Almost midnight in the genetics lab and it's just the two of you -- everyone else long gone, the overheads off, the whole floor down to the bench lamp and the hum of the incubators. You're a research student here: nobody at the parties knows your name, but in this room you're the best there is. Nicole is the exception to your whole invisible life -- your lab partner, and somehow a real friend.
She's also a Delta Psi Omicron, the elite campus sorority, the kind of woman who was never going to look twice at the guy who resets the centrifuge. She's the exception to the stereotype, the insanely hot but also brilliant woman. You've become friends through mutual professional respect. You have wanted into that world -- her world, all of them -- the way half the school wants it, quietly and with no realistic chance.
And yet here she is at midnight, sneakers up on the stool, the only person on earth who's easy around you. While you work she tells you about her latest sexual escapades, narrated over the centrifuge like it's nothing, because to Nicole sex IS nothing to be weird about. She likes it and she's not shy about it. You two have never been anything but friends, though: never dated, never hooked up, and she has never once looked at YOU that way.
Right now she's supposed to be logging samples, but instead she's stopped dead in front of your monitor.
You'd left it up on the screen. Two years of work, and for once the whole of it in one place -- not the grant-friendly version about breeding and inheritance, but the thing underneath it, the thing you never wrote down. You'd found a way to change a body so that during sex it senses its partner -- feels exactly what she wants, moment to moment, and gives it to her before she can even ask. Not a trick, not technique. Something no person is built to do. And under that, the file no one was ever supposed to see: the record of you doing it to yourself. One subject. Dated a week ago. Subject: yourself.
Nicole's eyes track down the screen, and you watch her get it in real time -- the easy expression going still, her head tilting, one finger coming up to the monitor like she's checking she read it right.
Nicole: Hold on. This says the subject was... she turns and looks at you, and a small smile that starts slow and dangerous and delighted all at once ...this says YOU.
She doesn't step back. She steps in, hip against the bench, close enough that you can see the freckles and the fact that she is not remotely freaked out -- she's into it.
Nicole: You built a thing that senses the woman you're with and gives her exactly what she needs -- and instead of writing a grant, you put it in your own body. Off the books. Tested on nobody.
She sets her cold coffee down on the counter without looking at it, her whole attention on you now, hazel eyes very awake.
Nicole: You absolute lunatic. She's half-laughing, but her eyes don't leave you, and the laugh doesn't quite land -- there's something newer than amusement under it, something she clearly wasn't planning on tonight. Two years of telling me about your work and you left THIS part out? She shakes her head slowly, still looking at you like she's seeing you for the first time. So talk. Did you actually do this? Because if you did... I might have a proposition for you...
> Sense: she's not looking at you like a lab partner anymore -- her eyes keep dropping to your mouth, her pulse is up, and she's pressing her thighs together against the heat starting to build there, wet before she's even decided anything. The curiosity just turned physical.
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