by Unknown
CHAPTER TWENTY
LIVING WITH NATHANAEL IS TURNING out to be a surprising experience. We’re together all day for work, and then we ride back home together. The MedBits Institute has rented a car for Nathanael, and he’s sharing it with me.
In the lab, he’s the dream partner. He pays attention to what I tell him, and, in most instances, he gets it the first time, and, just to make sure that we’re on the same page, he puts what I tell him into his own words. I’m not sure if he does that because English is a second language to him, or if it’s a feedback habit that he applies, no matter who he is working with. In any case, it’s great because it limits the possibility of misunderstanding.
I’m in love with his brain, his kindness, his patience, and his creativity. Nathanael is so perfect, and he blows me away every single day. His analytical mind sees patterns where everyone else sees only chaos. When he shares it with you, he makes it so clear that you can’t help but wonder why you did not see it in the first place. It’s like those drawings that are hidden within another drawing: initially, you don’t notice anything, and then when you do, the hidden drawing is the only thing you see.
When we get out of the office, he’s still a pleasure to be with. The awesomeness never ends.
On so many levels, Nathanael is more than I would have asked for if I had been allowed to design the perfect man for myself. There’s just one thing: there is no physical attraction… none, at all.
Obviously he has enough of a brain to seduce me, but it’s not enough. A man needs to have more physical substance to be sexy… at least, to me.
There’s an administrative assistant at the Institute who is so hot that men walk into walls when she passes them. I’ve actually seen a guy become so distracted by her cleavage that he stirred the sugar in his latte with his cigarette. It’s like there’s an enormous neon sign flashing above her head that says: “I love sex”.
Anyway, she has this theory that there is no such thing as a perfect man, so we should divide our needs. That’s what she does. She picked this job because she gets her intellectual stimulation at work by assisting a bunch of smarties, and then, after hours, she attends to her physical needs with a different crowd. She goes for blue collar guys, who live in their bodies, and not just in their minds.
I see why her theory would make sense to many, but still I know that there are guys with killer bodies, and brains to match. If I was able to find one, then there must be more out there; unless, of course, he’s one in seven billion.
Tonight, we’re celebrating our first week of collaboration in a small Italian restaurant. Despite my protest, Nathanael orders two glasses of wine, and, when the waiter comes back with the drinks, some bread, and olive oil, he proposes a toast.
“To finally meeting the sister I wish I had grown up with!”
I raise my glass. “To finally meeting the brother I dreamed about, who’s so much smarter than me, and who likes me.”
We both drink, and I soak the bread in the flavored olive oil. I need to get some food in me before the wine gets to my head. Why am I looking for an excuse? I just want the bread because it’s delicious! Nathanael is delicious, too; I like that he does not act coy, or shy. He knows how smart he is, and he owns it.
Despite the bread, the wine goes straight to my head, and makes me brave enough to ask a very private question. “Have you ever been in love?”
“I’m not sure,” he answers, but then his eyes take on a dreamy quality that I’ve never seen before.
“But there is a possibility?”
“Yes. There is a very young girl that I met in Paris just before I left. She’s just turned seventeen, and she is very sweet; so innocent. I wanted her so badly that it scared me.”
“That’s what made you think that it’s love?”
“I’m not sure about how I feel. It’s like she could be a part of me that I never knew I was missing, until I met her. I told her that I will be back in Paris for Christmas. I’ll see how we feel, then, and, if it’s the same, I plan to—I’m not sure how to say it—claim her?”
“Claiming is a nice way to put it. It sounds very romantic. It’s much better than ‘screw her brains out’.” I laugh as the words come out of my mouth. This is why I don’t drink; when I do, the very barrier that separates my brain from my mouth melts, and I say outrageous things.
My imagination is overacting. In my mind, I have him dressed as a French knight, riding a black stallion on his way to claim his belle. My cartoon image bursts when he speaks.
“What about you?”
“I’m not sure, either.” I blush.
“You want to talk about it?”
“Sure,” I pause, and then I tell him about Oliver. I tell him that I had no idea that sex could be that fabulous, or that I could actually feel such a strong connection with someone. Then, I tell him about the way it ended. I have tears pooling in my eyes by the end of it, but I blink them away. Nathanael takes my hand over the dinner table, and the tears come spilling out.
I tell him that Oliver was my first, and of how conflicted I feel. “I’m proud of him for doing the right thing, but I’m also mad at him for not even trying to get in touch with me.”
“Does he have a way to reach you?” He asks.
“He could always ask Agatha, or even Chanlina, for my email address. They both have it. He could do a Google search of my name, and find the MedBits Institute press release about our project.”
“Sounds more like love than lust, to me,” Nathanael says thoughtfully,
“How do you know the difference?” I ask.
“Well, that’s easy,” he shrugs. “When I think about Pamela, who has not missed an opportunity to bump against me and touch me in the past few days, I know that I don’t want a relationship with her; I just want to jump her.”
I laugh. “You mean you want to jump her bones?”
“I know she’s very thin, but why just the bones?” He adds, “That sounds horrible, like you want to have sex with a skeleton.”
