A Sky Without Zeppelins: Chapter Three
Aug. 13th, 2008 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amberfocus
Chapter Three
Jonathon’s eyes widen and he can’t help but feel just a little bit stunned by what Rose Tyler has just said to him. She’s going to try out beds with him? She really is? He knows he is flirting hard, can’t seem to stop himself, but he honestly isn’t expecting her to respond to it quite the way she is. He doesn’t get the feeling she does this sort of thing, with anyone, ever, but she’s doing it with him.
Jonathon’s eyes widen and he can’t help but feel just a little bit stunned by what Rose Tyler has just said to him. She’s going to try out beds with him? She really is? He knows he is flirting hard, can’t seem to stop himself, but he honestly isn’t expecting her to respond to it quite the way she is. He doesn’t get the feeling she does this sort of thing, with anyone, ever, but she’s doing it with him.
Is it possible she really is just as drawn to him as he is to her? And why does that idea make his heart surge with more hope than he can remember feeling in the last ten years since he lost…everything? It’s like he’s waking up after a very long sleep and looking at the world with brand new eyes and finding it the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. Can it all come down to her, this girl he’s known for a mere handful of days? He realizes he’s gaping like a fish and closes his jaw abruptly.
“Doctor?” she says softly and he is suddenly very aware of the fact that she’s put her hand on his elbow and for a second he closes his eyes, lost in an unaccountably familiar longing as the warmth of her fingers moves up his arm and she tugs his shirt sleeve lightly for his attention. He shakes himself, opens his eyes, swallows hard and says, “Yes, let’s.”
She tilts her head at him, takes a step back and drops her arm, then motions for him to follow her. As they enter the section devoted to beds and mattresses she asks him, “So what precisely are you looking for in a bed?” She is all serious saleswoman now, no hint of the flirty girl who had been there just a few seconds ago. He wants her back.
“Well, judging from the state of my linens every morning for the last several years, I’d say I’m a rather vigorous mover in my sleep,” he says seriously, but he can’t stop his mouth from smirking at the edges.
“Really?” she says. “So quite the bed rocker then?” Her tone is completely innocent but as she glances back at him there is mischief in her eyes.
“Oh, quite. Think I’ll need a good headboard, too. You know, for leverage,” he says and this time it’s she who is a tiny bit shocked now he’s found his equilibrium again.
But apparently you can’t keep Rose Tyler down once she decides she’s going to commit full bore to a rather naughty round of innuendo. “Anything special you look for in a headboard? Other than leverage? Iron rails, slats, posts to tie…things to?” He splutters and blushes and decides this round goes to her.
“Erm…is that something…I mean…is that a particular selling point for…some people?” he manages to ask his hand rubbing at the back of his neck. He is not asking her if it’s a selling point for her. He’s not. If she happens to volunteer that information…
She shrugs, completely non-committal in her response. “Oh, judging by several of our customers many people seem to like that particular feature in a headboard,” she tells him with a straight face. “Obviously it’s not everyone’s…thing, but if it’s yours, it’s something to look forward to.” She stops, backs up, adds innocently, “Look for, I mean.” She takes a breath and her tone turns teasing again. “Iron rails for example will hold up to vigorous tugging movements better than wooden slats unless they're solid oak, cedar, or pine. Or so I’m told. And you did say you were rather vigorous,” she pauses, grins, “in bed.”
That’s not quite what he’d said but he doesn’t feel the need to correct her. “Now,” she says moving across the ends of several twin and double beds to where the queen and king size ones are displayed, “judging from your length; and you have quite a substantial length, don’t you? You’ll definitely need some serious room. Are you a king size man?” Her eyes sparkle and she smirks at him.
“Definitely a bit more than average,” he tells her.
“How much of a bit?” she asks.
“You weren’t wrong when you said substantial,” he informs her and as her eyes widen again and her face flushes he realizes he’s won round three. But she’s not done playing yet.
She coughs to clear her throat and get her raging blush back under control. “So,” and her voice squeaks and she has to start again. “So, are you soft or firm?”
