It's Always Time Act 03 Ch. 02

["…nanomek always holds a little energy and some of your cum—maybe a milliliter or two—in reserve, out of instinct or something like that…"]

"You're so quiet I can't tell if you're freaking out or not," Yves added.

"I can't afford to freak out," Dee said, "now that I can bring Galatea back."

"How?"

"Three Ds."

"What?"

"The three Ds," Dee repeated, searching out glasses and clear plastic cups. "Remember? She said that's all she'd ever need."

Yves thought for a moment, then twitched with sudden recognition. "I can help you with the first two," he offered.

"I don't think we'll need more of the third."

Yves was collecting plastic cups near the bedroom window when he said, "What the Hell is this?"

Dee glanced up from his growing stack of glasses. "It's a webcam on top of a broom handle." He pointed at camera's winking LED light. "It's on."

Yves followed the camera's cabling to Bee's worktable. He fished a receipt out of a plastic bag crumpled by the keyboard. "Bee bought a three hundred gigabyte external hard drive a few days ago." He sat in Bee's mesh desk chair and brought his computer out of hibernation. "It's full." He hunched over Bee's computer monitor and called up an image viewer. "Oh my God," he said, mouse clicking furiously.

"What?"

"Well, Dee," Yves sighed as the monitor flickered. "I've always wondered, and now I know, thanks to you, Galatea, and a little help from Bee."

"Know what?"

Yves punched a key and a high resolution video filled the screen. "I am completely, one hundred percent, absolutely gay. This stuff isn't turning me on at all."

Dee came up behind him. "That's a prototype of her bed trick, I think. Too bad we never got to try the final version."

Yves pressed his palms against his cheeks, aghast. "I'm not turned on but I can't look away. How are you breathing between those?" He advanced the video a few minutes. "Or under there?" He advanced it again. "Or in that?"

"That's when I learned how to hold my breath for half an hour," Dee said, blushing. "At least. Never found out how long I could go. I, uh, kind of take over in a little while. That's part of the game…Yeah, there I go. Huh. Wow."

"'Wow?'" Yves laughed, hitting the fast forward button. "I see how you learned Goojitsu." He turned to face Dee. "Why aren't you angry? The Dee I know would be punching holes in walls and threatening to kill Bee."

"He's already dead," Dee said. He waved an arm over all the containers on the floor. "Besides, if this works, he's given Galatea back to me. I let all this happen—I gave him the nanomek and then I pushed Galatea away. And now thanks to Bee I have a chance to put things right."

"Except Bee will still be dead," Yves pointed out.

Dee shrugged. "I don't have a problem with that, to be honest."

Few minutes later they had almost a dozen cups and glasses filled with water catching the sunlight from the sill of kitchenette's bay window. Even in the cloudless dawn the water looked polluted with algae and silt. "Maybe we should stir it? I mean 'her?'" Yves said after staring for a long while. Silent minutes crawled passed and he added, "Uh, maybe I should lie down for a while and you could work on the third D. I'm beat. Literally."

Dee took up two cups, careful not to spill a drop. "The bathtub," he said, making his slow way to the bathroom.

Dee placed the two cups gently on the bathroom's linoleum floor. He hunted down Bee's drain stopper and made sure the seal was air tight before he poured the cups' contents into the tub and started the tap running warm. Yves came in with two more glasses and Dee said, "You rest a while and I'll fill the tub. Maybe if I can collect enough together…"

In about an hour the tub was half full with warm limeade. "I'm going to have to call in sick soon," Yves called from the couch.

"Maybe you should go," Dee said, watching the random ripples of the green bathwater, hoping to see any kind of pattern. "It looks like she's going to need the final D after all—or maybe this just isn't working and I need to find where Cherry Cupcake's taken the rest of her. I still have to do that, no matter what happens now. There's no way I'm going to let Cherry Cupcake hurt her—any of her—anymore. But I don't want her to hurt you again, either."

Yves shuffled in and put a kind hand on Dee's shoulder. "Forget that, I'm sticking with you." He took his hand away. "Although I will duck out for this last bit."

"Of course," Dee said, his smile wan.

"Maybe there's something I can do in the meantime," Yves suggested. "There's no window in here. What if I borrowed some grow lights?"

"Some what?"

"A natural light lamp," Yves explained. "You know, for tropical fish? Or indoor gardening? Or…"

"There's only one person I know who, uh, 'gardens' in a closet," Dee said.

"There's only one person I know who'd be crazy enough to believe us."

They locked eyes and chorused, "Ursula."

"I'll go talk to her," Yves said. "You should stay here in case Ursula is affected by your public fuckability."

"We definitely need a better nickname for that, too," Dee said. "Do you really think Ursula would be affected? I mean, she's gayer than you."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You came out of the closet five, six years ago, right? Ursula took a cheerleader to her junior prom."

Yves waved his dismissal. "Okay, okay. The truth? I hope not but I don't want to find out. Do you think your friendship with her would survive something like that? Plus, you've got things to do."

