by Orton, D. L.
She grabs onto my shoulders and attempts to push me over.
I raise an eyebrow. “Got a cake in the oven?”
“No, but I wish you did.”
“I’ll make you one tomorrow, hun.” I lift her wrists and place them above her head. “Assuming that I survive the night.” I hold down her hands and kiss her arm and shoulder. She struggles against me—and then suppresses a cough. I rest my forehead on her collarbone and exhale slowly. “Or we could play Scrabble.” I release her wrists. “That way I won’t have to worry about hurting you.”
“You are not hurting me, Diego.” Her voice is defiant.
“I already told you, Isabel, the moment you start coughing, we’re done. So either you let me lead, or we wait for another night.”
She gives an annoyed huff.
“Take it or leave it, Dr. Sanborn. The game board is in the top drawer.”
Anger flashes across her face. “Fuck you.”
“Yeah, eventually.” I stifle a grin, and she rolls her eyes. “I’ll take that as a yes.” I go back to kissing her shoulder. “And profanity isn’t allowed in Scrabble, as I’m sure you know.” I move my lips up her neck, taking my time. “So you’ll have to try a bit harder if you intend to win.”
She lets out a sigh of pleasure.
“Which I’m sure you do.” I slide my mouth up to her ear and exhale gently—and then wince when she grabs my hair, her body tense with anticipation. I smile, my lips still touching her. “Nine letters. X, Q, ends in TE.” I kiss her ear, and she wraps her body around me, her fingernails pressing into my back and her breathing audible.
I move my lips across her cheek, “Mmm, I’ve missed you,” and then lift up her chin and kiss the hollow of her neck. “Exquisite. As in ‘You are exquisite.’”
A moan forms deep in her throat, and then she takes my chin and pulls my mouth up to hers until our eyes meet. “Where have you been all my life?”
“Right here waiting for you to let me lead.” I kiss her, soft and wet, the exhilaration of being with her filling me with heat and light. When she breaks the kiss, I move my mouth down her body and slip my hand around her breast, enjoying the feel of it resting in my cupped palm. She watches me, her lips parted.
I move my mouth across her silky skin, and she lifts her torso, pressing her breast up to my lips.
“Two Vs, one L, ends in T,” I say and glide my tongue around her erect nipple and then take it into my mouth.
Her breath catches in her throat. “Oh god, that feels good.” She rubs her hip against my hardness and then reaches down and wraps her fingers around me. “Velvet—over steel.”
The double pleasure is too intense, and I pull her hand away, trying to stay in control.
But the moment I let go of her wrist, she slides it back down. I maneuver my hips to block her and then take my mouth away from her breast. “Patience, hun.”
“Yeah, well, if I had any patients, I would have been a doctor, remember?” She presses her nipple up to my lips, gazing down at me, her mouth open, and then moves her tongue slowly across her top lip at the same time she slides her fingertip around the head of my cock.
“Christ.”
“Profanity! You lose your turn.” Her voice is gleeful.
“You cheated.”
She stares at me, her eyes dark and serious. “No matter what happens, no matter how bad it gets, don’t walk away from me, Diego. Okay?”
I scoot up and kiss her on the nose. “Okay. I promise.” I slide over next to her and glide my fingertips across her alabaster skin. “God, I love to touch you. I can’t believe you’re actually here with me.”
“And that I’m letting you call the shots.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I enjoy the wrestling as much as you do, Iz. But not tonight. Not until you’re better.” I move my hand down between her thighs and stroke her with my fingertips.
She presses her hips against my hand, trying to get my fingers inside.
“You’re so wet. Shit, that makes me hard.” I move back over her. “Three letters, alternate spelling, starts with C.” I slide my mouth leisurely down between her thighs.
“Oh no you don’t!” She tugs on my shoulder, but I ignore her. She smacks me on the arm. “Damn it, you never listen to me.”
“Uh huh.” I place my mouth against her and move my tongue in a wide figure eight, slowly decreasing the arc until she grabs my hair and makes me stop.
I kiss her very gently and then lift my mouth enough to speak. “Is that too intense?”
She takes a shaky breath. “No. Yes! Please stop.”
“Let me make you come.”
“Not tonight. Not like that.”
I take a deep breath, hold it for a moment, and then let it out. “When I was twenty-five, I didn’t know what to do with you when you got like this.” I move back up next to her. “But even then, I couldn’t understand why the sex never seemed to satisfy you—and yet you refused to let me even try to make you come.”
Her eyes get big.
I finger a lock of her hair. “Just so we’re clear, I don’t plan to make that mistake again.” I give the curly strand a gentle tug. “So I’m not coming until you do. Period. End of conversation.”
She turns away.
“Iz? Talk to me. Tell me what you want, what you like.”
“It’s not something I’m comfortable discussing.”
I take her chin and wait until she looks at me. “You mean you don’t want to come? Or you don’t like oral sex?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Period. End of conversation, Captain America.”
“So teach me how to make you come with my hand.”
Tears form in her eyes, and then she glances away again. “I can’t.”
“Hey. No worries.” I pull her against my chest and kiss her hair. “We’ll figure it out together, okay?”