“Oh, I’m quite firm, I think.” She blinks and he grins and says, “Oh, you mean mattresses. Erm…somewhere in the middle. Soft enough to fall asleep, firm enough to not wake up with a crick in my back.”
“Ah,” she says recovering quickly, “like me.”
“An added benefit, then,” he says and this time she holds his gaze steadily.
“Perhaps.” She turns away abruptly and walks over to a suitable mattress. “Here, lay down on this one. Slip off your shoes first.”
He toes off the nice lambskin dress shoes and stretches his lanky frame out on the bed then glances over at her and catches her biting her lip as her eyes drift down his form. “It’s comfortable,” he says and her eyes trip back up to his. “What do you think?” he asks shyly, the blatant flirt now gone and his warm brown eyes seek out gilded amber ones.
“Me?” She’s shy now, too.
“Yeah. I trust your opinion.”
“But you’re the one who has to sleep on it,” she says.
“Yeah, but you might--.” His jaw snaps shut. He can’t believe he almost said that she might be sleeping on it, too, one day. Even for slightly naughty flirting he’s sure that’s going too far. He closes his eyes and tries desperately to think of something, anything to change the subject. He’s assuming just because she’s flirting like mad with him that he actually has a chance at a relationship with this young woman. He’s behaving like an idiot, a love struck school boy, a--. He feels the bed dip slightly beside him and the movement of someone carefully stretching out.
He opens one eye and glances at her out of his peripheral vision. “What do you think?” he asks and it barely comes out above a whisper.
She’s quiet for a long time and when she finally speaks her voice isn’t much louder than his is but her smile speaks volumes. “I think,” she says, “we should try out a few more beds for variety.”
“I’ve always heard variety in the bedroom is a good thing,” he murmurs. She turns her head and looks at him in surprise and he wonders if she’s misinterpreted him this time. “You know, between committed couples. Not with excessive partners,” he explains softly.
The relief on her face is too clear to be imagined. “I suppose as long as they love each other, trust each other to look out for the other’s comfort and enjoyment, variety could be fun.” She turns on her side to face him and he mimics her movement.
He is just reaching for her hand when a voice comes from the foot of the bed. “Am I interrupting anything?”
Rose springs from the bed like she’s been fired from a canon. Not just an ordinary canon either, but one with enough force to blast her across the universe. “No, of course not, Brendan!” She turns back to him. “This is my manager. Brendan, this is Dr. Smith. A very good customer.”
Jonathon sits up. “I’m buying a bed,” he says smoothly. “And quite a lot of other furniture. Furnishing my entire flat, in fact. I asked Miss Tyler to help me as I have no one with me to counterbalance my movements in bed and make sure I don’t disturb a second sleeper,” he says smoothly.
“I see.”
Rose’s manager is about thirty years old and doesn’t seem like he entirely trusts Jonathon’s motives, which, he has to admit, have not been entirely pure. Or at all pure really if he thinks about it.
Rose edges towards her immediate boss. “He’s already dropped six thousand quid on a new wardrobe this week,” she says softly. “Don’t screw this up for me. I may only have to work part time for the last month of Uni after my commission this month and you know how much I need that with finals then.”
Jonathon wonders if that is why Rose is flirting so hard with him, but the look she shoots him is immensely reassuring. Yes, she needs the money and she will do her job, but the flirting is strictly because she likes him. Least he’s pretty sure it’s because she likes him. It might just be for the sake of flirting, but he doesn’t think that, won’t let himself think that.
“Just be careful, Rose,” Brendan warns so quietly Jonathon almost doesn’t hear him.
“I’m always careful,” she replies steadily. Her manager gives a single nod and then walks across the floor, but his eyes follow them for some time as they try out various beds. At last Jonathon settles on a mattress that Rose likes, too and then they move on to picking out bedroom furniture. The mood has settled away from the previous flirtatious banter, under Brendan’s watchful gaze.
“I think that’s it for today,” he says checking his watch in a gesture that feels strange to him. He has only started wearing one since he began work at Illuminate, never having really needed one since his university years as he’d always worked only for himself until then. “But you said you were working furniture tomorrow, right?” he asks.
“I did.”
