“It’s fine. Annoying but typical,” Madison said in the lab the next morning. “Part of having an older male boss.”
“He ask you to do anything else with your young hands?”
“Like you asked the other night?”
I ignored her, studying my organics beneath a microscope.
“Let me see,” she said after a moment. I leaned back from the eyepiece and Madison squeezed herself between me and the table.
“Oh, here,” she said. Still wearing my sweater, she pulled it over her head, the shirt beneath briefly sliding up her bare abdomen before falling back to her waist. She leaned over to peer into the microscope, again pressing her ass against my lap.
“Are these growing like they’re meant to?” she asked, adjusting the viewfinder.
“Getting there.” I placed my hands on her waist and slipped them just below her shirt, caressing the midriff she had quickly flashed.
I felt her ass wriggle against me.
“How long?” she asked. “Until they’re ready I mean.”
“Days,” I said. “Plenty of time.
She spun around and rubbed her hands along my biceps as I held her shirt above her bellybutton.
“Did you watch me undress last night?”
“I would never.”
“Good. I was wearing very bright underwear. Electric orange. Didn’t cover much skin.”
“What about now?” I stretched her waistband toward me, trying to peer in.
“Very boring. Cheap cotton. You can probably see right through it.”
She unbuttoned my pants, unzipped them, and felt the fabric of my boxer-briefs between her fingertips.
“Yes. Much thinner than yours.”
Then she zipped my pants, refastened the button, and pushed me gently away.
“Good to know I don’t have to worry about covering my mirror,” she said.
Which was of course exactly what she did. When I finished my shower that night, I found her side of the mirror veiled by a piece of fabric.
But it was only a bedsheet, too thin to block the light completely. It created a gauzy, mysterious glow, as if her entire room was filled with an early morning fog. There I saw her silhouette rise from her own four-post bed. Then she stretched, a soft warm blur, and lifted her hair above her head before letting it fall. Whatever she wore, she slipped it from her shoulders, and I could make out two watercolor blurs of purple across the peach of her skin. She stretched again – I heard her moan faintly through the wall – and then one of the purple blurs, the higher of the two, fell to the floor.
Then I heard a phone ring. Not the tinny ring of a cellphone, but the room-piercing bells of an old rotary landline. Like the one next to my bed, but that one was quiet.
It came from Madison’s room. Her silhouette, climbing into bed, stopped and lifted the receiver. I heard her ask “hello,” expecting, perhaps, me. Then I heard a “yes sir,” “of course, sir,” a short laugh, a “no trouble at all, sir,” then a “no trouble at all, Harry.”
Then she hung up, and soon after that her light went out.
I must have fallen asleep, but I could have sworn I heard two voices in her room later that night, one shushing the other.
On my way to the professor’s study in the morning, I saw Madison exit his bedroom carrying an empty tray. She wore my sweatshirt again, which covered just enough of the top of her thighs that I couldn’t tell if she was wearing anything underneath. Her hair looked a bit mussed.
“Early morning?” I asked.
“Coffee duty again,” she shrugged.
“Hmm,” I said. “Are you going to join us in the study?”
“I’ll meet you in the lab, I just want to change first.”
I raised an eyebrow and watched her walk down the hallway, curious if I’d see a flash of the purple panties or bare bum peek beneath the sweater, rather than shorts, but I never got a clear answer.
“Morning Charlie,” the professor said, easing into his desk chair with a cup of coffee. Did he seem especially chipper? “How’s the transistor coming?”
“Early stages, but it’s coming along.”
“Excellent,” he said. “I’ve heard from Madison that things are shaping up nicely on her end, as well.”
“What I’ve seen checks out,” I said.
He took a sip of coffee and nodded appreciatively to himself.
“Early stages, but probably the right time to introduce the DNA sample,” he said.
“I believe so, sir. Will that be yours or do we have someone less personally invested?”
“Oh no, I hate to burden others with these kind of experiments. Mine will —” he searched around his desktop, then looked toward his bedroom door. “Damn,” he said. “One moment.”
Taking his cane from the side of the desk, he shuffled step by step to the door and, once open, step by step toward the far wall. I scanned his room from where I stood, and while I thought I saw a copy of Madame Bovary on his bed, I couldn’t be sure.
He opened a small fridge built into a dresser, put something in his jacket pocket, then made his way to me.
“I’m sorry, I hope you don’t mind,” he said, and he gave me, from his pocket, a vial filled with a milky white substance. “I hate to be crude, but I hate needles”
Madison was wearing skinny jeans and a white knit sweater when I found her in the lab, leaning over her own microscope to check the progress of her organics.
“Can you sequence this?” I said, slipping the vial into her back pocket. “If you haven’t already.”
She tried to bend to glance at the object in her pocket, then took the vial with her hand and, after staring at it for a perplexed moment, grimaced.
“Could you?”
“Not a chance,” I said.
She took the vial to the other side of the lab and I went to work with my microscope.
A few minutes later, Madison sat on the table next to my sample and crossed her legs. “When, pray tell, would I have sequenced that?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, Miss Lounds?”
“You said if I haven’t already. When would I have?”
“I don’t know what you do with your time,” I said. “I heard you take a phone call from the professor and this morning you’re leaving his bedroom.”
“Because he called and asked me to bring him coffee this morning.”
“Then there’s voices in your room at night.”
“Voices? I got off the phone and went to sleep.”
“Just laid there all night?”
“I spent awhile waiting for you to come over, but yes.”
I considered the possibility that I’d made a mistake, then tried to go back to my microscope, but Madison leaned forward and looked me in the eye.
“Were you implying, Charlie, that I somehow helped collect that sample?”
I tried to think of what to say, but taking too long, she got up and stormed back to work. When I went back to my room that night, it looked like there were two thick towels hanging over Madison’s side of the mirror.