“But to the public, you’re someone else. You can write anything without real-world repercussions. Say anything.”
“Such as?” She swirled her own fry in a fragrant puddle of truffle oil.
“I don’t know. Maybe whatever you’d say—or do?—to Ethan Meyer if your colleagues weren’t around.”
“Ugh. Don’t tempt me.” She took a fortifying sip of Chenin Blanc. “Not only did he castigate me for sleeping through IT’s two o’clock email, but the time slot I finally managed to get on the schedule is right before his, so we’re bound to run into each other. At least you’ll be on duty with me. You’ll have to give a countdown so I can get out of the control room before he arrives.”
Martina hummed in sympathy and crooked a finger for her to continue her rant.
After swallowing another mouthful of fries and alcohol, she talked her friend through her awful morning, culminating in Ethan’s questions about her gravitational wave data sets. Well,ostensiblyabout her data sets, but she knew—
She went for another gulp of white wine. Her glass was empty. She blinked at it, then refocused.
“And then—Martina.And then. Someone in Maiman Auditorium started clapping. Someoneactually started clapping, as if our argument were a… a professional baseball game with a score to count.”
“Really?”
“It started off as a standard debate about research methodology. But he went nuclear with implications about fraudulent numbers in LIGO’s database! I might’ve gotten in his face a bit after that, and then:the clapping. I don’t know if he also heard it, but if he did…” She reached for a lonely truffle fry, swiping up a last trail of oil.
“I wouldn’t have clapped.”
“I knowyouwouldn’t.”
“No.” Martina’s lips tilted into mischief around the rim of her own glass. “I would’ve been too busy with my popcorn.”
4
Data pings from the wall monitors.
Static pings along her spine.
Her breath hitches as the shocks corkscrew down through her stomach, hot and fast, a vicious and delicious helix. She grips an operator desk with white knuckles and angles her body for leverage, gasping again when she’s slammed forward across the surface in retaliation, weight and heat intensifying behind her, over her, inside her—but then fresh static sparks up her back, and it’s accompanied by fleece skimming her skin with contradictory softness.
“Easy, Monaghan.”
Though when has she ever been easy?
So she bucks against the softness and that command in challenge, against the fingers digging into her hips while an open palm strokes between her shoulder blades, demanding a choice, a commitment to either pain or pleasure, because she won’t wait for him to decide—
—and she can’t, not with the spirals in her belly tightening, drawing taut now, her vision brightening with stars and breathless impact, blurring—
But the data pinging on the monitors isn’t blurring.
It should be fading with the deafening rush of pleasure that’s just an inch—a breath—a pulse away, except it isn’t, it’s sharpening instead, distracting, and—
Beep. Beep-beep. Beep. Beep-beep.
“Ah!”
She thrashed awake, tangled in damp sheets, a pillow crushed between her thighs, heart pounding, disoriented,aching. Her chirping phone read a quarter after eleven. Erin switched on her bedside lamp and silenced the alarm with trembling fingers, groaning at the light, at the coil of frustrated emptiness in her core.
What the hell?
She smacked the pillow back into shape while her hands and breathing steadied, while she reminded herself of her location. She couldn’t have been napping for more than a few minutes, could she? But instead of resting itself for her research block in the control room, her brain had decided to do…
Whateverthathad been.
An after-effect of the alcohol at Left Bank?
