Mike & Karen Ch. 25

Once the makeup was applied, Freja got up and walked over to Vince and Jocy, kneeling in front of them. Jeanie went over and turned out the lights before returning, fishing her phone out of her pocket. In the near darkness, she turned on the flashlight function and put it on 'strobe'. She then pointed the light at Freja's face while the Danish girl slowly moved her head left and right.

The kinetic makeup sparkled and glittered brilliantly under the light.

The demonstration over, Jeanie got up and went to turn on the lights while Freja returned to her seat. Jeanie joined her and looked at her parents eagerly. "So? Whaddya think?"

Jocy didn't seem to know what to say, so Vince finally spoke. "You made all that money from selling this high-tech makeup?"

The two girls nodded.

"The music industry bought it from you?"

"Yeah," Jeanie said, nodding. "And we're one percent investors, so as long as we hold stock, we get..."

She paused and pulled out a series of crib notes she'd made. "Dividends... we get dividends as long as we own stock. That means we get a small percentage every year, right?"

Vince considered and nodded. "One percent of a lot of money is still a lot of money, pumpkin. What else did they agree to?"

Jeanie thought. "If Fre comes up with any improvements, we get extra money for selling it to 'em. I think we're kinda set. Which brings me to my next point..."

She looked at her parents, her expression hopeful. "Daddy, how much do you still owe on this place?"

Vince frowned for a moment and then thought about it. "I think we put down twenty-five percent and then we've paid another fifteen. Why?"

Jeanie was trying to figure out how to say what she wanted to say next. "So... you've paid... forty? Forty percent so far."

"Yes, yndling," Freja said warmly, squeezing her wife's hand. "That is correct."

"So, uh..." Jeanie began, looking through her crib notes for the right words. "Me'n Fre want to pay you back that forty percent with... uh, lemme check here... whatever these interest figures mean... and then handle the rest ourselves, so that you don't need to worry about it. Isn't that great?"

"Jeanie, you're being ridiculous," Jocy said before Vince could answer. "It's all very well and good that you have this money you think you earned, but you're not ready for this big independence of yours."

Jeanie looked upset. She'd thought her parents would be proud. "M-mom, I thought you'd be-"

"All this money of yours won't protect you from being you, Jeanette," Jocy continued, sounding slightly cross. "Playing rich will not be fun and games, young lady. I-"

"Jocelyn?" Freja interjected in a quiet voice.

At the use of her name, Jocy stopped talking and looked at Freja, vaguely offended at her impertinence. "What?"

Freja looked at them levelly, but continued to speak quietly. "I want to make this perfectly clear. Your daughter, she is my wife, and my responsibility. She was fantastic in California. It bothers me much that if you were there you would choose not to be proud of her."

She looked at Jeanie, who was silent but biting her lip, trying to not cry. She then looked back at Jocy. "And this is the end of it. Your daughter and I are now wealthy, wealthier than you and your husband's parents. We did it. We have nothing to answer for. My wife tried to do something wonderful and remove what we know is a financial burden from you, but you could only belittle her, as you always have. And therefore, I will tell you now..."

She leaned forward, her hazel eyes hard. "I will no longer allow my Jeanette to be under your thumb. You will either allow us to buy this condo from you, or we will go and buy another place for ourselves and leave it to you. I am giving you until this visit is over to make your decision."

"Now listen here, young lady," Jocy said hotly, standing out of her seat. "I don't know who you think you are, but-"

"Joc, that enough," Vince said in a firm voice. His wife stopped talking and looked at him in shock. He looked right back at her. "Freja is absolutely right. I'm done disrespecting my daughter. Now sit."

Turning pale, Jocy sat. Vince continued, looking at his daughter and her wife. "Pumpkin, we will absolutely sell this place to you, and we'll make sure all the interest stuff is fair. I... think you've done very well, and I'm proud of you."

"That's all I've ever wanted, daddy," Jeanie said in a trembling voice. "I... I know I'm dumb as a rock and I do crazy things and embarrass you both, but... I try so hard, and when I finally did something really good, it's doesn't seem to count."

"Of course it counts, Jeanie," Vince said, holding out his arms. Jeanie almost leaped off the chesterfield she was on and into his arms, kneeling in front of him and bursting into tears. "It counts, and I'm proud of you, you and Freja."

