Kelly tried to let his cares flow away as he took off his clothes. He almost succeeded, but there was still a little knot of worry remaining, and, of course, Danis noticed.
“Lie down and let me give you a massage,” she instructed him.
Danis dimmed the lights down to a twinkling glow. Somehow she was able to coax something approaching candlelight out of the grist—something he’d never managed to do with his comparatively bludgeonlike handling of the communication protocols. The bed warmed, barely perceptibly, and Kelly felt his wife’s presence, his wife, flow around him. It wasn’t a liquid or jelly feel that Danis possessed. The effect was more like a gradual awareness of touch and smell.
Like dawn rising inside me, Kelly thought.
Danis, through the grist, worked her way over and inside her husband. She navigated his musculature like a sailor makes his way about his home port’s bay: Here was the sandbar, here the hard rocks, and here the reef water. Before Kelly knew it, she had found the tightness in his back and shoulders and was working at it on a microscopic level. He had no idea what she did to him down there among the molecules, he just knew that it felt incredibly soothing and, somehow, at the same time arousing. He felt himself growing hard against the mattress, but did nothing about it for the moment.
He groaned low and soft as something unknotted. “Yes,” came her voice within his mind. “There it is. All better now. All better.”
In the end, he’d trusted his instincts, just as he did when it came to finance. And at home, as at work, he’d been right. Kelly didn’t fool himself into thinking he had any particular skill at judging matters of love. No. It was Danis that had made it all real. It was Danis who had somehow bridged the gap and come to him as a real woman comes to a real man, and had led him to understand that, however grotesque a relationship might look to an outsider, it was the happiness of the people inside it that mattered. He didn’t give a hang about free-convert rights or any of that—hadn’t really thought about it very much, to tell the truth. All he knew was that he and Danis were a very good thing.
And just as she had on the first night, Danis slowly worked her way around him. When she was fully inhabiting the grist of his pellicle, she began to send the signals to his skin.
He smelled her slight odor of cigarettes and perfume. He felt the heat of the flushed skin of a woman aroused. He felt her weight upon him. That was the mysterious part to Kelly, but Danis had once explained how easy it was to talk to human nerve receptors after you knew intimately the person they belonged to. You could cause a body to believe that another animal body was moving against it. You could make a man’s body believe that he was inside a woman.
Because he was.