Silence, thinking time, then "I'll ask Kane. Gotta go. Bye." Click.
Caroline hung up her own phone, shifted the stack of essays off her chair, and sat down. She stared at the phone. She wrote that paper. Prof. Stevens might be her faculty advisor, and Doc Kane the department head, but all they did to get their names on the paper was change a few commas here and there and substitute some six-syllable words that meant the same thing as what she'd already written in plain English.
"Edited," that was the term. Caroline wrote it, and at least half the words came straight from Grandmother Walks. But they wouldn't put Grandmother's name on the paper, and you'd need a magnifying glass to find Caroline's in the final publication. "Research Assistant."
A faint voice rasped in Caroline's head: "They. Only. Take."
Well, Caroline was about to take a few things, herself. She reached for the phone again, dialing a number she knew better than her own, and felt that warmth growing again.
*~*~*
Caroline toweled her hair, wondering if she'd finally washed out all the dust and dried leaves and fragments of arthropodal exoskeleton. And long hair made her mandatory field "tick check" harder. It was easy to see why Aunt Kate stuck with a buzz cut, working dirty all the time like she did.
Kate had given up on femininity years ago, viewing long hair and perfect nails as more of society's traps to keep women in their place. Keep women from earning a living on their own, supporting themselves and their children on their own. Men didn't like that concept. It raised questions about their importance in the universe.
But femininity wasn't all bad. Caroline's body felt relaxed for the first time in months, hormones appeased if not quite satiated. The quiet snores behind her improved her worldview considerably. Male snores.
She tossed the towel over a chair and stood naked in the pre-dawn darkness of her balcony, letting the desert air-dry her body and her hair. Dark body, dark towel, dark shadow from the twin balcony overhead, even if someone else watched for the sunrise they never would see her. Nor did she much care if they did. This part of the day was too sacred to miss.
Thunderstorms had crashed through, last evening, what some tribes called a male rain, hard and noisy and quickly done. They'd cleared the air, washing out dust and smog and leaving a trace of moisture in their wake. Her skin could feel the difference.
Her apartment faced west. Damn poor exposure, for the desert — afternoon sun turned the place into an oven, and the fourth-floor height gave that sun a clear shot over the next block. But it gave her a clear shot, too, all the way to the mountains west of town. She smiled at the incongruity of watching west for the sunrise.
The mountains waited in silence, vague black lumps under indigo sky and fading stars, and Caroline moved slowly into the Tai Chi routine that Aunt Alice had taught her. Heaven and Earth. Parting the Wild Horse's Mane to Both Sides. White Crane Spreads Its Wings. She took empty steps, lifting each foot and shifting her balance and then replacing the foot in the same spot, restricting the form to the cramped area of her balcony.
Peace flowed through her muscles. As she moved, exaggerating the slowness of the form to stretch it out, the sky brightened and the mountains gained form and the purple silence seemed to vibrate around her, untroubled by early cars and the hum of air conditioners and distant sirens. Magic closed her ears to such distractions. She could have been alone on a mountaintop.
She'd timed it perfectly, from practice and the day's almanac in the paper. Just as she returned from Heaven to Earth, fire touched the topmost peak of the highest mountain to the west. She stood totally still, relaxed, breath shallow and silent, and watched red light creep down the slopes, turning to orange flame against a violet sky and splashing each lower peak and ridge.
Sunrise in the west, falling rather than climbing. She chanted her greeting to the sun — Naskeag poetry thousands of years old, keeping her voice low in consideration of the open door behind her.
Right on cue, she heard the rustle of sheets and a male groan from the shadows. She smiled to herself, picked up the damp towel, and slipped back in through the screen slider.
"Woman, you are insane."
Kenny Grayeyes rolled over on his belly and buried his head under a pillow. She let her eyes savor the long lean dark body for a moment, mostly shadow against the light sheets, and then wickedness triumphed. She shifted her grip to one end of the towel and flicked it out as a whip, snapping across both cheeks of his butt. He yelped and rolled away, off the side of the bed to collapse in a heap of tangled arms and legs and bedding on the carpet.
She'd expected him to come growling out to grab her for a glorious tussle and the hot slippery aftermath when she let him win, but he just groaned again and forced himself up to sitting against the wall. He shook his head.
"Totally insane. Less than two hours' sleep, and you're up before the sun. Exercising, while I'm lying here in ruins. And you're already too damn strong." He groaned again, rotating his head on his shoulders as if testing the connections between them. "Woman like you could kill a man."
He stopped and scanned her naked body from head to toe, and she felt hormones stirring again. But he shook his head. "Hell of a way to die. Maybe tonight. I might have recovered enough by then."
She slipped around the bed to stand over him, feet straddling him so that he could look right up into her body, seeing if she could get a rise out of him that way, so to speak. No luck. Damn. Well, he had other uses. She'd