Freja's throat was slightly dry as she watched, smiling. Jocelyn was also watching, but her expression was rather blank, as if she couldn't understand what she was seeing. Jeanie's head was resting sideways on her father's lap as she tried to arrest her sobs, while his hand gently caressed her curly brown hair. Vince sighed and nodded, accepting his new reality and adjusting for it, what it meant for the future. There was a certain sense of ease in not needing to holding money over his daughter's head anymore, especially when she did something bonkers. He couldn't imagine it not being good for their relationship.

He looked at his wife now. "Joc, we would be the rotten parents we were always worried about being if we weren't thrilled for our baby girl at this moment. She and her wife have done a great thing. And for all the times we've put her down, she's still wonderful. We owe our little girl an apology."

He gathered her up and hugged her close. "I'm so sorry, Jeanie," he said gently, still stroking her hair while she cried.

Freja wiped at her eye.

Vince looked at his wife while letting go of his daughter. "Joc? You got anything to say?"

Jocelyn stared at her daughter, as if she almost didn't recognize her. Jeanie looked her mom, her eyes wet and nervous, terrified of what would happen next. They stared at one another for almost thirty seconds before Jocy slowly reached out and put a hand on her daughter's cheek. Jeanie didn't dare move, but she couldn't help trembling.

"I've spent so much time volunteering to be angry at you to protect myself and my life that I've just built up all this resentment toward you," she almost whispered, still looking into the open, honest eyes of her beautiful young daughter. "And I didn't protect myself from anything. And I might've lost so much..."

A tear trickled down the older woman's cheek. "Jeanie, can you ever forgive me?"

Jeanie burst into tears again and threw herself into her mother's arms, crying. "Mommy, I love you!"

"I love you too, Pumpkin," Jocy choked, resting her cheek on top of Jeanie's head as she held her close, tears on her face. Vince stood up and looked at Freja, holding out his arms. The Danish girl sniffled as she stood and walking into his hug, embracing him tightly.

"We're proud of you both," Vince said, looking over at his wife hugging their daughter and seeming to lose herself in it. He couldn't account for the why, but an incredible sense of relief flooded over him. "And yes, you'll no doubt still drive us crazy on occasion, but I'm looking forward to all our futures, instead of trying to keep them separate."

He now looked down at Freja and smiled. "Which is funny, because we're sort of separating our lives with this newfound financial independence of yours."

"I am knowings," Freja agreed, wiping at her eye again as she looked over at Jeanie and her mother. Jocy finally let her daughter go and looked over at Freja. As Jeanie pulled away, Jocy nervously held out her arms toward the Danish girl. Freja choked again as she knelt in front of her mother-in-law and hugged her, neither woman saying anything, but finally with peace between them. Vince had his arm around his daughter while the two of them watched the scene play out.

"That was a big cheque they sent you, Jeanie," he mused. "And just a partial deposit. And yes, you could have made a lot more with some hardcore negotiating by professionals, but like you said, you two did this. And that makes me even prouder than if you'd come home with ten times this amount. It's still a lot of money."

"I know," Jeanie giggled, still sniffling. "Like I said to the profs when we were in Frisco, I haven't seen that many zeroes since my Grade 8 report card."

"Oh, I might have known those were the heavy guns you had helping you," Jocy sighed in vague exasperation as she released Freja from the hug. "Still, I imagine they were equipped and prepared for the event. Do you think you might tell us what happened down there?"

"Not right now, mother, I would prefer we just enjoy these moments," Freja answered, standing up again and pulling Jocy to her feet. The four of them all hugged for several seconds before Vince let them go.

"D'you think gram and gramps'll be proud of Fre an' me?" Jeanie asked. There was an uncomfortable silence from Vince and Jocy, causing Jeanie to blush. "Oh. Right. They'll crap all over mom."

Vince coloured slightly at his daughter's statement and shook his head. "No. No, they won't. I'm done with them disrespecting my wife. It doesn't matter if she grew up poor, she is the woman I love, and I should've threatened to leave everything behind if they didn't respect her. I failed you, Joc. Not anymore. They're hearing about this, and they're not shitting on you about it. And if they do, they catch Hell from me."

"Vince, no," Jocy said, going almost pale. "They'll cut us out of everything!"

"I'm done caring," he said firmly, indicating that his mind was made up. "Besides, I've got the inside track on this hot new cosmetics product, so maybe I'll invest and make a bundle..."

