It was that short moment of evening when the sky glows like a blue jewel and if you don't stop what you are doing and enjoy it, you miss it. She could see it through the windowpanes, and she cocked her head toward them, stopping the conversation.
"You see that, the color of the sky? I love it when it looks like that. It's so..." she searched for a word, "...peaceful."
"Refracted sunlight has an emotional effect," he said, looking interested.
She smiled widely. That was Isaac, always analyzing everything. Except the one thing he should have been analyzing the most: himself. He never understood the dark forces that drove him, and he had sublimated so much of himself that he wasn't aware he even had any emotions. But she was. And she loved him. And she suspected he loved her, or would have if he could only breach the fort he had built around himself.
Initially it had been a meeting of minds. She was introverted, her personality coagulated around ideas rather than experiences. So when they had met at a party, after painfully introducing themselves, it had been a shock that they had so much to talk about, so much in common. Soon Wallflower Amy and Antisocial Isaac had retreated from the commotion--together. They talked for hours, the kind of fast, fascinated talk most people reserved for gossip. About everything from viruses to theology to whether Macs were better than PCs. They did the same at the next party, and the next, until finally Shy Isaac got up the courage to ask Amy the Brain out. Now they were together constantly, and connected more and more tightly. Except in the physical sense. They had had talks that she could only classify as intimate, but Isaac had never even held her hand, and she was pretty sure he was clueless about physical affection.
She, however, was not. There had been one long-term relationship, a nice love, that had ended when the guy had gotten a job the whole way across the country. He'd not been her intellectual equal, but he was a good man and a good lover. Now her mind was happy, but her body was in overdrive demanding sex--demanding Isaac.
She swallowed. They were in the living room, her sitting on the sofa, him in a chair pulled up opposite her so they could talk face to face.
Now how am I going to do this?
she thought.
Seduce a guy whose body is just a carrying case for his brain?
She could ruin everything if she freaked him out. But...she could also unleash him, and liberate a love that would make Antony and Cleopatra look like Beavis and Butthead.
"Everything has an emotional impact," she said finally. "And now it's almost dark, and that has an emotional charge as well."
"How?" he said. His face was half-silhouette now, lit only by the small lamp in the corner of the room. But he was leaning toward her, interested.
She drew a breath. "Velvet darkness," she said, making her voice smooth and mysterious. "Midnight plush. You see how intimate it sounds?"
Was it her imagination, or did his face flush? Briefly his eyes fluttered down; then he dared to look into hers. His lips opened a little and then he murmured, "Yes, I see."
So there was just one little crack in the wall of the fort.
"Do you feel it?"
"What?"
"The intimacy."
"Er...yes." Again his eyes fluttered down.
The cushions rustled as she slid toward him. "I do too," she said.
"I...ah..." his mind was stuck in some kind of Mobius strip, or else it was trying to force a new pathway. She waited to see which it was, and then he moved his hand forward and lay his fingers against hers. She was stunned at how intense the shock of pleasure was, just at this one simple movement. True, she hadn't made love in a while, but this was more than that. It was different now because Isaac was her mate. There could be no other man, because no other man was like him.
He was looking at her with deep concentration, and she could guess that realizing she was his mate too was taking some time to synthesize. Or maybe it was more. Finally he said, in an aching voice, "I know nothing about this."
"About sex, you mean?" she said, twining her fingers with his.
He nodded, looking unhappy.
"Well, then, we'll learn together."
"But you have already..."