“You’re right; it’s not pretty, but the expression is ‘I want to jump her bones.’”
“Okay, so I just want to jump Pamela’s bones, while I want to do much more with the French girl. With Pamela, it’s lust, but with Martine, it has the potential to grow into love.”
“So, will you act upon your urge with Pamela? You know that she’s coming to cook for us by the pool tomorrow, don’t you?”
“How could I forget? She’s used this as an excuse to come to me every single day with a new question.” He stops, and then says, “I’m not sure what I will do, yet. I don’t want to be dishonest with her. I will probably ask her if she’s okay with casual sex, and if she says ‘yes,’ then I will try to make it as pleasurable for her as possible.”
“You know that seldom works,” I say. “There’s this chemical reaction…”
“Yes, I know about oxytocin,” he says, interrupting me. “But she’s a big girl, and she’ll make the right decision for herself.”
“You’re right; I have this tendency to be patronizing.” A cocked eyebrow tells me that Nathanael does not know the meaning of the word. “You know, to act in a condescending manner; to act as if I’m the only one who knows better.”
“Oh, I see. Yes, the protective genius attitude,” he smiles, as he says this. “I used to have that attitude, and then, one day, I realized that sometimes a decision based on instinct or intuition is just as efficient as one that is based on pure intelligent reasoning. I decided that I should not… what’s the verb?”
“Patronize.”
“So, I stopped being an arrogant, patronizing person. Give it time,” he says. “You’ll get around to it, as well.”
The conversation flows easily, and the fact that we’ve clarified the way we feel allows us to be very free with each other. We actually touch, and I feel comfortable enough to slide my arm around his when we walk back home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ON SATURDAY, PAMELA JOINS
US at the pool. We’ve claimed a table by one of the barbecues. Before firing up, Pamela strips down to a tiny bikini, and shows us her perfect body while she swims laps.
She glides through the water, and the very meaning of the words “breast strokes” changes before my very eyes as I observe Nathanael’s physical reaction to watching Pamela swim in our direction. Every time her upper body slides out of the water, he holds his breath. I wonder if watching me swim had the same effect on Oliver. I give myself a mental kick, while Pamela gloriously steps out of the pool. Her shoulders are pulled back, her head is high, and she has that insolent smile on her lips. My God: all the men around the pool are frozen in space. She’s Halle Berry stepping out of the ocean in Die Another Day, and they all want to be James Bond.
“It works every single time,” says a woman’s voice. I turn around, and there is a classy lady sitting at a table next to ours. She must be in her early fifties. At some point in her youth, she must have been stunning; now she’s beautiful, but she seems cold. I try to figure out what it is that makes her classy, while she’s just sitting there with a bathing suit. Maybe it’s the way she holds herself, or maybe it’s the way she speaks.
There’s a twinkle in her eye when she says, “It never ceases to amaze me how quickly men can pack away their brain, and start thinking with their dicks.”
The word “dicks” does not sound that bad when she uses it.
“Don’t you women do it, too?” retorts Nathanael, who has taken it upon himself to defend men’s honor.
“You mean ‘think with our pussies’?”
Okay, now that makes me cringe. Kill me, I’m a prude.
The lady laughs. “Yes, I guess we do, too, but maybe a bit more discreetly. You kids are new here, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” I say. If she’s calling us “kids” then I’m calling her “Ma’am.” “My name is Jade—I just moved here—and this handsome French fellow is Nathanael, my roommate. The splashing mermaid is Pamela, who works with us.”
“I’m Lyv Wild.” She pauses, and before we have the time to comment, she continues, “Yes, my parents had a wicked sense of humor. God, I missed saying that.” My puzzled look prompts her to add, “I just went back to using my maiden name after thirty years.”
“Oh, I see.” I don’t know what else to say because I can’t guess from looking at her if it was a good or bad separation.
“Where do you work?” Lyv asks.
“MedBits Institute,” I answer.
“That’s the new research facility in Jupiter, right? It’s a great thing that they picked this location. They are creating a lot of local jobs, and are bringing fresh, educated blood in.”
“And those two are as highly educated as you can get, especially Nathanael,” purrs Pamela as she looks at him.
“Oh, good. What are you working on?”
Before I shut her up by saying that it’s complicated, Nathanael says, “We’re creating a tool to help doctors pick the best course of therapy for cancer patients.”
“Can you elaborate, or is it just so complicated that a laywoman would not understand?”
“Explaining what we want to do is not complicated; it’s doing it properly that is,” Nathanael answers. “You know that when cancer is diagnosed, there are several types of treatments possible.”
It was not really meant as a question, but Lyv answers it, anyway. “Yes, I can think of surgery, radio therapy, and chemo.” The weary look on her face speaks of a first-hand experience with this issue.
Nathanael nods, and continues, “It gets more complicated because, even when you decide to go for chemo, there are several sub-courses of treatment, and you can also alternate, or cumulate all those options.”
Lyv nods, and Pamela is listening, as well. I wonder if she ever knew what we were doing before this conversation.
