Madison came down with a cold. Nothing serious, just the natural consequence of having sex in a freezer, I assumed. She spent a day in bed to recuperate and Harry brought her warm chicken noodle soup, tea with honey, and lime sherbet with ginger ale. She was perfectly fine the next day, fixing her own breakfast toast with fig jam in the kitchen. Of course, owing to the nature of their relationship, Harry came down with the same bug. We all thought it best to switch off the transistor for a bit and let the double spend a few days mending in the hibernation bath.
Madison was in the lab first thing in the morning, midway up a ladder, cleaning one of the bronze cisterns. She glanced over her shoulder when she heard me enter, wiped her hands against her jeans, and climbed down.
“Nice to have you back,” I muttered, barely looking at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Put me to work. I can make up for the last few days.”
“The cisterns are a good start,” I said. “Drain them and you can wipe the insides, too.”
She nodded, though I could tell she had hoped I wouldn’t be too sour.
“There’s a phase two?” She asked from the ladder, stretching to clean the far end.
“That’s what I hear,” I said. “You probably know more about it than me.”
“We haven’t talked much,” she said, then corrected herself. “He hasn’t told me much about the project, I mean.”
“All I know is we need to get this lab cleaned and start a new batch of organics,” I said. “The professor’s supposed to help as soon as your new toy is up and running again.”
She climbed down and opened the cisterns release valve. Water pooled across the floor drain, and as she waited for the tank to empty, she walked over to where I sat and put her arms around my neck. She gave me a kiss—very platonic—on the cheek.
“Don’t be too sore with me,” she said. She walked back toward the ladder, tying her hair, her lovely blonde strands, atop her head.
“Do you sleep with both of them?” I asked.
She turned, surprised by my frankness.
“They’re the same,” she said.
“Both bodies at once, I guess I mean.”
“You want to know if I have threesomes with the professor’s two bodies?”
“Isn’t that the point?”
Madison shrugged and climbed to the top of the ladder. She looked into the empty cistern, made a face about the level of grime, then began to undo her jeans.
“We’ll, I’ve definitely tried,” she said, struggling to pull the tight denim from her hips. Those transparent white cotton panties were beneath and, snagged on the pants, fell a little lower than they should have before Madison pulled them back up.
“I told him I’m very good at multitasking, very good with​​—” she glanced at me then cut herself off. “But he seems completely uninterested.”
She climbed into the tank and crouched below the rim.
“It’s like he wants to forget about the existence of his older body altogether,” her voice echoed from inside the cistern. “Wants nothing to do with it. Even for…” she stood for a minute, holding out her arms like a pinup model, then crouched back out of sight.
After work Madison retired to the library. Said she was looking forward to a quiet evening of reading with a glass of wine. Read more »