right. But then, her first drafts were always bad. She had to write a story before she could fix it. She’d said as much to—no. Focus. And couldn’t she let herself have this particular mess? When the time came, she’d know how to resolve it. The characters would show her the way. She had to trust them to make sense of their narrative. Trust herself.
The trouble was that right now, she didn’t trust herself at all.
How could she?
How could she trust her narrative sense when all other senses had betrayed her? When she’d been so blind, deaf, and dumb as to mischaracterize all of her mental and physical data about Ethan Meyer?
She’d hungered for his notice on that first day at SVLAC—though after their collision in the corridor, how much of her zeal had sprung from his compelling, paradoxical research, and how much from her heated awareness of her own body in proximity to his?—and when he’d sabotaged her instead of offering respect and collaboration, she’d lashed out in frustration. In humiliation. She’d been determined to hate him then, because he obviously hated her. Proving that their animosity was mutual meant mean-spirited pranks that escalated from petty to dangerous, desperate to have the last word and show that she didn’t care about his good opinion.
She’d wanted his attention, though.
Craved it.
Three years on, she’d been sure that yes, she did loathe him—and also deserved his undivided focus…
Any supervisor who didn’t fire her for such a disastrous analysis of her own data—whether the Forster-and-Bannister bombshell was in the mix or not—was an idiot.
The data was her; she was the idiot.
“Everything’s on you,”
she muttered to the astronauts under her pencil.
But she smiled—idiotically—while she wrote through her lunch hour, while her characters simmered in growing suspicion about why they had no dessert. She returned to her desk and the crew after her budget meetings (did closed office doors—no: airlock doors—feature too prominently in the story?) and then she holed up in her bedroom with her notebook that evening as Kai and Ashley commented their way through a documentary on the latest Silicon Valley titan to fall under the weight of turtleneck-wearing hubris, too much unicorn investment, and not enough regulation.
“She’s such an interesting case study. Do you think any man would be getting this much negative press? Or would he just fail upward and into a new company?”
“The fraud was pretty egregious. Erin, what do you think?”
“Want to join us?”
Kai raised a bowl of popcorn dusted with nutritional yeast. “We’re watching a film on that FinTech startup founder who’s on trial for fraud and criminal negligence.”
“Uh—sorry, I have to work.”
She didn’t look at her LIGO exports, though, or read through the Kitt Peak National Observatory’s multi-messenger astronomy review of the last batch of data that she’d sent over prior to her quantum gravity assignment. Instead, hunched up against her headboard, she scrawled nonsense onto the page until her pencil gave out—and she realized that she’d been scribbling in the dark. Writing about the chilly conditions of ice cream and space had failed to cool the heat still lancing over her skin, however. She tossed away her pencil, then eased out of her jeans with a grimace at the drag of damp denim down her thighs.
A little better.
Stripping down to a camisole, seeking elusive cool patches on her sheets and pillow, she splayed herself across her mattress and picked up her phone.
8:59 p.m.
Damn.
She’d missed Monday’s call with her family. She tapped into the Monaghan thread to apologize and assuage their worries about her absence.
Erin
Sorry! I got caught up working on the Department of Energy’s contract and lost track of time.
Not quite true, but better than a cross-examination from her brothers.
Dad
Good to hear from you, kiddo. But we kept it short today.
Mom
Adrian had to leave for the airport. You’re not working too hard on your new project and those management responsibilities, sweetheart?
Adrian
When is she not working too hard? (Arrived and boarded. I should touch down in Austin around 4 a.m.)
Wes
Working too hard is a family trait.
A picture of his sandal-tanned feet hanging over a hammock strung between black mangroves on the Ecuadorian coast zipped into the chat. Adrian countered with a photo of his work laptop and a martini in business class. She left them to it, and switched over to her messages with Martina. Four unread texts were waiting for her.
Martina
I know we were both too busy for Pilates and brunch this past weekend (you’re not the only one looking for government data right now—I might’ve found some financial dirt on one of the city council trustees and their investment in the development firm looking to bulldoze my park!)—but: what’s new with you and Bannister? Did you get your date rescheduled?
Then, a few minutes later:
Martina
Wait… are you out with him right now?
(Oh my God. If yes, call me once you’re back!)
Bannister.
She squirmed. Friction from her sheets scratched her skin. Or was it guilt? She hadn’t spilled the truth yet.
Yet, but should she?
Popcorn.
Easy, Monaghan.
Had Martina already suspected… well, not the reality about Bannister, Forster, Ethan, and Erin, but something else?
I wouldn’t have clapped.
Her smugness would be unbearable. (She’d been smug enough when Erin had broken the news about her partnership with Ethan on the federal contract.) It might be even worse than her surprise.
If she was surprised.
Erin
No, I’m home tonight. Working on the quantum gravity project.