"Good points all," Dee said, sitting on the toilet. "Get going, and close the door behind you."

Yves smirked. "You can keep those pants when you're done. Jesus, Dee," Yves said, smile fading, "for a guy who's about to win back his true love, you look miserable. Dee? Is there something you want to tell me?"

After a while, Dee whispered, "Just go."

Yves left without another word, closing the bathroom door behind him. Dee waited to hear the front door of the apartment to open and shut, but after a quizzical, silent minute he remembered the front door was now scraps of metal scattered in the foyer. He leaned forward, clicked the door lock, and dropped down to kneel at the foot of the tub. "Okay," he sighed.

After a final moment of hesitation, he dropped a hand down into the tub. It made a loud slap when his hand hit the mixture and he jerked back, mournful. The liquid felt warm and tacky. His hand came away filmed with fluid.

Damn. That felt awful.

Resting his head against the cool ceramic lip of the tub, Dee said, "I can't do this."

* * * *

Yves trudged up the cement stairs to the second floor. Pain flared from the muscle and tendons of his waist with each step. He felt like someone had kicked him in the groin, but he had felt that way for over an hour now and was growing accustomed. You don't get good at Aikido, he thought, without spending many years being bad at Aikido. I've been hurt before.

A stitch in the ribs took his breath away when he opened the door to the hallway. I've lost fights before.

He moved down the citrus-perfumed hallway, resisting the urge to limp and favor his left leg. I've been robbed of my dignity before. I've even been—His right leg folded up under him so he sat there in the middle of the hallway, searching for balance. Breathe. Victory is not getting cut. Breathe. Eight forces sustain creation: Movement and stillness. Breathe. Extension and contraction. Breathe. Unification and division. Breathe. Solidity and fluidity—"Oh, for Heaven's sake," he said with sudden realization. "If Aikido has anything to do with goo girls and solid boys I'm going to take up ballet instead."

Yves stood with composure and crossed the hallway to knock on Ursula's door.

"Just a minute," came Ursula's dreamy alto voice. "Who is it?"

"Yves."

"Yves?" Ursula asked. The door opened. The funk of patchouli unrolled in the air.

No one was there until Yves remembered to look down. Ursula slipped on her oversized, oval eyeglasses with wide, red, plastic frames and peered sleepily up at him, her angular face as pale as milk. Yves could see the mousy brown of the roots of her hair, dyed a lustrous black with some homemade henna concoction and pulled into two thick, braided pigtails curled over her shoulders and dangling down to her hips. She wore a tight set of boy's black sweats, a cat burglar's outfit ruined by an overstuffed pair of baby blue bunny slippers with long fuzzy pink ears. "Earth to Yves."

"Sorry," Yves said. "I've never seen you…well, anyone…dressed like that. Ever."

"I'm sleeping in today," she said as if that explained everything. "You look like Hell, Yves. Are you okay? What's going on?"

Yves glanced down the corridor. I should have come up with something to say before knocking. Oh, well, bean spillage time. "Actually, Dee sent me because—"

"Galatea's in trouble," Ursula said, not missing a beat.

"God damn, woman," Yves cried out, "how do you always do that?"

* * * *

"Galatea," Dee said to the tub of sugary green soup. "I don't know if you can hear me. I don't know if you have any nanomek left in there. But I've realized something. I've realized why I couldn't do it that first time. It's the same reason why I can't do it now. And I want to explain."

He turned and sat with his back against the tub. "I love you and I know you love me, and I've got this thing for you too, just like you have for me. But I don't have a thing for Jell-O, or goo, or maybe even goo girls. I don't have a thing for things." He laughed. "I know this is sounding like one of my rehearsed hissy fits, but it's not. Please hear me out, if you're in there.

"In fantasy, and on the Internet—it is a blast, Galatea, just like you said—I can get turned on by almost anything. That's what fantasy is for. That's what the Internet is for. It's harmless, guiltless pleasure. But actually sticking my dick into a bowl of Jell-O that I didn't know was you, that I thought was just Jell-O? That isn't harmless, at least not to me, although I'm sure it is for some. And neither is masturbating over what is probably the corpse of the woman I love more than anything else in the world."

"So, I can't do that." Dee stood up. "More than that, I won't do that." He pulled off Yves' muscle shirt and hopped out of the Hammer-pants and underwear. "But I will do this," he said, and slid naked into the tub.

The liquid sloshed over him, a warm green film sliming his hair, gumming up his nose, greasing his stomach, trailing over his legs and puddling in his crotch. Every inch of his skin felt pasty. Soon the rippling from his descent petered out. Other than the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, nothing moved in the tub. "I love you, Galatea," Dee said, his voice distant and muffled to his plugged-up ears. "I said it unthinkingly before, but I mean it now more than ever: you are a part of me."

On the inner curve of his left thigh, Dee felt a single, solitary nanogasm.

* * * *
In the Blood of Eden,
We’ve done everything we can.
In the Blood of Eden,
So we end as we began:
With the man in the woman,
And the woman in the man.

—Peter Gabriel, Blood of Eden
* * * *