He’d grown fully hard. His meandering hands had coaxed his arousal into something heavy and aching, yearning to be touched. Warm, wet drips were already gathering on his stomach.
The mechanics of the act were simple. (They would be slightly more complex if he slid open the drawer of his nightstand, whose contents he recalled with striking clarity. Lange filed that thought under future experiments.) What had eluded him, until now, was the appeal. Masturbation was one more tiresome bodily habit, like eating or sleeping, to which he would eventually succumb.
Lange trailed his fingers up the length of his dick and hissed out a breath. Fuck. He’d been wrong about a lot of things. It was good to touch himself. Better than anything else in his new existence.
Taking himself in hand provoked a loud, shuddering breath. The sound reverberated in the still room. Shit. The door. He’d left it cracked open so the cats could come and go.
He hadn’t intended to do anything other than sleep. Intentional or not, his hand was moving now, gliding up and down. It would be easier to shut the door than to stop. One sustained moment of focus on his part could swing the door closed, silently enough not to disturb McCreery.
Lange didn’t move it.
McCreery wouldn’t come in. He’d ignore any sounds he heard, very politely, just as he’d averted his eyes when Lange had showered and changed near him. The care that McCreery took with everything, the way he was quiet and gentle and patient, was alluring and infuriating at once. With few exceptions, he’d asked “Is it okay if I touch you here?” before every instance of contact. The man was unfailingly appropriate.
Lange liked that he asked—and hated it.
Oh.
He wanted McCreery to be inappropriate with him.
Or perhaps it was the other way around. It was easier to imagine that, and Lange’s thoughts slid in that direction as his hand slid down. McCreery was kind, compassionate, and above all, he loved to solve a problem. Lange could be that problem.
Lange could throw the sheets off, groan, and drop back into the pillows.
“Lange?” McCreery would call. “You okay?”
“No,” Lange would say, surly and despairing.
McCreery would enter the room cautiously, and when he caught sight of Lange naked, he would both put a hand over his face and turn around. The hand would muffle the sound of him saying, “What the fuck, Lange.”
“This keeps happening,” Lange would say. “It won’t go away.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” McCreery would mutter. “What did you call me in here for? Instructions?”
McCreery would pose the question sarcastically, but Lange would say yes without a trace of irony.
“Eleven-year-olds regularly figure this one out on their own, Lange. I’m pretty sure you can handle it.”
“I can’t,” Lange would say, and it would be just pathetic enough to keep McCreery from leaving. Asking for help was galling in real life and easy in fantasy.
McCreery would huff and swear again. “Fine. Wrap your hand around your dick and pull. There’s your goddamn owner’s manual. I’m leaving now.”
Lange would yelp in pain and McCreery would cringe in sympathy, his shoulders lifting sharply.
“Be gentle, you fucking doorknob.”
“My fine motor control isn’t what it once was.”
That would do it. McCreery would turn at last, his face flushed with a mixture of mortification and frustration and—Lange might as well indulge himself—arousal.
McCreery would stomp over to the bed and sit down next to Lange. “Is your hand wet?”
“What?”
Exasperated, he would say, “You can’t just yank on it when everything’s dry. Come on.”
In the fantasy, it wouldn’t occur to McCreery to check the drawer of Lange’s well-stocked nightstand for lube. Instead, he would take Lange’s hand—he would not ask permission—and raise it to his mouth to run his tongue over the palm in generous, wet strokes. Lange shivered. If McCreery was going to do something, Lange felt sure, he would commit to doing it right.
And then he would replace Lange’s hand on his dick, adjusting his grip just so. He would keep his own hand there, wrapped around Lange’s, guiding it up and down. His touch would be warm.
“See? It’s easy,” he would murmur, all his irritation softened into something else. His big hand engulfing Lange’s, staying steady even as Lange’s breathing grew shorter and shallower. “You got this. Good, just like that.”