She should be. It wasn’t even ten o’clock. She could grab her laptop and remotely double-check her calculations on their experimental laser angles. But… she had a question for her collaborator first. The obvious place to pose it was in SVLAC’s messaging system; email would be too slow, and Ethan wouldn’t thank her for stalling their research by burying an inquiry among the conference speaker requests, paper acceptances, and departmental bureaucracy overflowing his inbox.
What if he muted all work communications after hours, though?
(He didn’t.)
(But what if he did?)
She needed her answer. Needed it now.
There was only one channel where she could be certain of reaching him.
She opened Bannister’s messages.
Erin
I have a question about our hutch setup.
An instant typing bubble appeared beneath her text.
Bannister
Did you mean to ask me here?
Erin
It’s urgent. I had to make sure you saw it. Anyhow, you’re always saying that I need better time management. I’m trying.
Bannister
That’s reasonable. Sorry for the delay. What’s your question?
She snorted.
Erin
It took you—what? A full 10 seconds to respond? You call that a delay? No wonder you think I’m always wasting time, since I’m not optimizing my life in 10-second increments!
Bannister
It’s a quantum state of mind.
Erin
Very funny.
Bannister
Yes. Bunsen thought it was funny to raid my dryer for socks while I was cleaning the lint trap, too.
Erin
You’ve got to hand it to him, that’s classic comedy.
Bannister
I’m not going to hand him anything. He was trying to bury a sock under a dead succulent on my patio. That’s littering. It violates my building’s regulations.
Erin
Wait—you have an in-unit dryer?
Bannister
Is that your urgent question?
She eyed her overflowing laundry hamper, and snorted again.
Erin
In the Bay Area? Yes.
Bannister
Fair.
Bannister
You also had a research question, though.
Erin
Right. I was considering whether we needed to adjust the hutch’s lighting.
Bannister
Why?
Erin
MEC would usually be running a laser to create extreme temperatures and pressures in samples, so it should already be set up for dark-room experiments. But I’m not sure if we confirmed that. Did you talk with the engineers about lighting needs?
Bannister
No. We could check the hutch blueprint for wattage specifications.
Erin
I have it here. Let me look.
She retrieved an annotated hutch layout from her backpack. Returning to the circle of lamplight on her bed, she smoothed the Mylar paper across her sheets, tacked down its borders with her knees, and snapped a picture.
Erin
See?
Bannister
Is this a hard copy of the print you were referencing this morning?
Erin
Yes—before you interrupted me.
An ellipsis appeared in answer, then vanished… only to reappear again after a significant pause.
Bannister
Sorry.
A one-word reply. So what had taken him so long to type it? Curious, she enlarged the image she’d sent, and—God, she hadn’t cropped her legs out of the blueprint picture. Articulated against the grid, her shadow on the laser-printed document made it clear that she’d stripped off her jeans, that she wasn’t wearing much beyond her flimsy camisole and panties.
Fuck.
This was worse than her lingerie photo. But the tingle of heat suddenly dancing up her arms and gathering on her tongue… it wasn’t embarrassment.
Swish.
Bannister
You don’t have bruises from knocking our knees today, though. No damage from the static shock, either?
Erin
If I’d suffered a cardiac arrest, someone in the building probably would’ve noticed and called an ambulance.
Bannister
Only because all of Modern Physics was watching us in your cubicle.
Though what if they hadn’t been surrounded by colleagues? The heat reversed course, slipping lower. Her pulse dropped farther still, down to a hum between her bare legs. What if they’d been alone?
Erin
Would you have resuscitated me yourself if our coworkers hadn’t been there?
Bannister
There’s a defibrillator by the kitchenette.
Erin
Too far away.
Bannister
Then I’d need to restart your heart manually.
Erin
Well, you’re an artist. Get creative.
Before she could doubt herself or even think—no time, heart rate stalled, emergency action required—she pushed aside the blueprint and took another picture: legs extended across her bedspread, ankles crossed, the freckles around her navel peeking above her panties. Her fingertips rested against the lace over her hip. The edge of her thumb dipped beneath the mesh.
Erin
(And yes, I meant to send this to you.)
Then she waited, breathless, blood beating a fierce tattoo in her ears, until—
Swish.
Bannister
Erin, I know we agreed that messaging was fine, as long as we weren’t communicating as Bannister and Forster. But…
His ellipsis lingered.
Erin
Do you want me to stop, Ethan?
Not Bannister.
Swish.
Bannister
No, I… but j-just give me a minute. I’m putting Bunsen out on the patio.
Ethan Meyer’s precision with words was as exacting as his numerical analysis. He didn’t message with a stylistic stammer. Ever. He must’ve switched from typing to audio transcription, which meant that his phone was detecting a break in his voice.
And he’d freed both hands, too.
Swish.
