Delivering His Heir

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Delivering His Heir Page 13

by Jesse Jordan


  “Trademark infringement,” Freida says, sipping her huge latte. “NBC still makes a ton of money off of Friends reruns.”

  “Yes but… never mind. Again, another difference between our cultures,” I comment, sipping my own triple espresso. “You know, with this much caffeine we’re sure to be twitching by lunch.”

  “Nah, I never have a problem with caffeine,” Freida says as she takes another sip. “Part of working for Rick. I’ve gotten so used to working fucked up hours that my body clock is permanently set on ‘what the fuck ever.’”

  I laugh, glad to see more of this side of Freida. She can still be very well put together, not quite arrogant but just reserved. With our growing relationship though, I’ve come to realize I like this woman, and count her as a friend. “Excuse me, Freida?”

  “Yes, Su Lin?” she asks. The light changes, and we carefully cross the street. I’ve come to recognize that drivers in New York treat traffic lights a lot like drivers in Beijing. Recommendations only.

  “Would you mind… well, would you mind if I called you my friend?” I ask, slightly nervous. “I mean, I know it’s not required for what our relationship will end up being once I have a child and Rick is… well, you know, but-”

  “But I’d like that very much,” Freida says, smiling. “It’s not easy making friends with the job I have. Most of the other house staff see me as half boss, half harbinger of doom.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Freida smiles sadly. “While Rick doesn’t like firing house staff, it has to happen sometimes. Rick’s not afraid to do it, but usually I end up doing it while Rick’s still willing to give them another chance. Growing up the way he did, Rick’s big on giving second chances to his staff. So sometimes, I’ve smoothed the rough patches for Rick when he’s busy being a genius. It’s… it’ll be nice having a friend.”

  “Especially since you can’t fire me,” I joke, and Freida laughs. “So, fill me in.”

  “Before I do, let me ask you… why?” Freida says. “I mean, it won’t really effect your life if you don’t want it to.”

  “No, but right now it effects Rick’s,” I reply. “I’d like to be the best wife I can for him, and not just… well, you know.”

  Just then, a guy on a skateboard goes rolling by, bumping into Freida’s shoulder. He tosses an apology back over his shoulder as I yell at him, shaking my fist and cursing loudly in Mandarin, but he doesn’t stop. “Get back here you fucker and apologize!”

  “I’m okay, he didn’t even knock me down,” Freida says, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Hint, there’s a rule in New York. Don’t start shit if you don’t want shit.”

  “Yeah well, he hit my friend, and didn’t apologize. I could handle him,” I growl, turning around and seeing that Freida is, in fact, okay. She didn’t even drop her coffee. “All the extra wushu practice means I can kick a little ass.”

  “You have a little ass,” Freida says before stopping, shocked. She blushes, then laughs. “Okay, it’s official. We’re friends. I can’t say shit like that about my boss’ wife.”

  “Only if I get to insult you back, in private,” I return. “And thank you for letting me see this side of you.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” Freida says as we start walking again. “Why are you really doing this? I mean, I know you had some struggles at first, but Rick seems to be doing better, and… well, you seem satisfied.”

  I can feel the heat creeping up my neck, and I nod. “I am… Rick’s a tremendous lover. I was worried, actually. I read during the day I had between accepting Rick’s deal and leaving with him that frequent sex could get… difficult for a woman. That things get… how shall I put it?”

  “A little worn down?” Freida asks, chuckling. “Remember Su Lin, I’m always worn down. Oh, the nerves down there work just fine and I can climax, but I don’t quite get as lubricated as some women. So when I do have time for a lover, I have to always use… assistance.”

  “Me too, from time to time,” I admit. “At least, before I met Rick I did. I mean… okay, Rick knows, but I only had one man before him. And that guy wasn’t very good. But with Rick… I’m never needing assistance.”

  Freida gives me a jealous look for a moment, and I’m reminded that despite her protestations to the opposite, she probably has looked at Rick in a sexual manner from time to time. I don’t feel angry or upset at her though, she knows her place and has never shown any sign of wanting to cross the line she’s drawn in her relationship with Rick. Still, I can understand her jealousy. “How long has it been for you?”