McCreery would risk looking at him. He did it all the time, checking to make sure Lange was still with him, still listening, still okay, and if so, he’d smile. Not a big grin, nothing so loud, but something small and reassuring and pleased. It did good things to his face, that little smile. Seeing it was a rare reward.
Lange thrust into his own hand and came hard. His whole body had tightened and then suddenly released, and now he felt… liquid, almost. Like he could melt into the mattress.
It wasn’t so bad to have a body.
He blotted at the mess with a tissue and then lay in bed and drifted toward sleep. He should be nicer to McCreery, he thought.
It might be easier to return to Facility 17 and close the breach. In both cases, he had no idea where to begin.
7
Bad Idea
It was still dark when Jake gave up. He’d spent a restless night on the floor in front of the wood stove, surfacing from sleep at every creak of the cabin and every movement from one of the damn cats. All three of them had visited him, walking on him or sniffing him, and at one point one even curled up and slept next to him. He hadn’t welcomed the intrusion at first, but once the cat had settled, it had been kind of nice.
Plus, the cat’s presence was a distraction from the other noises he’d heard. Noises he wished had been less identifiable. Noises that were absolutely none of his business.
Jake had been caught between thinking good for him and wondering if maybe Lange would be less of a dick now that he’d relieved some tension. Probably not.
He reached down to scratch the cat—the big orange one, Chandrasekhar—behind the ears. The animal tightened the circle of its body, tucked into the crook between his stomach and his bent legs, and began to purr. Jake felt the rumble before he heard it.
It was probably nice to have a person sleep next to you like that, too, not that Jake would know.
He got up, leaving Chandrasekhar to sleep in the nest of his blanket, and went poking around the kitchen as silently as possible. There were more canned goods, but little else. He had some emergency rations in the pod, but this wasn’t technically an emergency, and he knew better than to eat those right away. Repairs always took twice as long as expected.
Because Lange’s cabin was so tidy—just like his room at Facility 17 had been, before Jake had packed it up—Jake didn’t have to search for the truck keys. They were on a hook next to the door. If Jake left now, the sun would come up on the drive and he’d get to the nearest town just as stores were opening. He could pick up some epoxy for the heat shield in addition to food. He didn’t know what Lange liked to eat, but Lange probably didn’t know either. If Jake left him alone in that cabin with no food, there was no telling how well he’d fend for himself tomorrow or next week.
The trip took three hours. Lange was still asleep—or at least, in bed—when Jake got back. The note Jake had left on the counter was untouched. He stocked the pantry as quietly as possible, ate breakfast, updated the note, and then hiked down to the pod.
Absorbed in fixing the heat shield, Jake didn’t realize Lange had come to find him until he backed up into the man. Eliza beeped a warning, but she was too late. Jake stepped right on Lange’s foot. He stumbled and would have fallen, but Lange caught him telekinetically, so he ended up with his feet hovering above the ground. It was disorienting and then Lange spun him around so they were facing each other. Jesus.
“Your hair,” Jake said, which was really not the most important aspect of this situation.<
br />
Lange ran a hand over his head like he needed a reminder that he’d buzzed it, leaving it just a little longer on top than on the sides. He’d neatened up his beard, too, so it angled sharply down his face, emphasizing his cheekbones. It was weird to see Lange looking like the professional photo on the back cover of his book.
Crap, Jake was staring. “Also, good morning. You can, uh, put me down now.”
“Oh,” Lange said, like he hadn’t realized he was levitating a human being fifteen centimeters off the ground. Like he’d moved Jake—who was both taller and heavier than him—without really thinking about it.
Lange deposited him on the ground with precision and gentleness.
“I came to see if you needed help,” Lange said.
Today was full of surprises.
“You’re too late, I just finished,” Jake said. He’d have to do a pre-flight check, and a test flight, but he’d been through everything else. His apologetic smile was a reflex. Lange wouldn’t give a shit.
