by Mia Newberry
Jada had finished kissing him when she turned around to see four heads vanish from the window. She smiled to herself and waved at the SUV as he drove away. She walked into the studio to face a committee of concerned dancers, all of who wanted to know the details. The classes weren’t supposed to begin for another half hour, but the instructors and studio owner where already there for a weekly meeting.
“So who was behind the wheel?” was the least intrusive question she had. Everyone wanted to know who he was and was he coming back to pick her up that evening. She told them the name of her new boyfriend and a few of them had heard about David on the news. Congratulations went out all around and a few of them wanted to know if David had any friends who were in need of female companionship. She told them yes he would be back to pick her up and she would check on his friends’ status.
David had a little bit better luck, casually mentioning he was seeing a woman to his work colleges. They all wanted to know and he found a picture of her from the studio on line. The sound of high-fives drowned out everything else and they wanted to know if any of the other dance instructors were interested in men who programmed.
“Seeing as how we have a company that matches people up,” David told them, “don’t you see a disconnect between me trying to fix you guys up with her friends?”
This produced a small amount of grumbling and David told them they needed to find a way to incorporate dissimilar career groups into their dating database.
“I’ve heard for years,” he went on to say, “that ballerinas retire at thirty due to feet problems and marry computer executives. We need to find a way to mediate that process.” This produced some agreements at the meeting and brought in more suggestions on how to increase the revenue stream.
David soon became a regular fixture where Jada taught and could be seen sitting out in the lobby where the parents of the young girls who were students stayed. He would spend her dance time on his tablet computer or looking at his cell phone when not staring at her in wonder as she taught the young girls the basic positions. If he had an important phone call, he would take it outside or in his SUV. When it was time for her to leave, David would greet her at the locker room door, kiss her, and take her backpack for her. The other instructors would gather to watch them leave and sigh.
David waited a few weeks before bring Jada by his company. They were still in the process of moving everything into the building the first night he had taken her to dinner. He brought her by at lunch time when she was between classes and introduced her to the people in the room where he worked. He showed her his office and took her around, explaining the importance and function of every office in the building. Jada asked the employees questions regarding what they did, which surprised them since most people outside of their industry didn’t have a clue as to what they did. Everyone told her how glad they were to meet her and how much David had talked about her.
David kept her around later that day, because he told her he wanted to talk to her in his office after everyone had gone home and they could have some quiet time. When the last employee left for the day, he closed the shades and locked the door to his office. Then he sat her down on the couch and made love to Jada for next hour. She was a little shocked at first, as the idea of separate work and play was in her mind, but David was ready, having had a set of sheets and pillows delivered earlier in the day by a courier.
“I think that was the longest time I’ve ever spent bent over a couch for any reason,” she told him later, while they were curled up on the couch with a sheet over them.
“I think that was the longest time I’ve ever made love in a standing position,” he told her. “Did you enjoy it?”
“Baby,” she told him. “I’ve enjoyed everything we’ve done together. Now let’s do it some more.”
They didn’t leave the building for another two hours. Employees would soon learn not to knock on the door if David’s girlfriend had come by for a visit. He found that the shades could be lowered quickly by an automatic system and a fold-out couch was a vast improvement over the first one he’d purchased. Thankfully, he’d included an executive washroom and shower into the design of the office which only he could access. David’s office was referred to by the employees as the “love shack” when he was out of hearing range.
A month later, Jada moved into David’ condominium. He dutifully notified his association and told them they were “pre-engaged” so it wouldn’t be an issue. Some of the older residents grumbled, but lightened up when they saw Jada stroll by in her leggings. She was a preacher’s daughter after all and could charm anyone in the collection of buildings which composed his development. David didn’t have much trouble having her live there and he turned one room into a practice area for her and made sure she had plenty of room for her text books.
They became quite a fixture in the area. The light computer expert in his SUV with his striking deep dark ebony girlfriend. Jada knew how to dress to look good and was still on a college student’s budget, but she helped David with his wardrobe. The people at his company soon began to ask him where he got his clothes. He would tell them he didn’t have a clue, his girlfriend found them for him.
All of this had an effect on their families as well. Jada received a call one night from one of her brothers who wanted to know who the “white dude was she was shaking up with” was. He seemed to think she was somebody’s mistress until she had him bring up David’s profile on the internet. She gave him a few minutes to read it and then waited for the apology. Not only did she get an apology, but her brother wanted to know when the wedding was going to take place and to be sure to name one of the kids after their parents. David had more trouble with his parents who seemed to be more taken back by the fact he was “living in sin” with a woman than the race of who he was keeping company with. He assured them this was a temporary measure and he had every intention of making Jada his wife. His mother offered to send a minister over right away, but he told them he would take care of it in due time.
