9

All the parts of Kendra that had responded to Matt on the dance floor did so again, but more so.  Her body definitely wanted more of him, while her mind feebly trotted out the image of her barefoot and pregnant self surrounded by many tots who wobbled and fell on the dirt floor of a shabby cabin.  She stopped kissing Matt to get a better look at him.  She touched his face.  Visually, he seemed fresh-shaven, but his skin felt far more bristly than her father’s, the only other male face she had touched.  Kendra smiled.

He took her glass of water, and put both drinks on one of the little tables on the patio, then he took her hand, and led her out the little gate to the not-bar side of life.  Kendra giggled.

“What’s so funny?” Matt asked as he put his arm around her shoulder.

“You don’t look like a student of math.”

“Oh?” he cocked one eyebrow at her, and they both laughed.   “You don’t look like a student of physics either.”

“Good,” she said, and was surprised to find that she meant it.  Uh oh.

He told her about the politics and machinations afoot in the math department as they walked north, headed away from the university.  Matt seemed to have a clear sense of his colleagues and of himself.  She found herself drawn to his stories.  She hardly noticed the half-mile walk.

As she waited on the doorstep while Matt unlocked the building’s front door, Kendra wondered if she’d be there often enough for it to become familiar.  Would he give her a key some day?  Chiding herself for even considering a serious involvement with the first boy she kissed, Kendra glanced back at the street, and gasped.  Xenopoulos had just stepped under a streetlight across the street.  The spy wore a dark jogging outfit, but still managed to look powerful, sexy and mysterious.  She smiled at Kendra.  It was a hungry, knowing smile, and it gave Kendra the creeps.  Spy or vampire?

“What is it?”  Matt turned to look, but Xenopoulos had vanished in the shadows.

“Nothing,” Kendra said.  She pushed past him into the well-lit entryway of the building.  “So,” she said and forced a smile, “what floor do you live on?”

“The third prime.  Want to take the elevator?”

Okay, that was geeky.  She grinned for real.  “No, I could use the exercise.”

Matt took the first flight two steps at a time, then waited for her at the landing.  “Sorry,” he said, “force of habit.”

Kendra thought he seemed a bit sheepish, and wondered if he was nervous.  She decided as they climbed to the fifth floor that, since she had no idea how to flirt or make any kind of social patter,  she might as well just say whatever she thought. 

After Matt unlocked the door to his apartment and gestured for her to go in, she stopped in the short hall, leaned against the wall, and asked, “Do you often pick up women?”

He hung his jacket on a wall rack, and took hers as well.

“If you think about it, there’s probably no way for me to answer that question without lowering your opinion of me.”  He kissed her instead, and pressed against her.  Because she was leaning back, his fly pressed into her belly.  She could feel his erection.  Penises gained an instant tangible reality in her mind, where they had only ever been an abstraction.  The heft of them, and Matt’s in particular, seemed…inconvenient.  She pushed against Matt’s chest, and he reluctantly backed away.

“Too fast?” he asked, breathing heavily.

“A little,” she agreed absentmindedly, her thoughts riveted on how stupid it had been to just come to Matt’s apartment without knowing anything about him.   She was lucky that he did not seem to be a date rapist.  

“Excuse me for a minute,” he said hoarsely, and headed into the apartment.  “Make yourself at home,” he said over his shoulder as he turned a corner, and then went out of sight.

“I will,” Kendra muttered, feeling very suddenly sober.  She listened a moment, heard water run in the bathroom, then went through Matt’s jacket.  His wallet wasn’t in there, but he did have a student ID in the inside pocket.  She found a pen and some notes too, a version of the logistic difference equation.  She looked at the second page.  Yes, a computer printout showed a population increasing unchecked to chaos, but what was that gash across the curve on the third page?  Nothing she knew, short of an extinction event, could decimate a population like that.  The population remained incredibly stable, flat, after that.  Nature had nothing to do with that, so why bother to use fractal geometry to describe it?

The water in the bathroom stopped.  Kendra hastily refolded the notes, and stuck them back in Matt’s jacket.  She stepped into his kitchen, and looked out the window to the street below.  A face turned up to look at her out of the darkness, Xenopoulos.  Kendra gasped and stepped back.

“Ouch!”  Matt hopped on one bare foot while he rubbed the one Kendra had stepped on.  “What did you see?”

“Um, nothing,” Kendra replied, but Matt, dressed only in his jeans, leaned past her to look out the window anyway.

“Ah, that woman again.  She followed us from the bar.  Do you know her?” he asked, his voice entirely too casual.

Surprised, Kendra searched Matt’s face.  He was holding something back.  He didn’t seem at all like Shaggy anymore.  Underneath his friendly expression and casual appearance, she saw that Matt was very serious, and though not muscle-bound, he was really well built.  She let her eyes linger at the spot where the muscles on the right half of his chest swept into his upper arm.  For some reason, that junction had always held great allure for her in all the photos of topless fit men she’d ever seen.  

Get real.  Kendra shook off the last of her attraction to Matt.  He was just as much an unknown quantity as Xenopoulos was.

“We’ve met,” she replied.  “She works for American Missile--a spy I think.”

“Hmm,” he smiled, and tilted his head to one side, considering her.  “You really have to tell me about your research some time.”

Kendra felt the pull of his charm.  She wanted to be pulled back into the romantic fantasy that had so briefly held her in thrall.  A handsome man, clad in jeans and little if anything else, seemed fascinated by her. Yeah, right.  The magic vanished.  She felt only her usual compulsion to protect her work.

Matt must have seen her expression change, and hastened to add, “Or not, I know how possessive you physics types can be.”  He ran his hand gently up and down her arm.

Her mind still not its agile self, Kendra almost asked about mysteriously ruined population curves, but caught herself.  She didn’t want Matt to know she’d searched his jacket.  So much for saying whatever she thought. 

“Mmm,” she said, sounding noncommittal.  Even though every neuron in her brain screamed, “Danger!” by then, her body again surged at his touch.

“Well,” he said and walked toward the front door where he shoved his feet into his shoes, and threw on his jacket.  “I’ll just go down and convince her to leave you alone, shall I?  Then you and I can get back to our evening.” 

“N-n-” Kendra, bowled over by her own libido, started to protest.  Matt crossed the room in a few strides, kissed her quickly, then went out the door, closing it behind him.

“Okay then, play hero--or are you a villain?” Kendra counted to one hundred slowly, then looked out the window.  She didn’t see Matt and Xenopoulos.  She turned off the light by Matt’s front door, and looked again.  She saw them in the shadows between street lights.  Matt leaned against the fence as if talking to an old friend, and Xenopoulos only half faced him, as if not really listening.  They both looked up toward his window.  Very glad that she’d turned out the light, Kendra slipped to the side, careful not to disturb the curtain.  Matt knew an industrial spy?  She risked another look, and saw him run across the street.  Time to go.

Kendra grabbed her jacket and ran down to the fourth floor.  She waited until she heard Matt thunder past on his way up, then she ran quietly to the first floor, thoughts flying.  Worst case scenario, Matt and Xenopoulos were in cahoots, and the elegant spy would watch the elevator in case Kendra came down.  Instead, she opened the window at the back of the hallway on the first floor, and climbed down the fire escape.  She ran down the alley and around the corner just in time to catch the bus.  She fed her metro pass through the meter, and took an aisle seat next to a man big enough to shield her from prying eyes outside.  Not until the bus rounded the corner did she risk a look back.  She didn’t see anyone.