“I still need a living room set and something for dining. And then after that I need to stock a kitchen with pots and pans, dishes, silverware and all of that. I’ll come by after work. You’ll help me again, won’t you?” he asks.
“Of course. With furnishings. I don’t work in house wares at all though.”
“Oh.” He looks down then looks back at her hopefully. “Do you have a day off? One where you could help me? I’d be willing to pay you for your time.”
“That’s not necessary,” she tells him. “I don’t work this Saturday and I’d be happy to meet you here, say tennish?”
He smiles and her slow grin meets his. “That sounds wonderful. Thank you.” They move to the purchasing counter and begin the paperwork and the arrangement of delivery of stock from the company warehouse to his flat. She is impressed when he gives her his address just a few blocks away in one of the poshest neighborhoods in the city. It’s all part of his benefits package as an Illuminate inventor, but he still likes that she is impressed by anything about him.
After a brief phone call she tells him, “You’re in luck. This batch of furniture is all in stock and can be delivered any time in the next seven days. When would you like it?”
“Do you deliver nights?” he asks.
“No, but we do Saturdays.”
“But we were going to…”
“Tell you what. I could meet you at…at your place and we could wait for the morning furniture delivery and then walk over here and buy kitchen stuff afterwards,” she says. There is hesitancy in her voice as if she feels she is being too forward by inviting herself over.
“I’d like that very much,” he tells her and the uncertainty fades from her expression. “If you don’t mind sitting on the floor waiting. It’s got very nice carpets. Very plush.”
She laughs and he adores the sound of it. “I don’t think I’ll mind one bit,” she tells him. She throws her head back and her hair untwists itself from its fancy updo. As the golden strands fall across her shoulders he wonders just what it might feel like between his fingers or what it might look like splayed against the floor of his very plush carpet. He puts a solid stop to that line of thought or otherwise Rose Tyler may find the subject of his rather substantial, firm length arising again very quickly.
I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says softly.
“Looking forward to it,” she tells him warmly. They say quiet good-byes and he’s not even sure his feet touch the ground for the rest of the night.
Later that night Rose tries desperately to study but all she can think about is the last few hours spent in the company of Jonathon helping him pick out first a bed and then much more easily some solid pine bedroom furniture with a warm, honey-colored finish that matches the mission style bed frame, wooden with slats, that he’d picked out. It’s beautiful and should last him a lifetime and even be something he might pass down to his grandchildren one day. Temmel’s has only the best in furniture, no cardboard inserts or shoddy plywood supports behind the scenes.
She thinks about the mattress he settled on and how very good it had felt. A far cry from the one she’s stretched out on now with a book entitled Circuitry in the Small Scale Robot. She’s building a robotic cat for her final project and double-checking some of the fiddly bits of her blueprints against the design schematics in the book. She should probably be doing it at her little desk but her bed’s always been more comfortable. Least until she’d discovered what his new one felt like.
Rose thinks she’d love to spend some time on that bed and not necessarily for anything romantic to happen. She can easily see herself all spread out with her school books, gazing at him as he reads some article to her out of a scientific journal. Or just sleeping on it, not necessarily even next to him, it was that nice of a bed. It had been like the very heart of luxury itself and it’s been so long since she’s slept really well. And then there are the romantic possibilities… She tries to stop that line of thought.
She blushes at the very thought of what could happen in the future between her and this man and turns her mind fiercely back onto checking her plans again. She’ll start building the robot cat tomorrow and she really doesn’t want any last minute surprises tripping her up, even though she’s pretty sure she’s got the entire book memorized.
Some days it still surprises her that she ever entered the field of robotics. When she’d been tested at sixteen for job affinities and it had come up that she’d had all the skills for being adept at robotics, computer programming, and technology. Jonathon’s company (when had she stopped calling him Dr. Smith?), Illuminate, is very strong in such industries, is behind most of this sort of testing in the U.K. school system, and she’d been granted partial scholarships for choosing to study in any of those fields. It had been the guiding force really behind her decision to choose this particular path, that and knowing she’d most likely walk right into a very good job, probably with Illuminate Corporation at graduation. Graduates in robotics with her level of achievement generally did.