She buries her face in my neck. “Don’t you ever leave me, Diego Nadales. I would rather die than lose you again.”
I put my arms around her and roll over onto my back, taking her with me. “There will be no need.”
She lifts her head and looks at me, her eyes glossy, and then she runs her hand down the side of my face, leaving one fingertip pressed against my lips.
I take it into my mouth, wanting more of her—all of her.
“Make love to me, Diego. Like you’ve been dreaming about it your whole life and are afraid you might never get another chance.”
And I do.
Chapter 8
Matt: It’s Classified, Doctor
I walk through massive blast doors into the pre-dawn chill. The air smells of burnt plastic, and the summit of the snow-capped peak behind us is lost in a sooty haze. To the east, giant plumes of black smoke obscure the city spread out below us.
How did all those fires get started?
“Let’s go, doctor.” Agent Dick’s voice breaks my frozen trance.
I’m standing on a giant ledge hacked out of the mountainside, shivering in my thin sweatshirt. “Yeah, I’m coming.” I hurry across the expanse of decaying concrete, following the agents toward a gray windowless van.
As the sun rises above the eastern plains, we watch eight marines unload an extremely heavy object in a canvas bag out of the van. They wrestle the monster into a steel sling suspended from a professional grade engine hoist. The rig makes a moan of protest as it takes the load, but holds. When the men finish, they form a line, sweat forming dark shapes on their sandy T-shirts.
A tall, fit, thirty-something officer gives his men a curt nod. “At ease.” The guy’s dark skin is covered in tattoos, colorful shapes and lines snaking around his arms and neck: The Illustrated Man.
Agent Dick steps up to the van and adjusts his tie. “I’ll take it from here, sergeant.”
“With all due resp
ect, Mr. Johnson, that duck weighs over 500 kilos, and it’s going to steer like a tank.”
Dick lowers his voice and glowers at the man in sandy fatigues. “I’m aware of that, sergeant. We’ll handle it from here.”
The marine officer pulls a folded piece of paper out of his shirt pocket, his face unreadable, and offers it to Agent Dick. With obvious disdain, the government man unfolds the paper, glances at it, and hands it back. “Okay, you come with us, but not the soldier boys.”
A muscle in the marine’s neck twitches.
Even I know that marines hate to be called soldiers. How can a guy who works for the government not know that?
Dick unbuttons his suit jacket and grabs onto the hoist, his tie flapping over his shoulder. “Let’s get this inside quickly, Smith.”
The tattooed officer raises an eyebrow. “They’re marines, sir.”
“What did you say?” Dick asks, his eyes narrowed into a frown.
The Illustrated Man’s jaw tightens. “They’re marines, Mr. Johnson, not soldiers.”
“Yeah, whatever. They’re done.” Dick scans the sky, obviously expecting a battalion of enemy drones to attack, and then returns his attention to the hoist. He gives it a forceful shove.
Nothing happens.
This guy is a laugh a minute.
With practiced indifference, the marine officer turns back to his row of men. “Dismissed.”
They salute and disappear into the maw of the gouged mountain.
The tattooed man turns back to the rig, his gaze coming to rest on the same lever as mine. He looks over at me, lifting his chin ever so slightly. I nod once. He leans against the van, his arms crossed and a slight smile on his lips.
I like him already.
Dick scowls at Junior, and the younger man jumps into action. He unbuttons his suit coat and lays his shoulder against the rig, adding his weight to the effort. The winch squeaks but refuses to budge, and I try hard not to laugh.
The marine catches my eye and nods again. I clear my throat. “Excuse me, gentlemen. May I be of assistance?” I walk over and release the hand brake on the hoist. As I’d guessed earlier, it’s an expensive hydraulic rig and nearly perfectly balanced: one wheel twists sideways a centimeter and stops. I lower the suspension arm and let the cradle slide down almost to the ground.
Dick makes a move to stop me, but the marine sergeant leans over and grabs his arm. “Lowers the center of mass, Mr. Johnson, making it easier to steer.”
Dick’s eyebrows become lost in his thinning hair, but he recovers quickly. He leans his shoulder into the hoist, and with Junior’s help, they start the duck rolling toward the mountain.
We watch, our hands shading our eyes from the rising sun, and then the marine officer turns and reaches out to me. “You must be the materials expert they hauled in this morning. I’m Master Sergeant Colton Richter. People on the project call me Picasso.”
I shake his hand. “Professor Matt Hudson—friends call me anything but doctor. Nice to meet you.” His grip is solid, but not pretentious.
“My pleasure, Professor Hudson. Welcome to the circus.” He nods toward the government agents. “You just met the clowns.”
I laugh.
We go back to watching the two suits wrestle 500 kilos of metal—the equivalent of four large refrigerators—across the uneven expanse of cracked and crumbling concrete.
Picasso shakes his head and walks over to shut the double doors on the van. He raps his knuckles against the side twice, and a uniformed arm waves from the driver’s window. The vehicle makes a U-turn, passes through huge gates, and disappears down a narrow road carved into the mountainside.
