DAVID COULDN’T RECALL being nervous like this before a date. In fact, he couldn’t recall ever being nervous before a date.
As arrogant as it might have sounded, he’d simply never cared this much before. Even in high school, it had seemed immature to drown in the drama of pursuit and rejection. He was always working on other things that took precedence.
Most of that, he did not need a therapist to tell him, was because of the losses he’d suffered. His sister’s death was like a bullet from a random drive-by cracking the drywall of his family’s home. It taught him that nothing was ever as solid or safe as he thought before.
He’d decided to fix it. He would make sure that it never happened again, to anyone. A childish hope, sure, but hey, he’d been fourteen, and in all honesty, he was smart enough. So he already had a quest.
Dating and girls, and then relationships and love, were distractions at best. Other people were capable of finding love. Only David was capable of finding what he was looking for.
And if that meant putting his own life on hold for a while—well, he was young. There would always be time to catch up later.
Those thoughts melted when he knocked on the door of her condo overlooking the bay and Shy opened it and smiled at him.
She wore a simple and elegant black sheath, held at one shoulder with a silver clasp that gleamed against the dark tan of her skin. He had to kick-start his brain into supplying the standard greetings.
This is what normal people do, David told himself, handing over the bouquet of flowers he’d agonized about bringing. (Corny or romantic? Endearing or childish?)
Shy took the flowers and thanked him, then invited him inside, the black silk clinging to her tightly.
David stood at the threshold for a moment longer. Then he shook his head and stepped in.
Christ, get a grip. It’s just a date. People do it all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.
SHE MADE HIM DINNER, and they ate in front of a window that seemed to frame the entire horizon as it met the water. It was beautiful. The food was perfect.
He looked at the view twice and barely tasted what was on his fork. Instead, he stared. A lot. And struggled to find something to talk about with her.
You are blowing this, he told himself.
She threw him a lifeline and asked about work, which was the only thing he really had. “So, what does Conquest have you doing?”
Unfortunately, he also had a very strict nondisclosure agreement. “I’m really not supposed to talk about it.”
She smiled. “Come on. Surely you can avoid slipping out any corporate secrets.”
David laughed, relaxing a little. “Ah, it’s probably dull as hell to you. I’m stuck on some complicated DNA stuff. You don’t need me droning on about that.”
“Oh, I see. You don’t think I’m smart enough.”
“No, no,” David said, rushing the words out. “It’s just—you know, technical.”
“Oh. Technical. I see. That clears it right up.”
He had the distinct feeling she was laughing at him. Still blowing this, David. Come on, bring it back around.
“All right,” he said. “I warned you. Ready?”
She put on a serious expression, her eyes lit up with mockery. “Ready,” she said. Then she leaned forward, inadvertently revealing a distracting slice of her cleavage.
David forced himself to keep his eyes level. “Okay. No secret that Conquest is working on antiaging approaches, right? The trick is, which approach do you take? Aging is so fantastically complex. The body breaks down in all sorts of ways. It’s like the story of Hercules and the Hydra. Cut off one head, another two take its place. Deal with one problem, another one pops up. The idea of a single magic bullet to target them all, that’s got to be a fantasy, right?”
“Except you don’t think so.”
He smiled. She was fast. And he reminded himself, she didn’t work for Conquest, so he’d have to be careful.
“The basic problem is in our DNA. Humans have never lived as long as we do now. So we’re running into the unintended consequences of our success. Evolution didn’t come up with solutions for all the problems of aging because it’s not crucial to our survival. As long as our species can still breed, evolution doesn’t care. Sexual maturity comes when we’re in our teens. But we survive long after that. It’s like we outlive our warranties by fifty or sixty years. The longer we live, the more wear and tear we get. Our cells get corrupted, too, so our most basic building blocks start to fall apart. We get tumors, we get slower, our hair falls out, our cuts don’t heal as fast, our skin gets thinner and sags. That all starts way down in our DNA.”
“Right,” Shy said. To David’s ears, it sounded very much like Duh. He wasn’t breaking any new ground here, and she seemed on the verge of boredom. “So, how do you fix that?”
“I think there has to be a way to address all the problems all at once. A truly holistic solution, instead of trying to chop off another head of the Hydra every time it appears. There are self-repairing mechanisms already in DNA.”
“You mean nucleotide excision repair,” Shy said.
“Right,” David said, reminding himself he wasn’t lecturing a hall of Biology 101 students right now. “Those sequences get old and wear out and start picking up errors, too. But if we fix them—get them to repair themselves perfectly, with zero errors every time—we could have an autocorrect for the human genome.”