He smiled and winked at Freja and Jeanie, who both giggled.

"And if they're gonna be stubborn about it, I'll just buy all the property out from under them and they can live in a posh retirement home," Vince said. "You girls are my family, and you, Jocy, are my wife. The times, they are a'changin'."

Jocy blushed and hid her face against her husband's shoulder. "Shut up, you lug..."

"I know there's paperwork and stuff to do now, but there's also stuff to get done at home," Vince declared, looking at them all. "I guess we can close down your side of the account since you have a new one now, brimming with money."

"I dunno, daddy," Jeanie said, shrugging. "If you an' mom ever run into financial trouble, I can just give you money easily if you keep it open, right?"

"Jeanie!" Jocy exclaimed, looking aghast, but then all three women started giggling. "You little brat!"

"Not to mention I'm sure I have a lot of testy conversations with my parents coming up while I put them in their place," Vince added.

"I like this new side of you," Jocy almost purred, smirking at him. "Anything else you want to put in a certain place once we get home?"

"Why wait until home?" Vince reasoned, shrugging. "That's why God invented rest stops, right?"

Jocy blushed, squeaking and giggling as she slapped her husband's shoulder. "Well let's get going then!"

She hugged her daughter and Freja again before they picked up their coats. Freja helped Jocy put hers on then they walked the older couple to the door, everyone in the same, delighted frame of mind. They hugged again before Vince and Jocy hurried out the door. Once they were in the elevator, with Jocy still giggling like a girl, Jeanie shut the door, leaning against it and sighing, looking at the ceiling.

"Thanks, Fre," she said finally, smiling at her lovely wife. "That was all your doing, y'know. You're the one that finally got through to 'em."

"I took no pleasure in the doing of it, Jeanette," Freja replied, exhaling. "But I will always stand up for you, even to your parents. Just as it now sounds like your father will do to his in defence of his wife. I am happy he will do this."

"It's like a whole new beginning, isn't it?" Jeanie said as they walked back into the living room, already shedding her shirt and bra.

"It would be nice to think so, but we must not expect your parents to change overnight," Freja pointed out, also getting naked. "There will be days where your mom, she is the old Jocy, trying to be a controlling bitch. And days where your dad, he is not so assertive. But this was indeed a pleasant start, ja?"

"Oh, fuck yeah," Jeanie said as she lay down on the plush rug, totally naked, and spread her legs wide. Freja knelt between her legs and pressed her pussy against her wife's. Their hands clasped and they began a familiar, practiced rocking and squirming motion, slithering together wetly. "Mom gave me a scare there when she copped that big attitude, but I think she was just kinda panicking about the change, y'know?"

"I do indeed, my love," Freja sighed, closing her eyes as she girl-fucked her wife slowly, the two of them letting the excitement and anxiety of the past hour bleed away through their lovemaking. "And after this, we will have a shower and then wait for their inevitable call."

Jeanie considered that. "It's gonna take us at least an hour to restore the shower to its normal operational parameters, Fre. There's so many dildoes to stick back in place."

"Operational parameters?" Freja laughed, pushing down with her hips and making Jeanie shiver and groan. "Have you been spending too much time speaking with Alex?"

"Hey, I wanna be a smartie too, y'know," Jeanie said, pushing up with her hips in retaliation. "If he could just fuck it into me with his jizz, that'd be great. But no, gotta do the yap-yap thing. So yeah, sometimes I pick up shit he says."

"To quote Alex, then, 'Thank Sanguinius for that!'" Freja quipped, both girls laughing as they ground their cunts together with increasing pressure and speed.

Jocy called, but they both just let it go straight to voicemail as they came together, wailing loudly.

***

A lecture hall, St. George Campus, 1987...

"Recently, methods in which we decrease temperature and quantum field simultaneously have been proposed and as a result, we can attain a better solution than the simulated annealing and the simple quantum annealing," Professor Horvath droned, tapping with his wooden pointer at his huge board, covered in chalk numbers, symbols, equations, and smudges. "Moreover, as another example of methods in which we use both thermal fluctuation and quantum fluctuation, novel quantum annealing method with the Jarzynski Method was also proposed, which is based on nonequilibrium statistical physics."