“Where’d you work on car engines?” Picasso asks. He stands next to me, his hands in his pockets, both of us watching the rig weave and sway as Agent Dick yells inane commands at Junior.
“Plane engines, actually. I grew up outside London. Spent my free time working on Cessnas so I could afford to fly them. Never met an engine I didn’t learn to love. Wish I could say the same about my interpersonal relationships.”
He chuckles.
“How about you?” I ask.
“Been tinkering with engines since I first discovered that my father was afraid to get his hands dirty.”
I glance at his ink-covered forearms and then up to his face. He has a strong force of personality and is well-built and smart, not the type I’d expect to be covered in tattoos. “Why all the ink, if you don’t mind me asking?”
He takes his hands out of his pockets and turns them over in the waxing daylight. “Started adding them after my mother died, and my father told me he couldn’t stand to look at me anymore. I guess I couldn’t stand to look at me anymore, either.”
“That must have been rough.”
“I’ve seen more fucked-up shit than I care to remember,” he says, “but I never saw anyone more terrified than my father when I told him I was going to quit law school and join the marines. Maybe that’s why I did it.”
I chuckle and turn back to the clowns, wondering if there’s any chance the guy is gay.
Dick and Junior have stopped moving and are attempting to lift the engine hoist over some obstacle. We can hear Dick’s angry shouts all the way across the expanse of concrete.
“Looks like our government boys have run into a bit of a snafu,” I say.
Picasso rests his hand on my shoulder blade. “Come on, let’s go help those pikers before they kill someone.”
∞
For the last two hours, white-coated technicians have been popping in and out of this bomb-proofed cave, running a parade of tests on the artifact, while I stand by and take notes. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the damn thing has gallstones.
Now that I’m finally alone with it for a moment, I ignore the clamor of angry voices out in the hallway and run my fingertips across the cold metal enigma. The surface is perfectly smooth except for five raised symbols:
e = mc2
The silver-gray, super-heavy tungsten alloy—ceramic, actually—doesn’t have a scratch, nick, or dent anywhere on it. I rap my knuckles against it and listen to the sound, testing it like a ripe watermelon. I have a hunch that the center is hollow.
Agent Dick thinks it’s a bomb, but I seriously doubt that someone would go to all the trouble to forge a perfect sphere, carefully sintered with Einstein’s equation, and use it to kill people—ignorant government goons excepted. Still, I’m a bit perplexed about why someone would launch it at super-sonic speeds into a landmark hotel, setting the better part of downtown Denver on fire.
The door bursts open and Agent Dick scurries in, his face contorted in anger, Junior on his heels.
He glances at the sphere and then pins me with a glare. “What is that thing? You’ve had two hours, and I want answers. The Pentagon doesn’t want to start a panic, but you can imagine how much shit will hit the fan if that thing turns out to be a nuke.”
I rub my eyes. “It’s not a bomb—or any other kind of weapon, for that matter.”
I bloody-well hope I’m right.
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know yet,” I say, “but I think it’s hollow.”
He recoils. “Hollow? What the hell, Hudson? That thing weighs more than my car.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll know when the density numbers come back. My best guess is there’s a small cavity in the center filled with inert gas.”
Junior addresses me, his forehead wrinkled. “Can’t we just x-ray it to see what’s inside?”
“Unfortunately, no. It’s tungsten carbide, nearly as hard as diamond and impervious to just about everything, including x-rays.”
The kid glances down at his feet.
“But it’s a good question,” I add.
Dick glances at his watch. “How did it end up inside the Brown
Palace Hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who made it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why is that damn equation on the outside?”
“I don’t know that either.”
He turns and slams his hands down on the desk. “What do you know, doctor?”
I try to keep my voice level. “A private company or a large university probably made it: people with money and access to special tools. It’s not something you could whip up in the basement.”
“Can you get it open?”
“Probably,” I say. “Tungsten is strong, but brittle. Like an eggshell, the sphere could withstand extraordinary external pressure. But, if we hit it hard in one spot, it should fracture.”
Dick looks over at Junior. “Do it.”
I hold up my hands. “Whoa there, cowboys. Once you break it, there won’t be any way to put it back together. Any information contained in the structure will be lost.”
“Yeah, I’m feeling real sorry for Humpty Dumpty.” Agent Dick turns to leave. “You can start gluing the pieces back together tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow? What about my job—and my life? I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours.”
“Someone has been assigned to take over your responsibilities at the university, doctor. You are now on permanent loan until such time as the Pentagon says you are no longer needed on this project.”
It’s not as if teaching undergraduate physics is a particularly rewarding career choice, but still, it’s my life. “Couldn’t someone have asked me first?”
He shrugs and leaves the room, Junior trailing like a duckling.
I turn to a new page in my notebook and write:
Why would someone take the time to put Einstein’s equation on a tungsten sphere and then blow up a hotel with it?
I stare at the page, unable to come up with anything that makes the least bit of sense.
It was an accident? A warning? They got bad room service?
The equation must be important: It’s how I knew the thing wasn’t a bomb. Any educated person would recognize those five symbols, no matter where they grew up.