Bannister
(New Photo Message)
Illuminated in the beam from a lamp on a familiar industrial-style desk, he was sprawled across a couch with a pair of running shorts slung low on his hips, and… oh. Her thumb and index finger spread over the image. It expanded under her touch. Closer, closer, to a narrow trail of dark hair snaking down his stomach and under his waistband…
She hurriedly changed from typing to a voice-to-text input, too.
Erin
If… if we’d been alone and I’d collapsed on my desk, what would you have done?
Bannister
I’d need to get your heart rate up.
Erin
How?
She bit her lip while a tantalizing ellipsis appeared under her question. Each dot made a tiny point of imaginary pressure against her skin, and she quivered. The damp lace of her panties clung to her. She slipped another finger under it, to the centered beat of her heart.
Bannister
My first inclination would be to touch my pencil to your skin. Would… would that help?
Erin
M-maybe.
Bannister
I’d bend over you. Ease off your jeans. Slide them down over your hips. T-then I… I’d trace my graphite over your body. I’d map the divots beside your ankles. The curve of your calf.
Muscles tensed along her legs, reacting to the whirl of her imagination.
Bannister
I’d explore the back of your right knee. You have freckles there, don’t you?
Her free hand stroked up her calf to shadow his touch.
Erin
I might… squirm.
Bannister
Good. But there’d be danger in sitting up too quickly. I’d put a hand on your thigh to keep you still.
Erin
I’ll t-try to stay still.
Bannister
If you do, I’ll trace up to your hip. How’s your pulse?
Thundering.
Erin
Getting stronger. I—I think. Don’t stop.
Bannister
I’ll savor every scallop of the lace on your panties. First around your waist. Then… then between your legs. But I don’t want to mark you. Not with my pencil. N-not yet. Stay still.
Erin
I’m trying—oh, G-God—
Licks of heat tightened and heightened along her inner thighs. Her hips bucked against the heel of one hand pressed over the exquisite, agonizing strain.
Bannister
Tell me what happens. Does your pulse stabilize? Or is it too erratic? Do I need to start over again from your ankle with my fingers?
Bannister
Do… do you want me to touch you?
Erin
Y-yes. Please. I n-n-need—
Bannister
What do you need?
She couldn’t hear her words over the hammer of her heart against her ribs. Was she whispering, or shouting? She gripped her tongue in her teeth and sent a third picture: her finger and thumb dipping deeper under her panties, the lace cleaving to a nest of curls visible beneath the mesh, her heels braced on the footboard of her bed, knees raised, stomach taut.
Bannister
God, y-you’re so flushed for me. So—so beautiful.
Swish, and she whimpered.
Bannister
I’d circle around your ankle. D-draw my knuckles up your calf. Still light pressure, but more than the pencil. Feel me.
She couldn’t help herself, and gasped out, “I do.”
Please God, let her roommates have abandoned their documentary for a bar.
Bannister
Over your knee. Up your thigh. H-higher.
Erin
Ahh…
Bannister
I’d cover your hand with mine, slipping under the lace with you. I’d move our fingers together. Touch you together. What pace should I set?
Erin
Please, just—f-faster.
Her palm ground down, circled. Her thumb sank to the knuckle.
Erin
Someone could be here soon, someone could…
Bannister
No one else is here. Just us.
God, his focus and precision and patience were relentless, and it was so so so good—
Bannister
While you’re writhing under my fingers, I’ll move between your legs. Your panties are so wet, aren’t they?
Erin
Please—
Bannister
I want to taste you.
Erin
Y-yes.
Bannister
I kneel down by your desk. I lean close to breathe you in. Then I press the flat of my tongue to you, edging your panties aside, because I don’t want their rough lace, I only want… w-want you—
F-f-f-fuck!
She couldn’t breathe. Incandescent electricity was sizzling through her body, scorching strikes of pleasure building, building—but if she couldn’t answer him in words?
A fourth photo: thighs spread, hips lifted, fingers blurred with movement.
Bannister
(New Audio Message)
“Fuck, I—God, Erin, you’re—I can’t—keep—I’m—”
She was burning, hot enough to ignite carbon fusion, combusting with the shockwaves of an exploding supernova, destruction and creation intertwined. A gasp, a groan, a cant of her hips, and she chased him into blazing oblivion, overwhelming her fingers and her panties in quaking, toe-curling, spine-arching currents of ecstasy, choking out his name.
“Ethan…”
came her strangled whisper, sending in an audio message of her own.
And then, in the sweet, shivering, boneless silence that followed, her vision white with stars: again, “…fuck.”
If she hadn’t before, she definitely needed medical attention now. She’d driven them both insane. She must’ve. Because she grinned through her body’s aftershocks as she tapped back into her phone. She licked her lips while she changed Bannister’s contact name.
Dr. Ethan Meyer