David became a regular feature at her college, which did not go unnoticed by the staff. Knowing a wealthy computer executive was seeing one of their graduate students provoked intense debate in the physics department. Half wanted to approach him for a grant, the other half wanted to name a building for him if they got one. David would tell her professors he didn’t want her to receive any special treatment and they assured him she was one of their brightest students.
Two months later, they were in the Jacuzzi again relaxing. Jada had just finished another round of exams and he’d completed some more financing for an addition to the company. They had the TV off and were just spending time alone. It was something David was finding too infrequent. Some days he just wanted to stay home and make love to her, but their schedules were becoming increasing erratic. He’d managed to fly with her for a weekend in Paris, which made up for a lot of neglect, but they were still having trouble being together as often as they wanted to.
That evening, David was braiding her hair in the Jacuzzi, something he loved doing. She had taught him how to do it right, even letting him sit in on a session at a hair salon so he would know how. It was part of their love-making some evenings. He would have her sit in the tub just below him and she would put her head down as he would make tight rows in her hair with his nimble fingers. David would kiss each row when finished and she would kiss him on the lips in response. It would take him an hour to do it right. She could feel his erection on her back all the while he was doing the braiding. When finished, she would float up to his level, lay back on the side of the Jacuzzi and place her thin, strong dancer’ legs on his shoulders. He would kiss her between the legs until she couldn’t take it any longer.
David had learned where her most sensitive spots were and, as he liked to put it, enjoyed “teasing the cum out of you.” Jada would nearly pass out from what she called his “golden tongue”. When finished, it would be his turn and he’d exchange places with her as she took him in her mout
h, slowly stimulating him while he felt the tight rows on her head till he begged her to release him. She would continue sucking him until just at the point of his climax; she would stop and tell him to ask for it. He would beg in increasingly flowery terms and she would finish him off, enjoying the way he spurted down her throat. They would wipe their faces off with towels and spend another hour cuddling, sharing the “I love you” talk.
That night, after they had finished making love again, Jada put her head on David’s chest and looked up at him. He still couldn’t believe he was sleeping with the most beautiful woman he’d ever known. And she knew about so many things! He had to ask Jada some more about this new form of power generation.
“So,” he said kissing her on the lips, “you think it’s possible to duplicate the sun’s way of making heat on earth?”
“It’s theoretically possible,” she told him, rubbing his chest. “People have been trying to get it to work for years. Look at the hydrogen bomb; it’s the same way one of those functions. But no one has been able to get the reaction to a controlled temperature where it will sustain itself. The tokamak system has always been thought to be the best one; just nobody has been able to create a magnetic bottle which will hold it.”
“What about battery technology? Isn’t that improving all the time?”
“Yes it is,” she told him, the moonlight reflecting off her naked skin. “But it all involves materials which are going to become increasingly hard to get in the future. Where do you get the rare earths needed to make the batteries work? There’s plenty of lithium in the sea, but a pure lithium battery is dangerous which is why you have to complex it with other metals.”
They dozed off talking energy and power transmission.
David wanted to make the engagement ring special. He had planned to buy both the wedding and engagement ring as a set. He sought out a jewelry designer and picked out the rings just to remind him of the first time they had met. He was sure Jada would like it. A few months into the relationship he had seen her looking at rings on the internet. David knew why, but didn’t want to tell he had that part covered.
He wanted to make the presentation very special and planned to take her back to the original restaurant where they had their first date. He would book a room just for the two of them and present the ring just as the waitress brought out the appetizers. At least this was his plan. But, “best laid plans” and all that. Sometimes plans don’t work out so well, but it is not always the result of poor planning.
They were relaxing in front of the TV a few weeks after David had first started planning on how he would present the engagement ring when Jada showed him something on her computer screen. She had been doing some school work on it and found a very interesting article for David to look at.
“What’s this?” he asked her.
“It’s an article about a Tokamak generator,” she told him.
David scrutinized the article and tried to read it. His was the field of computer language not high energy physics. Jada could see his confusion as he tried to make sense of the article. He finally gave up and handed the laptop computer back to her.
“Why is this so important?” he said to her. “I see it’s important to you, but it might as well be Greek as far as I’m concerned.”
“It’s one of the best options for producing clean power: nuclear fusion,” she told him. “It’s something that has been on the drawing boards for years. But no one has found a way to make it profitable. There was a man who was involved with the Department of Energy for years who pushed the idea, but it never went anyplace. If someone was smart enough and had enough resources to put behind it, it just might take off. And if that happened, you would go down in history as the man who made energy clean and plentiful.”
“But I don’t understand,” David said to her, “I thought nuclear power had been around a long time and there are all kinds of problems with it.”
