Rolling Thunder (44 page)

“I didn’t do much, me. I know it’s s’posed to be different than that.”

“Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret,” I said, getting up and kicking off my shoes, which was all I was wearing. “If you don’t get it right the first time, there’s always the next time.” I squatted down and removed his shoes and socks, then pulled his pants off. I stood and held out my hand. He took it, and I pulled him to his feet.

Then I led him to the bedroom.

21

YOU COULD PUT
it down to sheer horniness and I wouldn’t blame you. That wasn’t what it was, but still, the last time I got laid was back on Europa, over a year ago—or ten years ago, calendar time. No time for a relationship during the Earth tour, and no inclination, and nobody I liked well enough. But a girl
does
need it, that’s well-known, or she’s liable to get grouchy. I’d been feeling mighty grouchy for a long time.

He’s old enough to be your grandfather!
I hear you say. Yeah? You wanna make something of it, punk?

But you have a point, I know. The man was born in 1980, for heaven’s sake. That meant he was pushing ninety,
hard.
But you can’t count those many years in the bubble. Clock time, he was fifty-seven.

Ouch. I know. I know. I know there were a million practical reasons why this whole thing was a very bad idea. But love knows no practicality. Ask Romeo and Juliet.

Okay, bad example.

The fact is, all those practical considerations vanished every time I looked into his eyes and saw the joy there.

Oh,
cher,
all those wasted years …

* * *

I ACTUALLY SAID
something like that to him, later that amazing day. We were both sprawled across the wreckage of my big bed, eyeing each other warily from time to time, like two exhausted boxers wondering if the other guy could possibly last another round.

“What waste,
cher
?”

“Well, all those years without making love. It just seems like a waste.”

“I real shy, Poddy.”

“I know that. But still.”

He patted my thigh. “Better late than never. And if I’d been making love all this time, I mighta fallen in love too early, and got married, and had to settle for second best without ever knowin’ it. There’s a time for everythin’,
cher.”

THAT NIGHT, WITH
Jubal snoring gently against my breast, I had a hard time getting to sleep. I was trying to sort out my feelings.

Had I been aware that he was falling in love with me? Yes. Jubal was transparent as a pane of glass, he couldn’t hide his emotions, and I could see it in his eyes. I knew it was more than simple lust, too, because I’ve seen that before. I’m not runway model material, but I’m not bad-looking, and any girl learns to recognize that look in a boy’s eye about the time she starts to develop into a woman.

Had I been aware that I was falling in love with him? Tougher question. I’d never been in love before; do you always recognize it instantly, or is that just storybook stuff? I’d dated about a dozen guys in school, for different lengths of time. Some I had sex with, some I didn’t, but they all came up lacking in the end. Either there was something about him I didn’t like, or there was just no spark there. It didn’t bother me, I wasn’t in a hurry, I had career plans and figured it would happen when it happened. Look at Mom and Dad, thrown together by catastrophes; they might never have met without the Big Wave and the Martian War. Mom told me it was an immediate attraction she felt with Dad, but that the love part grew gradually until suddenly it was just there. So I grew up not expecting to get struck unexpectedly by the thunderbolt of love, impaled on Cupid’s arrow, or hit over the head by Maxwell’s silver hammer.

And that’s how it had been, a gradual building of affection, turning slowly to thoughts of
lovemaking,
as distinct from love … and then out of the blue …
the thunderbolt!
I could still feel it, churning around pleasantly down there in my belly. Was that right? Shouldn’t I be feeling it in my heart? The fact was, though my heart had been thumping like a kettledrum, the real feeling, the physical ache, had been some inches below that. And I’d felt it before, when a boy put his hands on me, here, and there, and someplace else. That had been lust, pure and simple. Was this?

No. That had been there, the sexual part of it, the trembling, the flushing, the suddenly slipperiness, the instant hardness of the little girl in the pink boat, but there had been something else along with it.

A bursting. A flowering.

I thought again about that moment. The instant decision, not made consciously but springing directly from either my belly or my heart, take your pick, to make the first move. Did I figure I’d be jumping his bones about ten seconds later? No, honestly, I didn’t. But I had known deep down that the rest of my life hung in the balance in the next few seconds. If he didn’t respond, if he didn’t make the
second
move, then that would be it, very likely for all time. I had never kissed a man before without knowing if the very idea of sexuality would terrify him, without knowing if he
had
any sexuality.

One inch. He moved forward one inch. It was all he was capable of, and it was the equivalent of a hundred-yard dash for a normal man. I had some inkling of the walls he had built against human intimacy, how deeply he had believed that this was an experience that would be forever denied him. Jubal was the most loving man I’d ever met, and there were plenty of people who loved him back, so he wasn’t deprived that way. But the love between a man and a woman … he knew that just wasn’t going to happen. He told me as much, later that day, in bed.

You sure know how to pick ‘em, Podkayne.

Oh, shut up, you bitch subconscious, or I’ll toss you in a barrel and nail it shut.

But she had a point. Was there ever, in heaven or Earth, a worse mismatch? Let’s add it up, shall we?

In the debit column, right up at the top you have to put the age thing. “The age thing,” …
hah!
He was almost three times my age. If he lived to be one hundred, I’d be sixty. He’d be a wreck, most likely, and I’d still have a lot of life to get through without him. More likely, by the time I was sixty he’d be dead.

There was the intelligence thing. When people were making lists of the great men of physics, it usually went like this: Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Jubal Broussard. Not necessarily in that order. I was a B student in science, a C student in math. On a good day.