  “Since when?” Freida asks.

  “Since you last had a lover,” I reply, making Freida spit out a little bit of coffee. “What? You can’t be a mystery to me forever.”

  “No, no you’re right,” Freida admits, checking that there’s no coffee on her shirt. “I was just surprised, that’s all. It’s been longer than I’d like to admit, honestly. Between most men seeing me as just a fuck toy as soon as they find out I can’t get pregnant and my duties for Rick and now you, I don’t have a great social life.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say honestly. “I do hope once I am pregnant that you will be able to have a bit more social time.”

  “Dealing with Harvey and his bullshit’s going to be a full time job,” Freida says with a mirthless chuckle. “Trust me, it’ll probably take both of us to deal with his scheming.”

  “Start with Harvey then,” I say. I see a bench, and nearby is a basketball playground filled with young men playing ball. “Here, we can sit and you can get some eye candy while you tell me.”

  We take a seat, watching as the young New York men play basketball. As I watch, quickly getting the point of ‘shirts and skins,’ I find myself studying each of the men as they remove their shirts. While more than a few are impressive, I can’t find a single one that I think is more handsome than Rick. None of them have the same balance of muscularity, flow of body, and facial perfection that leaves me breathless every time Rick looks at me with desire in his eyes.

  I bite my lip, distracted to the point that Freida has to jostle me with her elbow. “Hey… I thought the eye candy was for me.”

  I laugh, finishing off my coffee. “Sorry, I was just watching them and thinking… well, I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I think I have the best looking husband in New York City.”

  “I’d agree with that,” Freida replies with a chuckle. “Anyway, about Harvey and his various connections. Harvey’s wife is cousins with the Pratts, who are a family….”

  I force myself to listen intently, knowing that every piece of information that Freida shares with me could some day be important to my interactions with Rick, and in protecting him and our position within the world.

  I won’t fail, and I won’t fail him again.

  Rick

  I’m so close to the breakthrough that I’ve been searching for, I know I’m just one or two steps away from getting through this bottleneck that’s stopping me.

  But what a bottleneck. I know it seems like magic, harnessing the sun in the manner I’m looking to do. Flexible, inexpensive, and more efficient than anything on the market right now, if I can get this to work…

  I can’t even begin to count the benefits to all of humanity. With cheap, plentiful electricity that can be produced anywhere there’s sun, global warming can be reversed. Electric cars can be made available for everyone… hell, they can refuel themselves with panels on their roofs that charge the battery while the owner’s not driving. Combined with Panther technology, and electric aircraft could become a viable alternative to jets for all but the heaviest lifters and the military.

  No more wars in countries that don’t want to be fucked with, but because of their oil reserves are considered so valuable, they’re ‘liberated’ on a constant basis. Oil can be used for its other uses, going back to being a chemist’s playtoy.

  But I’m missing something. It’s so close, I can feel it dancing right there in th
e shadows of my brain. I’m losing too much in cross-linking, transmission losses are reducing the efficiency more than what’s acceptable.

  “We can’t just make everything out of gold and superconducting fluids,” I mutter to myself as I look at the latest materials analysis. “It’d be fun though. That’s what I need, a superconducting putty….”

  The comment is total foolishness, but it starts the wheels turning in my head, and I sit forward, entering the figures on a new configuration. High conductive putty….

  “Rick?”

  I ignore the voice, my mind spinning with the possibility. It was a minor plaything I’d been screwing around with years ago, a copper alloy that I’d decided wasn’t helpful unless we were to roll out hundreds of meters of it….

  “Rick!”

  I look up, growling. “What!?!?”

  It’s Su Lin, and she takes a step back, surprised at the venom in my voice. I hate being interrupted during moments like this, I can already feel the idea slipping away from me and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it back. Not that Su Lin understands. “I… I started my period again. I thought… I thought you’d want to know.”