“Nuclear fission power has been around a long time,” Jada explained to him, “Not nuclear fusion. There’s a difference. Nuclear fission creates heat the same way a nuclear bomb does, nuclear fusion creates the heat like the sun creates it.”
She went on to describe to him how nuclear fission reactors create their energy by the reaction of uranium or plutonium to generate heat, which can leave a lot of radioactive material. A fusion reaction, on the other hand, works much in same matter where hydrogen fuses in helium at super high temperatures and once the reaction reaches a high enough temperature, it sustains itself. The problem in harnessing fusion reactions is keeping it going; it had almost been impossible to control the reaction in a laboratory setting to get high enough temperatures to make a useable reactor. There had been countless attempts and the design based off the Russian idea, the Tokamak generator had the best possibilities.
“I think it’s something you should look into,” she told him. “Aren’t you looking for new places to invest your company’s money?”
“I am,” he said, “but I would have to know more about this project. I can’t blow the corporation’s money without having some reason. The last thing I need is to have the investors bail on me. Is there someone we can talk to about it?”
Jada told him she would schedule an appointment with one of her professors at the college to talk to him. She’d have him read the article and see what his impression was.
The article talked about a project to get a fully functional thermonuclear reactor up and running in a laboratory in the Florida Keys. The man behind the idea was a former scientist employed by the government who had attracted a group of investors to get his pilot plant in operation. He’d gone so far as to get some seed money from a man who published scandal magazines in the supermarket. Now he was concerned he was running out of funds to keep the project running.
“It’s just that I’ve heard this so many times before,” David told her. “Somebody has a great idea to create perpetual energy or a hyperspace drive. And they always seem to be able to prove it if they have ten billion dollars in cash to build their massive spaceship in the desert. When you look at the plans they show you, it always violates some fundamental law of thermodynamics.”
Jada put her arms around him and looked into his eyes. “Don’t do this for me,” she said. “Do it because you think it’s a good idea and a good investment. I’ll have my professor explain it to you if he thinks the guy has a sound idea. If not, I won’t bring it up again.”
David went ahead and made his engagement ring plans. He contacted the jewelry designer and told him to go ahead with the concept they had jointly come up with. He felt it would symbolize their union: an intricate pattern of black and white diamonds on a gold ring. The engagement ring would be a solid diamond of a very high quality worked into a plain band. The jeweler had him look at it as it was close to completion. He even found a way to get Jada’s ring size without her knowing about it by “borrowing” one of her fashion rings and getting it “appraised”.
He went ahead and booked the room in the original restaurant to take her on the six month anniversary of their original date. Jada told him she still had the dress from that evening and would wear it for him. David found a way to hide the ring box inside his jacket.
But when the evening came, they turned on the news report to discover the restaurant had burned down from an electrical fire. David was disappointed as he had wanted this to be the place where he popped the question. Jada told him it was fine they could find another place to go that evening. They ended up finding a spot at a small French restaurant near her college campus.
They arrived earlier than planned with the hostess telling them they could have the table ready in a few minutes. All they had to do was wait in the lobby until a place was cleared for them. David had requested a secluded spot to present the ring to her, so they were forced to wait longer than he would have liked.
But while they were waiting, one of her professors came by and sat down with his wife across from them. Jada introduced him as Dr. Sh
een, one of the senior professors in the department of physics and she had taken several of his courses. He was also the professor she had wanted David to talk with about the thermonuclear power article. They both had some time to wait so David asked him what he thought about the article.
“I think the guy’s on to the right idea,” he told them, “but he’ll never get it off the ground unless he has more money than he’s playing with right now.”
“Always seems to be the trouble,” David responded. “These big dreamers just don’t have enough funds to get their project into operation. Look what happened to Tesla with that tower of his…”
“The power transmission tower was a good idea,” Jada cut into the conversation. “Tesla just couldn’t get enough money in the early twentieth century to finish it.”
Her professor went on to say the project in the Florida Keys might have something going for it, but the money needed to make it happen would be astronomical before the first watt was even generated. It was the same thing that always stopped nuclear fusion reactors from being practical. David told him he would look into it further before the hostess came and took the professor and his wife away.
The same hostess eventually found the secure, isolated table David had asked for. They sat down and ordered their dinner, since the appetizers had already been brought out in advance. The food was good, although David had little knowledge of French cuisine; Jada did and helped him with the order. David looked at her and was stunned at how beautiful she looked. It was merely six months since had asked her out the first time and now he was all ready to ask her to marry him. They had joked around about marriage for months, but it had only been in fun. He didn’t think she actually felt he was serious, but David wanted nothing more than to spend his life with her.