There was the emotional thing. I see myself as a pretty grounded person, even after all the upsets in my life recently, what with nearly being crushed to death by an alien creature and then being rebuilt practically from scratch, losing ten years of human history, and having megacelebrity dropped on me like a gold-plated elephant turd. None of it had made me timorous, or big-headed, or really done much to change the Poddy I was proud to be, in spite of my occasional faults … though I know I’d be the worst judge of that. But it was nothing compared to what had befallen Jubal at a tender age, before he was formed as an adult. Brain damage is probably the worst thing that can happen to you. At least, it was the thing I feared the most. Jubal had heroically adapted to it, but it hadn’t left him unmarked. It never does, according to the reading I’d done on the subject, and all our high-tech medicine still can’t do a damn thing about it. Jubal was prone to mysterious sulks, to withdrawal and depression, to bouts of despair.

He didn’t like new things, didn’t like meeting new people, and would be happiest as a semihermit in a mosquito-infested swamp I could hardly imagine inhabiting, hunting alligators and eating possums and raccoons. Me, I’m a city girl; I love the great indoors. I’m slightly agoraphobic, I fear bugs of any kind, and I’m not really comfortable around animals except dogs and cats. Jubal was going to be a high-maintenance companion, and I wondered where we could live that would make us both happy.

Then there was the stature thing. Jubal was … there’s not an easy way to put this for a six-foot-four girl …
short.

Okay, I know it’s silly, and it’s sure not a deal-breaker, but I just thought I’d mention it in the debit column. We looked at ourselves in the mirror standing side by side and had giggling fits. He was five-four in his bare feet. We were the very picture of Mutt and Jeff, except I had bigger boobs than Mutt. He was a fireplug, I was a willow. He was wide and I was narrow. Well, that’s what the Y chromosome is all about, isn’t it? So we can tell one sex from the other? Only usually the guy is taller.

Okay, on to the pluses. Were there any? You bet.

About the age business … in some ways I was older than he was. He was never childish, but frequently childlike, in the best possible way. He had not a lick of an old man’s cynicism, ossified opinions, petrified imagination, envy of youth, or even regret for things not done. He knew who he was and was comfortable with it, and he had the sense of wonder and exploration of a twelve-year-old combined with an IQ that might reach into four digits for all I knew.

Intelligence? While I’m average, at best, in the hard stuff, my verbal skills have always rated in the 99th percentile. And I had no problem with not being able to keep up with his mighty brain, because I wasn’t even interested in trying. I intended to follow his mind wherever it led us. We fit together like yin and yang, strengths matching weaknesses. I could even help him express himself. Besides, I’d always preferred smart guys, and with Jubal I’d hit the jackpot.

Emotions? I could sense a tidal change in his behavior even that first day, and I thought it would get better. I could see him emerging from his hard shell, working at his shyness—with me, at least. I liked it that his emotions were right out on the surface, that he had no hidden agendas. With Jubal, what you saw was what you got, and I liked what I saw. How many people do you know who are like that? I couldn’t think of another.

Short? The hell with that. I liked leaning down to kiss him.

As for where we could possibly live … that was going to be a problem, but there would be a solution, I knew there would.

So put it all on a balance, and how does it add up, logically? Well, I’d call it a draw, with the scales tipping slightly toward “Run like hell!”— mostly because of the age difference. I could see I was going to have a problem selling that one to some people. But I’m an adult, and I’m stubborn, and if anybody couldn’t accept us they could just go to hell.

But none of that really mattered, because there was nothing logical about it. Cupid had planted his cherubic pink butt on the other side of the scale, and the needle had swung
hard
in the other direction, and was now reading “Go for it, Podkayne!”

WE HAD AMAZING
days there alone at the Fortress.

We didn’t spend the
entire
time in the sack, but it was a close thing. Jubal was eager as a puppy dog, and an amazingly fast learner. He was game for anything, and his delight at some of the things I showed him was a joy to behold. He quickly learned to prolong our mutual pleasure, and when he brought me off—frequently!—he was as proud as if he had invented the wheel, or fire, or the squeezer machine. Prouder.

We watched old movies. He taught me to cook. He brushed my hair and painted my toenails. I taught him poker—which he was terrible at, there was very little bluff in Jubal—and he taught me pinochle. We didn’t even try chess. I knew he’d be twenty moves ahead of me. We showered together and we bathed together. We took the elevator to the surface and made a snowman out of dry ice. He lapped milk out of my belly button, when I could stop giggling enough so it didn’t slosh out. I did his beard to make him a little more Ernie, and styled his hair to make him a little more Lennie. We read books to each other. Jubal could read just fine, never stumbled over a word, though he mispronounced many. He just usually couldn’t find the word he was looking for when speaking. We played nonviolent video games. One day, we painted each other like circus clowns, head to toe. The lovemaking was particularly good that night. What was
that
all about?

So, basically, this is the scene, if this were a movie, where there would be a montage of us cavorting around doing silly things and laughing a lot to some sort of rollicking music, sharing secret smiles, a little bit of slow motion. Which is what we did, except the slo-mo part. But enough of that.

We worked out together in the well-equipped gym. Jubal could bench-press me all day long without breaking a sweat, but went back to barbells because I wasn’t heavy enough. We rowed together through a video environment of some of the world’s scenic rivers: the Mekong, the Nile, the Orinoco, the Columbia. It was all kind of sad, knowing most of these scenes were outdated, the estuaries inundated and virtually flushed out from giant waves, but it was better than just sweating on the rowing machines.

Every day we spent an hour with me in a trance, staring at different things Jubal thought might nudge my mind into the impossible frame of reference where one could make a “twist in space,” as he put it, and create a Broussard Singularity. I asked him to make one, so I would know it was possible, but he refused, saying he didn’t want to influence me. I knew the whole thing was crazy, but I kept quiet. He had this conviction that because we had been entangled (something I didn’t understand or even fully accept), I could become the second human capable of doing it.