  I hiss, anger flaring inside me. My back feels like hell, I’m stiff as a board, and I can feel the clock inside me ticking away. “Great. Just fucking perfect. Anything else?”

  “N… no,” Su Lin says, shaken. Her face falls, and she looks down. “Rick, I know that this is important to you, but I’m trying the best I can.”

  “Well maybe you need to try better!” I grunt, heaving myself up to my feet. A sharp pain flares up my spine, and I know I’m going to have to do something about this before I can’t even focus my eyes. “Maybe a little less caffeine and a little better nutrition! Or maybe you’re just not as fertile as you said you were?”

  I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m just talking through my frustration and my pain, but Su Lin can’t tell that. Instead of quailing though, she turns her eyes up, glaring at me. “Maybe the problem isn’t with me! Maybe it’s with you! Maybe you’re firing blanks there, Mr. Orgasm Machine! Maybe all that baby batter you’re filling me with for half the month is flat and needs a little fucking leavening, did you ever think of that?”

  “I-”

  Su Lin isn’t giving me a chance to reply, though. Tears coursing down her face, she jabs a finger in my chest. “Fuck you!”

  She turns on her heel and storms out of my lab, slamming the door behind her. I want to go after her, but just lifting my foot up sends a white hot bolt of pain up my spine and I collapse backwards. If my chair wasn’t there to catch me I’d probably collapse to the floor.

  The pain’s so great I have to close my eyes, all thoughts of my idea washed away in sheets of agony. I don’t even know how long has passed, but through the pain I hear the door to my lab open again and someone approach. “Su Lin, I’m sorry. I just-”

  “She’s upstairs in the gym, yelling in Chinese and beating the hell out of your punching bag with her staff,” Freida says. I’ve noticed it over the past six weeks, as the two women have gotten close enough to call each other friend. Whenever I do something that upsets Su Lin, Freida will let me know. She also will let me know, usually through her tone of voice, how she feels about it too. And right now, she’s sounding like she wishes Su Lin was down here beating my ass.

  “Sorry,” I hiss, trying to sit up and failing. “I… I fucked that one up, didn’t I?”

  “You did,” Freida says, coming around. I force my eyes to open, a throbbing needle of light stabbing me in the eyeballs as I do. “What’s the problem?”

  “Stiffness… back… feels like I might have a migraine coming on,” I admit. “I… I was brainstorming, I had the idea on the tip of my tongue and she came in to tell me she’d started her period. I looked up and that triggered everything. It was like I just got a cattle prod shoved up my ass.”

  “Don’t tell Su Lin that, the way she looks right now she just might be willing to do it,” Freida says, coming over next to me. She slings my arm over her shoulder and heaves me to my feet, holding me steady as the world swims in front of my eyes. “What do you want to do?”

  “First… I need to apologize to Su Lin,” I rasp, clutching the edge of my lab bench and counting to fifty to let the pain fade away. “Next, I need to go to the hot tub, that’s helped in the past.”

  “Okay,” Freida says. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” I say, clearing my throat and taking a slow, tentative step. It hurts, but not as badly. “Make an appointment to see the doc. Su Lin asked if I’m shooting blanks, and maybe she’s right. Then… talk with the staff, I want this lab modified. Raise the tables and desks, get some big touchscreen monitors for the walls. Geek this place out so that I don’t have to sit down to do my work any more.”

  Freida, who I’ve always suspected is a bit of a tech geek, grins. “I’ve got a few ideas.”

  “Rick, I just got the results of your blood test back,” Dr. Gordon says as I pull my shirt back on. I don’t feel bad right now, in fact I’m feeling pretty good overall. “It looks like the pain’s just a progression of your symptoms. You’ve got systemic joint inflammation that’ll tend to get worse at night.”

  “Systemic joint inflammation?” I ask, buttoning my shirt. “So I’ve got arthritis?”