After a hesitation, Lange said, “So it’s fixed? You’re leav—”
“You know,” Jake interrupted. “The hardware store owner gave me a hard time this morning. She said ‘who are you and why are you driving Solomon’s truck?’ But you told me that only your family called you Solomon.”
“She is family,” Lange said, unfazed.
Jake blinked. He hadn’t expected Lange’s family to include a seventy-something Native woman in rural Alaska, but Lange had mentioned that one of the people he’d called lived an hour away.
“You met my aunt Cora,” Lange continued. “She’s not related to me, legally or biologically, but I’ve known her for most of my life. My other aunt and uncle were atmospheric chemists. Their research required visits to remote locations, so they came here for work regularly. They were worried about feeling isolated up here, about being the only Black people, but Cora and her family made them feel welcome.”
“And you?”
“My aunt and uncle used to take us with them in the summer. My cousins hated it—no one to socialize with—but for me, it felt peaceful. I spent a lot of time helping them with their research. I came back on my own, and later I helped Cora’s grandson with his homework a few times. She’s never forgotten that.”
“You what?” Jake couldn’t picture that at all. First, it was the idea of Lange with a child of any age, and second, it was the idea of a child of any age being tutored in school-level math and science by a world-class, award-winning genius who was also an infamous recluse. Items one and two on his list were the same. Jake’s brain wasn’t working quite right.
“He was twelve. The questions were easy,” Lange said, as though Jake’s bewilderment had anything to do with the contents of the kid’s homework. Then Lange made pointed eye contact. “Before this digression, we were discussing whether you plan to leave.”
“You picked me up. What else can you move?” Jake asked, dodging the question about his departure. For a moment there, Lange had looked unnervingly… pleading. Big brown eyes or not, that shouldn’t be possible. It was Lange. Mean, recalcitrant, occasionally terrifying Lange. Jake had probably hallucinated it.
He’d probably projected it, being as foolishly worried about leaving Lange alone as he was. Aunt Cora or no Aunt Cora, Lange was alone here. One seventy-something woman an hour away couldn’t do much in an emergency. God, Jake couldn’t have picked a more difficult person to care about.
Lange was squinting at him, so Jake doubled down and asked more questions. “When you move something, does mass matter? Or volume?”
“I haven’t found a limit yet,” Lange said.
“How many things can you move at once?”
“At least three,” Lange said. That seemed correct, since Jake had seen him open the cabin door and bring in two logs.
Jake grinned, nudged the tool roll he’d left on the ground with the toe of his boot, and said, “Wanna try four?”
Lange nodded, pleased to be asked. Jake supposed experimenting was familiar territory for both of them, even if Lange dealt in theory far beyond what Jake could understand.
Jake patted his pockets until he came up with a pad and a pencil. He’d pulled a crate of emergency supplies out of the pod before the repairs and it was still on the ground, so he sat on it.
“Okay. What do you wanna test first?”
“Number of objects.”
One by one, a drill, a screwdriver, and a wrench slid out of the tool roll and hovered in the air. It was kind of creepy, watching things move when nobody was touching them, but Jake couldn’t help the buzz of excitement that ran through him, either.
“Cool. So that’s three.”
Lange added a second screwdriver. Jake made note of that, and by the time he’d looked up again, the whole roll was empty and there were sixteen objects floating in the air.
“Impressive,” he said, and braced for Lange to tell him that it wasn’t.
Instead, Lange beamed at him. The bright, excited expression rendered him almost unrecognizable, and for a second, it cut the signal to Jake’s brain. Reconciling the wide, shallow curve of that smile and the crinkled corners of those eyes with the idea of Solomon Lange took real effort. But there hadn’t been much joy in Lange’s life, these past few weeks. No reason to smile. The novelty captivated Jake. That was it.
Lange raised his brows. Waiting for more.
“What can you do with them?” Jake said, finding his voice. They obviously had to keep experimenting, since it was making Lange so happy. “Could you actually unscrew something? And simultaneously use the drill? Or is it like when people can’t rub their belly and pat their head at the same time?”
