Total pages in book: 41
Estimated words: 41137 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 206(@200wpm)___ 165(@250wpm)___ 137(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 41137 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 206(@200wpm)___ 165(@250wpm)___ 137(@300wpm)
When I break away, she takes a breath. “That’s a good point. I wouldn’t want you to fit in with this.”
“Maybe that’s what you like about me. I’m far from anything you’ve known before.”
“Partly,” she admits.
“And maybe you’re ready to leave all this behind.”
“Maybe,” she says again.
I kiss her neck, take her hair. “I’m not rushing you, Clara. I would never do that.”
“I know,” she says, kissing my lips. “There’s still time for all this, right?”
“For being young? Absolutely.”
I kiss her, pushing her back onto her bed. We kiss for a while like that, and I don’t try to push anything else. I just like being with her, kissing her, my body tight against hers.
She’s right that I don’t fit in here. It’s a young room, the room of a young woman, and I’m much older than all this. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find a middle space, somewhere that we both fit.
That’s what I want. I don’t need things my way. I just want her.
After a few more minutes, we break off. “Come on, let’s hang out with Mac,” she says.
“Okay,” I say, standing. “But just so you know, you’re going to have to be punished for that.”
Her eyes go wide. “Punished?”
“You told someone about us without asking me.”
She frowns, looking at the floor. “I know. I’m sorry.”
I step closer, lift her chin up toward me. “It’s okay. I think you’ll enjoy your punishment.”
There’s a little smile on her lips as I kiss her and lead her out of the room, back toward the living room.
We drink more wine, we laugh with Mac, who’s surprisingly funny. After a few hours, I kiss Clara goodnight, and I leave, sneaking out into the night.
As I drive back to my house, I keep thinking one thing, over and over again.
We can be normal. We can have that.
Eventually, we can get past all the things holding us apart, holding us back, and we can be normal.
Semesters end. Teaching jobs end.
We can move forward and have lives together.
If Mac can find out and not lose it, the world can deal with this. And when I’m not her professor anymore, it’ll become much less scandalous.
And anyway, I don’t plan on being a professor forever. Sooner or later, I’ll give it up and move forward with my VR company.
Hopefully I’ll have Clara by my side.
15
Clara
I’m smiling the next morning.
There’s no other way to explain it. I’m smiling because Jason came to my apartment, spent time with my friend, and it felt…
Normal.
Strange, at first, but normal.
Which is what I wanted, and what I was afraid of.
I think part of the magic with Jason is the forbidden taboo nature of it all. I mean, we have to hide, obviously, but he’s also way older than me. He’s totally off limits.
But if we can sit in my living room with my friend and drink wine and make jokes and watch stupid TV, then…. I don’t know.
What does that mean?
We can be normal. Maybe it means we can be normal.
I keep buzzing all around that idea as the next internship day starts. We’re about a week out from the end of the semester now, and the four guys are basically ignoring me these days.
We’ve been working on implementing Howard’s idea. I haven’t been too into it or excited about it, but I’m doing my job anyway. I want to beat the hell out of these guys and I need Jason to see how much better I am than they are.
We go through the different tasks, stitching together the necessary components that’ll build up Howard’s implementation. Once it’s all together, in theory, the whole program should be that much more efficient and easier to create from the bottom up.
But as we keep chugging away at the different modules, I keep running into these little problems. Small things, at first, just little nitpicky things that have to do with the design.
But once I start on a particularly key section of the code, I start noticing something.
It’s not lining up. Howard wants everything to become more efficient when we’re done, but I’m not seeing that, not at all.
In fact, everything’s slowing down.
“Howard, are you seeing this?” I ask him toward the end of the session. “I just pushed my update for that last module and it’s like… crawling.”
He frowns at his screen. “Yeah, I saw. Probably just network issues.”
“We’re hardwired together. There’s no way.”
“Computers don’t have enough power?” Alan offers.
“Can’t be it. I mean, this is supposed to make it easier to run this stuff on slower, crappier hardware.”
Howard frowns at his keyboard. “It’s just lag,” he says finally. “It’s not the code. I think it’s solid.”
“It’s solid,” Coop says, getting his nose covered in shit in the process.
Alan and Parker both agree and I’m left grinding my teeth.
Network lag makes no sense. If the hardware isn’t keeping up, we’re making this whole thing worse, not better.