“Since time is often of the essence, picking the best one right away can mean life or death for the patient.”
“Yes, I understand that. Sometimes it’s too late when they find the appropriate treatment through trial and error. So, you’re looking for a way to narrow down the choices. What will it be based on?” Lyv asks.
“Patterns. We find these patterns by using all the information given by the doctors who participate in the study. I’m helping Jade, who is a biologist. We are setting up an analysis system, which should allow us to look at the data from many different points of view. The data collected identifies the cancer strains, the DNA of the patient, and the results of the attempted therapy.”
“So, you want to identify DNA categories in relation to each specific disease, and then find out what worked and what did not work. Then you can tell the doctors, and they’ll start with what worked on others as a first course of action.”
“Precisely.” Nathanael is beaming. He’s going to be an amazing professor because he likes it so much when he conveys his knowledge to others.
“Do you have a scientific background?” I ask Lyv.
“No, I didn’t get an opportunity to get a formal education. I just learned what life had to teach me as time went by.”
“You just read about what you were interested in when you needed the knowledge, right?” asks Nathanael.
Lyv nods, and he gets started on his pet theory that no one should be left behind, as far as education is concerned.
“I truly believe that we can all become what we dream of being if we’re given the appropriate amount of time. The fact that a person is unable to study full time for whatever reason, or the fact that, intellectually, a person takes more time to learn and process information doesn’t mean that he or she should not be given a fair chance by the education system.”
“You’re being unrealistic,” I say. We’ve had this discussion several times, already. “Your vision is lovely, and I fully approve of it in theory, but the fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of students that the universities can teach. It makes sense from an economic point of view to give the education to those who are adapted to receive it in a decent amount of time.”
“But who’s to decide what’s decent? You can’t analyze life from a purely economic point of view simply because you have limited resources.”
“We don’t really have a choice,” I argue.
“Does this mean that you approve of the countries in which a heart transplant is not performed on overweight patients, and cancer treatment is denied to a person who won’t stop smoking?”
“You know, I can’t say I do. In a perfect world, everyone should receive appropriate medical care. However, we’re not in a perfect world, so choices have to be made. When there’s only one heart to transplant for ten or twenty possible recipients, a call has to be made, and picking the person who’s likely to make the most of the heart doesn’t seem to be a stupid way to go about it.”
“I’ll go with you on medical decisions,” says Lyv, “because there are limited resources. But that’s not the case for education, nowadays. There are online classes, fabulous tutorials you can take by yourself, and all sorts of ways to access information.”
During our conversation, Lyv has come to sit at our table. I warm up to her. Pamela has turned on the barbecue, and every so often, gets Nathanael to come help her.
There’s plenty of room for two in front of the barbecue, but somehow she keeps bumping into him. Ouch, that must hurt without any padding. He must like being poked by bones because he doesn’t move away. They whisper things to each other, and she laughs as if he’s the funniest man on Earth.
Pamela’s not as dull a knife as she lets on. There are a few things I could learn from her. There must be a sexy move program that she attended, and she had to have graduated at the top of her class. I’m sure her major was the hair throw back. My hair is too short to give it a try, but I think if I tried the move she uses to chase her long mane away from her face, that I would suffer from a bad case of whiplash.
“Are you okay with her hitting on him like that?” Lyv asks so
ftly. She’s been watching me as I study Pamela.
“Oh, yes. He’s like a brother to me, and I’m not in the dating game, at all. I’m mending my first broken heart.” I surprise myself by telling her this much; she’s easy to talk to.
“I’m so sorry, my dear,” she says, as she pats my hand. “The first one is the hardest. It does not get less painful at the second, but at least it’s easier because you know you will survive. Some days I wish we could come with a set of spare hearts that we could trash as we go because it does hurt like a bitch when it gets crushed or shattered, and there’s nothing else to do but wait for it to mend.” She’s wearing such a sweet, sad smile. She knows what she’s talking about.
“How long does it take?”
“It all depends. Sometimes, jumping right back into the saddle works, and sometimes kicking the bastard’s ass helps. We all have different healing processes. If you’re into revenge, I could give you a hand. I’m very good at getting a pound of flesh.”
Underneath the very soft facade, there seems to be something more. She said earlier that she raised three kids by herself: two girls, and one boy. That requires a strong backbone. Yep, I can believe that she could turn into an icy bitch.
“Well, if my heart-breaker ever shows up in this neck of the woods, I’ll be sure to call on you for assistance. Aside from kicking asses, what do you do for a living?” I ask, suddenly curious about her.
She’s too young and too energetic to be retired. Lyv does not appear to be one who would enjoy being idle. Her answer confirms my vision of her.
“I’m lucky because I no longer need to work for a living,” she says and I think that maybe she got a good divorce settlement. “But I still do because I like it. My thing is people management. I’m really good at getting people to work together, and getting the best out of them. I’ve been doing it for a long time, and, right now, I’m running a restaurant in Jupiter. You guys should come have dinner there one night. It’s very quaint, and I’m sure it will be quite exotic for Nathanael.”