Shy smiled. She saw it now. “If the repair mechanisms are perfect—”
“They can repair the DNA in every cell and make them perfect, too. Think of it as a massive software upgrade for the entire human body. A way to reboot DNA without any flaws.”
“So you’re going to fix something that’s gone unaddressed by millions of years of evolution.”
“I can do it,” he said.
“You seem pretty sure.”
David knew it sounded impossible. But he had an advantage over Shy, over everyone in his field, in fact. He knew it was possible. He’d seen it firsthand.
But Shy hadn’t. He worried he’d said too much and started talking rapidly to cover it up.
“There’s got to be a way to train and shape the DNA-repair sequences,” he said. “We’ve created custom genes. We have the tools. Hell, it might even be there already, somewhere in the junk DNA that hangs out in the cell, just waiting for the right circumstances to activate it. I’ve been looking into the Johns Hopkins research on hydrogels, which can be turned into self-activating, self-assembling proteins. They could create a cluster of the right kind of amino acids. But that raises its own interesting questions. The delivery method alone . . .”
David had been talking uninterrupted for a while before he realized Shy had stood up from the table and was standing over him.
He blinked and looked up at her. She had that enigmatic half smile on her face again.
“Sorry,” he said. “I can get carried away.”
“Perfectly all right,” she said. Her voice was throaty, as if she was holding back a laugh. David figured he’d bored her out of her mind. A deep disappointment welled up in him. He’d definitely blown it.
“Sorry,” he said again. “It’s just, when you think about the implications this has for cancer research alone. The idea of programmable cells—” Oh my God, you’re doing it again, what is wrong with you, for God’s sake, why can’t you shut up?
Then Shy touched the clasp of her dress, sending it to the floor in a puddle of silk.
David shut up.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I interrupt your train of thought?”
He just stared. Her skin was beautiful. All of it.
“Well,” she said when he failed to answer. “Maybe we can find something else to do with your mouth.”
She leaned down and kissed him.
It was like the contact between them closed some circuit, reactivated some vital knowledge in him. He kissed her, his body instantly aware of every inch of hers, her warmth and bare flesh only inches away from him.
He stood and ran his hands over her, trying to touch all of her at once. His pulse sang in his veins. He felt clumsy, overeager, like he was in high school again, making out in the backseat of his car.
She let him paw at her for a moment as she effortlessly guided him from his clothes.
He looked at her again. Still could not believe it.
Every inch of her was perfect. Flawless, copper-colored skin smooth over supple muscle. She stood effortlessly, lightly, on the balls of her feet, watching him watch her, eyes still smiling, amused by him and his awe. He felt like he was in the presence of great art, inside a cathedral, his head buzzing with the impulse to worship, to kneel.
So he did.
He hiked her right leg over his left shoulder, supporting her as he lapped at her, unable to show any restraint. She ran her fingers through his hair and tugged occasionally, pulling and guiding him.
Then as her back began to arch and she started to push against his mouth, she suddenly broke contact and yanked him to his feet.
She took him in her hand and pulled him along, leading him quickly to the bedroom.
He was suddenly on his back, in her mouth, feeling like he would explode in seconds. But she held him off, working him expertly, bringing him to the edge and no further.
When he thought he could not take it anymore, she released him. He was gasping for air when she swung a leg over him, straddling his hips, drawing him deep inside her.
He thrust upward and felt a kind of savage pride as he saw the look on her face, her eyes rolling under her closed lids. Her mouth was open, a small triangle of skin flushed red, right under her throat, above her breasts.
There had been other times with other women, but at this moment, they seemed like dim matchsticks in the dark against a blazing incandescence. She pulled something from him, something stronger than he’d ever felt before.
He’d never felt so hard, so sure, so right. This was different. She was different.
He pushed against her and she held him down with her hips, pushing back.
She cried out as she shuddered, and it was more than enough to put him over the edge. He thrust again and again, his strength draining, his muscles going liquid even as she kept on building and building, her cries reaching a high pitch before she collapsed on his chest.
David felt as if he’d ridden lightning to the ground. He felt as though he’d been broken. He felt an unaccustomed surge of peace.
He looked at her face and saw her eyes open, watching him.
She smiled, and he saw something predatory there, something triumphant.
He did not care. He felt that, too.
They curled into each other, side by side. David did not feel as if he’d ever need to move again.
But within a few moments, he felt himself stirring. So did Shy. She looked at him over her shoulder, both a challenge and invitation in her eyes.
That was all he needed, and he was lost again.
Just a date, he reminded himself. People do it all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.