Leo walked out of the shed and headed toward his quarters. He wasn’t surprised that Jane followed, nor that she continued her almost constant flow of curiosity.
“You didn’t seem to care about what Dr. Suez wants, do you? Are you not impressed because you’ve seen so many other scientists with the same ideas, or do you think there’s anything to his ideas at all? If there is such a great scientific upheaval going on, I’m sure you’d find that Dr. Suez could make a contribution. Dr. Johns says that he’s the finest in his field.”
Leo was pleased to listen, pleased to have the woman near. Now that his attention had been drawn to her green eyes, Leo found himself, with a slight guilt and wonder, stealing a glance into them at every opportunity.
Jane Early was simply interesting. On first impression, she might have been absurdly light/bright enough to take one aback. She might have been a curiosity with her shock-white skin, hair and brows. Her lips, too, were virtually colorless and could not be distinguished as different from the rest of her face unless one were close enough to notice the difference in consistency. She smiled almost constantly, and her teeth were as bright/white as her hair and skin.
She followed Leo directly to his room and sat on the bed while he took off his shirt and rinsed his upper body. He sat down on the bed beside her while she continued to ask him every kind of question, from the geopolitical to the most personal. He was barely listening, but pretending to listen gave him an excuse to do what might have been a breach of etiquette, staring directly into her beyond-beautiful face and sinking into her eyes.
“What do you think so far?” she asked. “Have you found anything that interests you here?”
“I find you interesting,” Leo said bluntly.
Was that a pink tinge in her ear?
“Really?” she said, hesitating in her speech for the first time since he had met her.
The pink was now spreading to her cheeks. She stopped talking. Leo was emboldened.
He reached a finger out to touch her, lightly, on the cheekbone. He brought his finger close to his own eyes, then his nose, then, finally, into his mouth. He neither saw nor smelled nor tasted any trace of cosmetics. He saw, smelled, and tasted only Jane. She sat frozen still. He reached again, more slowly and gently, his finger to her cheek. He took a long minute to trace his finger, in a semicircular arc, down to her chin. Then, ever so slowly, his finger raised to rest, at last, on her exquisite bottom lip.
Jane raised her own finger to touch Leo’s face, then laid her whole hand against his cheek. It was cool and soft, but her touch electrified Leo.
Her eyes moistened pleadingly. “I... don’t... know...” she uttered slowly.
Leo let his own hand slip around her cheek to the nape of her neck, beneath her stunning hair, to the warmth and essence of her, and he pulled her to his mouth.
The kiss was long. It blotted out Leo’s thinking into the mutual moment. She quietly complied as he began removing her clothing. He paused only a moment to behold her naked. She was the same, provocatively colorless, the entire length of her. Leo was surprised at how slight she was. She seemed almost weightless as he moved her beneath him.
As the two made love over the next moment or hours, she was at first only compliant, but became more and more aggressive as the curiosity that she had only shown as verbal turned to physical. She wanted more than sex with Leo, she wanted to take in everything about him. In that sense, in the sense of wanting more and more of Leo, she was insatiable. Leo, too, felt a great and growing need to know Jane thoroughly and completely.
Her questions now were of the intimate kind. “Have you made love before?” “What was it like in this or that situation or with this or that person?” “How would you describe your orgasm?” “How would you describe mine?”
Leo abandoned his usual defenses, and he tried to answer each question, partly because he wanted to please his new partner, because he wanted her to know the answers she sought, but also because he, too, wanted to hear his own interpretations, and also because he wanted to ask the same questions of Jane.
Eventually, Leo found himself explaining what he himself had barely understood and what everybody in Oklahoma seemed to want to know – what he was doing there. The biggest secret he had defended to this moment, he gladly shared with his lover. He told Jane in their intimacy that he had not been sent to solve anybody’s problems but his own. He had not come to Sasakwa to govern or even to investigate. Even his most specific mission, concerning Dr. John’s need for electric power, was of no real consequence to Leo or anybody else. “They sent me here for me, to rehabilitate me, and that’s the only real reason.”
Jane’s acceptance was even more caresses and kisses.
They fell together into the deepest bond of gratitude.
After a period of spontaneous lovemaking, Jane began to grow more specific and demanding. She wanted to know everything that Leo knew about the wonderful new topic they were exploring together. Leo was happy to show her cunnilingus. He kissed her vagina with the same love and gratitude that he had kissed the rest of her. When his tongue found her clitoris, she shuddered with relief. She insisted, too, that Leo instruct her in fellatio. He put his arms gently on her shoulders while he told her the exact location of his most sensitive erotica.
That sexual act, though, brought their dream world to a sudden end. When Leo spewed into her mouth, she accepted it gratefully at first, but then her face contorted into another, frightening, stranger as she pulled back from him. “What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she choked, “Have to go!” She swept up her white clothing and disappeared into the interior of the house, leaving Leo sweaty and dumbfounded on the bed. He stared at the door where she had just vanished, trying to preserve the last image of her nude disappearance, then lay back. He decided there was nothing he could do. This was apparently something of her own set of mysterious problems that she needed to work out without him. The only role he could play, he decided, was to love and trust her.
Unfortunately for Leo, his next thought seemed too obvious to be untrue. She was running to Dr. Johns! Johns had shown from the first a kind of patronizing concern for Jane Early. She clearly was not simply a housekeeper, and she didn’t seem to have any particular role in running the laboratory. He was a psychologist and she was a patient, most likely. Or, possibly, she was an acolyte, a devotee who thought that Dr. Johns was as great a man as Jones himself seemed to think. Either way, Leo thought, she was running to him now. It made him shrivel inside to acknowledge his petty jealousy.
As Leo drifted toward sleep, he recriminated himself for falling so easily in love, or into whatever he was feeling, and for having shared so much more of himself than he had ever shared before. The indifference to life and to all life’s players, cast aside so easily with Jane Early, came back over him like the rough but comforting protective blanket it had always been. The only change in the situation, from Leo’s view, was that there was now one person besides himself who knew what was really going on with the “commissioner’s” visit. “It’s not like any of it matters,” he thought to himself as he dozed away.