  “Well, my grandmother would have said you’ve got a touch of the rheumatiz, as she put it. Thankfully, most people with Trikala Syndrome don’t progress much past this point in terms of arthritic severity. Still, I’d say cleaning up your diet, going on an anti-inflammatory food plan can’t hurt things. Lots of fatty fish, stay away from the processed grains… I’ll give you a printout on it before you leave.”

  “I’ll have my chef adjust immediately,” I promise. I blink, then laugh softly. “God, that came off as a rich, arrogant prick, didn’t it?”

  “Not really,” Gordon says with a smirk. “Last time I told someone about the diet, their comment was their wife can’t cook salmon for shit, so he guessed he was just going to have to take the drugs. Now that’s an arrogant prick.”

  I nod, sighing. “Yeah, about that. I’ve got a little crow still to eat in that regard. What about my other question, doc?”

  “Your fertility?” Gordon asks. “Well, I’m not normally a doctor who does sperm counts, but thankfully this hospital has someone who handles just about everything. They’ll have the results in about twenty minutes, but if I can say… I don’t think your sperm count has anything to do with it.”

  “Trikala?” I ask, and Gordon shakes his head. “What, then?”

  “Stress,” Gordon replies. “While I was waiting on your blood results I talked with a friend who’s an OB/GYN, fertility specialist. According to her, most people put too much stress on themselves when they’re trying to have a baby, and that can screw with the internal mechanisms. According to her, she doesn’t even consider doing any sort of fertility treatments until a couple’s been trying for over six months. Her comment was it’s probably a good thing that people aren’t more fertile than they are, when you consider the hundreds or even thousands of times someone will have sex during their reproductive primes, only to turn out 2-3 children on average.”

  “Yeah well, I don’t exactly have six months to sit around,” I grumble, tucking in my shirt. “So what can I do?”

  “De-stress,” Gordon says. “Rick, I’m not sure if I agree with what you’re doing on a moral level, but I’m sure you’ve got your reasons. The least of which is the common human desire to procreate before you die. But if you and your wife have been operating under some sort of timeline… stop. Rick, what are you working on right now?”

  “I’ve got some corporate issues I’m dealing with, and there’s this energy idea I’ve got buzzing around in my head, and trying to have a baby….”

  “Stop,” Gordon repeats. “First off Rick, as a husband I’d say you’re off simply because your wife isn’t in your top three. Corporate, you can delegate that. I’ve met your assista
nt, she’s sharp as a samurai sword. Your invention… Rick, your inventions are going to live forever. But which is more important, this one invention you’re working on now or having a child? And the only way you’re going to have a child is by being with your wife and both of you chilling out.”

  I nod my head, taking in his advice. He’s right, more than he knows. My inventions might live forever, but they could also be responsible for the deaths of millions in the hands of a man like Harvey Stone. I don’t even have a ‘nuclear option’ of letting everything go to the public domain, because it would just trigger another arms race as governments on all sides would see the same potential Harvey’s seen and try to weaponize what I’ve done. I don’t have enough faith in the people who run the world to trust someone won’t get pissy at two in the morning and push a button that’ll kill half a continent. Better to let the assholes just rant on Twitter instead.

  “Okay doc,” I finally say. “And if there’s a problem still?”

  “If nothing sparks in another two months, we can look at fertility treatments or insemination,” Dr. Gordon says. There’s a knock on the door, and one of his assistants brings him a paper. Gordon looks at the numbers, smiling. “Well, nothing wrong there. In fact, your sperm count is a little higher than average. So do what I said, just relax, let it happen, and give me a call if you have any more symptoms.”

  “And if I get too stiff to… uh, do the deed?” I ask, and Gordon laughs. “What?”

  “Rick, most men don’t have a problem with being too stiff, but exactly the opposite. As for if your back and hips are painful… well, that’s not quite my field of expertise, but I have heard some women don’t mind getting on top. Let Su Lin do the work.”

  “How was your trip to the doctor?” Su Lin asks when I find her in the kitchen, billows of smoke erupting from a wok as she seems to be taking a rag on a stick and rubbing at it furiously. It reeks, and I can see the kitchen staff wincing but not saying anything.

 

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