Lange frowned like he’d never heard of any such thing. Then the drill rose out of the cloud of tools, slow and unsteady. As its trigger depressed and the motor turned on, the remaining fifteen tools clanged against each other in their fall.
“Okay,” Jake said, not sure why he was bothering to sound reassuring. It wasn’t like Lange had failed a test. “So that’s a limit, of sorts. But could you pick up all the tools and move the whole group around?”
This proved easier and also significantly scarier if Jake imagined himself in the path of sixteen unforgivingly solid objects hurtling through the air.
Finer control proved elusive, and those experiments dampened Lange’s good mood, so Jake switched subjects. “You held the heat shield together yesterday. That’s, what, a thousand kilos? You think that’s your upper limit?”
“I wasn’t lifting its whole weight,” Lange said, as though that lessened the impact of him saving both their lives. “Merely keeping it in place. And it was an extraordinary circumstance.”
“Still,” Jake said. “Besides, knowing how much you can lift seems useful, right?”
Lange said nothing and for a long moment, nothing happened. It was impossible to say what he was focusing on. Jake didn’t know where to look.
Then the pod creaked. It didn’t move, just sat there in the frost and the mud. Of course it didn’t move. That thing weighed five thousand kilos, easy.
“Holy shit.” Jake laughed out loud. “Maybe set your sights a little lower.”
Lange exhaled roughly and his whole body slumped. “I wasn’t trying to move the whole pod, just the heat shield. I can’t do it. It’s beyond me.”
“Yeah, well, it’s beyond the rest of us, too,” Jake said. “I’m amazed you had any impact at all. As for the heat shield, you did it when it mattered. But let’s maybe not experiment any further on my method of getting home.”
“Mm.”
Lange had perked up since they’d been messing around down here, but he looked a little drawn now, his eyes less alert and sweat at his hairline. Lange hadn’t exerted himself in weeks and yesterday he’d nearly passed out from saving them and now Jake had worn him out again. Shit. Lange should probably be resting.
“How do you feel?” Jake asked. “You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?”
“No,” Lang
e said, scowling like he didn’t need to be asked any such thing. Like he wasn’t the guy Jake had recently coaxed into eating a sandwich and showering. Like he hadn’t given himself a magic nosebleed yesterday. “The telekinesis is tiring, but painless.”
“We should test your stamina at some point,” Jake said. “Maybe not today. We’ve already done so much. Let’s go back to the house.”
Lange’s eyes lit up, and Jake had no idea what he’d done to make that happen.
The hike back to the cabin had left Lange embarrassingly winded. He hadn’t protested when McCreery insisted he sit at the kitchen table. He’d been relieved to deposit himself into a chair with minimal wobbling.
McCreery hadn’t said much on the walk, but that was his way. It might not be significant. He was cooking in silence now, slicing an onion with a dexterity that revealed long practice. Lange’s eyes stung. Watching McCreery’s knife clip the hemisphere into translucent white arcs, he remembered something. This wasn’t the first time McCreery had cooked for him.
Months ago at Facility 17, they’d encountered each other in the middle of a sleepless shift. Lange’s wandering had taken him through the halls, and he’d discovered the lights already on in the kitchen. McCreery had been standing at the stove making a perfectly square and golden grilled cheese sandwich.
He’d reacted to Lange’s entry only by saying, “Want one?”
Lange had said yes. The hour or the fatigue—or possibly the scent—had weakened his usual defenses. Whatever it was, he’d accepted McCreery’s offer and had ended up seated at the long metal table with the grilled cheese on a plate in front of him.
Moments later, McCreery had sat down across from him with an identical plate. He’d smiled, which Lange knew was the prelude to small talk, which might lead to companionship, which might lead to emotional investment, which he avoided at all costs. Lange had made a mistake, coming here and sitting down.
Fixing it would be simple enough. He had only to execute his usual tactic. He knew many ways to drive people away, but one of the fastest was to weaponize his own life.
Nowhere Else Page 8