Karen tried to hold in her sigh of desperate boredom as she listened to Horvath continue, his tone on the verge of putting her (and a full two thirds of the class) to sleep. This man's cadence was a guaranteed cure for insomnia. He reminded her of that actor with the deep, dull voice, Ben Stein, only with less pep in his tone. And to boot, this old fossil had an annoying habit of losing his train of thought, trailing off into silence while he tried to remember what he was talking about.

Karen fully believed in rewarding merit, but there were times the concept of tenure irked her mightily.

"In this lesson, we will review the Ising Model, which is the fundamental model of magnetic systems," Horvath continued, again tapping his chalkboard. "We will also examine two optimization problems, the Travelling Salesman Problem, and the Clustering Problem. Furthermore, we'll discuss how these states give way to the Ising Method of nuclear magnetic resonance."

Dear God, what is he even on about? Karen wondered in exasperation as she listened, her chin resting on her hand as she kept herself upright. She was having better luck than many of the other students. She could see at least eight of the fifty-nine in the lecture hall had gone to sleep. The large, semicircular room with its ascending rows could hold two hundred, but Experimental Physics didn't exactly pack in the crowds these days. Theoretical was the hot commodity, and Mathematical, her chosen field, was even more niche than experimental. Not that she minded, but these cross classes with Horvath were painful.

Why is he blathering about this? The Ising Method gave way to the Monte Carlo Method almost two years ago when it resolved Travelling Salesman!

But this didn't stop the redoubtable Professor Cornelius Horvath. No sir!

"- because of the Kibble-Zurek Mechanism within the Ising Spin Chain, and order by disorder in frustrated systems..."

Karen was reasonably certain she'd be having more fun right now if she'd been chained down naked, covered in paper cuts, doused in Tabasco sauce, and forced to listen to a Vogon poetry jam.

"To consider the second order phase transition at finite temperature in the ferromagnetic systems, we define the dimensionless temperature g as g equals T- Tc over Tc, where Tc is considered the transitional phase temperature. When the absolute value of g is small, it is believed that the scaling ansatz is valid..."

Oh, freddled gruntbuggly... Karen moaned internally, putting her face on her arms as they rested on the desk. Why on earth is he still teaching? I know I'm somewhat distracted today, and damned if I'm not horny, but this is torture!

She was sitting relatively high up in the rows of seats, maybe the seventh row up and back. Not many people were near her, thankfully, to feel her waves of bored anguish. The kid in front of her was almost snoring, he was so out of it. She could see other students yawning, fighting to stay awake. She sympathised, but not a one of them understood all this material already, the way she did.

Well, that wasn't true.

Her eyes flicked over to one of the ends of the curved seating rows in the big hall, and in one seat loomed the titan figure of DeBourne. He was watching intently and taking notes diligently. Despite his prodigious memory, which she admitted easily rivalled hers, he always wrote everything down, in case some terrible blow to the head from a rogue asteroid impaired his cognitive functions. It would take a direct hit from a comet or asteroid to damage that cranium, mind. Karen doubted conventional Earth weaponry was up to the task.

What about Vogon poetry?

Mike was nodding as he wrote all the information down as quickly as Horvath droned it. He was well ahead of the game, in fact, since clearly nobody had told Horvath that the Ising Method was currently out of date. That, or if he'd been told, the old dinosaur had simply forgotten. Still, Mike was here to learn and wasn't about to mess this up. Maybe with this old model plus his recent findings in Calabi-Yau, he could come up with some improvements to the ferromagnetic model and correct the ansatz scaling for T minus TC...

The students around him were falling asleep, not that he blamed them. It took considerable willpower to make it through one of Horvath's full lectures, and Heaven help you if you'd just eaten. Mike had forgone food for the past three hours, just in case. One student two rows down directly him in the row below was out like a light. Horvath hadn't noticed, and nobody else blamed the young man, or cared. The student sitting behind the sleeping man seemed to be barely holding on, his head nodding from side to side in his hands.

He wouldn't hold it against them. Mike knew all this stuff already; he couldn't expect anyone else in the room to have the same grasp of it that he did.

Well, that wasn't entirely true...

Mike needed hydration, because Horvath's voice was sucking his brain dry. He pulled up the large plastic bottle from beside his chair and unscrewed the top, taking several stiff swigs from it. Water, of course, although vodka or tequila would have been more gratifying. He kept writing.