She’d not have thought even six years ago that she’d ever be interested in something like this, but the challenge has been good for her mind and she’s actually enjoyed it. And soon everything she’s been working for is going to pay off. She smiles, allows herself to daydream and returns to her work a few minutes later. When she is positive she knows all she needs to know cold, she puts the book away, prepares for bed and climbs beneath her covers.
She falls into an easy sleep, dreaming of warm brown eyes, really great hair and a smile that she hopes she’ll be seeing a great deal more of.
Rose wakes early the next morning, takes the seven a.m. bus to school and finds herself standing in front of campus health without really realizing what she is doing or how she got there. It is only a short wait for the doors to open and she is the only one besides the employees who are inside. She is shy and hesitant but determined to do this. She asks to speak with someone about birth control.
She has done very well in her life not thinking about things like sex much. Oh, she is as randy as anyone else with a fully functional set of hormones, but she is a clever girl and as handy as the next person and has dealt with such issues as they arose. It might not have been quite as satisfactory as a mutual relationship, but she’d seen the dangers of that a long time ago when her old pal Shireen had taken up with Jimmy Stone after Rose had dumped him.
That could have been her, dropped out of school without even her A levels, pregnant two years later and currently raising two children with a dead beat, semi-abusive man she wouldn’t leave. Apparently Jimmy had gotten better at sex, but Rose is glad she never waited around to find that out.
The risk of sex had never really been worth it again, but now, assuming her new acquaintance’s flirting and slips of the tongue meant precisely what she thought they meant, perhaps it was time to reconsider the issue because there is no doubt in her mind that if she’s actually here, and obviously she is, she wants this with him. As the receptionist leads her back to meet with the doctor and be given a brief exam she tries to still the nerves in her stomach.
She might be two months from graduation, but that doesn’t mean she is going to be careless right as she is about to begin her career. And anyway, she isn’t thinking about slipping into bed with him right away. So a couple of months for her body to adjust to some kind of birth control would be a good thing. She knows it takes a month for most forms to be effective anyway.
Rose hopes she isn’t jumping the gun, isn’t reading too much into things because from the moment she woke up she was no longer hiding from herself the fact that she is extremely attracted to this man and is very interested in a relationship with him both in and out of the bedroom, and by out of the bedroom she didn’t mean having sex in the kitchen, the living room, or outdoors. She meant getting to know him, building a friendship, and then building a romance that later led to sex in the bedroom, maybe one or two other rooms, and quite possibly if she was very brave, outdoors.
She snorts at her flight of fancy but somehow can’t get the idea of making love with him under the stars out of her too fertile new randy imagination. Fifteen minutes later she leaves the clinic with a three month supply of pills she’s to start after her next period and heads off to her first class of the day. It’s the right thing, she’s sure of it. She’s Rose Tyler and she learned a long time ago it’s always best to prepared.
Ch. 4: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/119062.html
“Doctor?” she says softly and he is suddenly very aware of the fact that she’s put her hand on his elbow and for a second he closes his eyes, lost in an unaccountably familiar longing as the warmth of her fingers moves up his arm and she tugs his shirt sleeve lightly for his attention. He shakes himself, opens his eyes, swallows hard and says, “Yes, let’s.”
She tilts her head at him, takes a step back and drops her arm, then motions for him to follow her. As they enter the section devoted to beds and mattresses she asks him, “So what precisely are you looking for in a bed?” She is all serious saleswoman now, no hint of the flirty girl who had been there just a few seconds ago. He wants her back.
“Well, judging from the state of my linens every morning for the last several years, I’d say I’m a rather vigorous mover in my sleep,” he says seriously, but he can’t stop his mouth from smirking at the edges.
“Really?” she says. “So quite the bed rocker then?” Her tone is completely innocent but as she glances back at him there is mischief in her eyes.
“Oh, quite. Think I’ll need a good headboard, too. You know, for leverage,” he says and this time it’s she who is a tiny bit shocked now he’s found his equilibrium again.
But apparently you can’t keep Rose Tyler down once she decides she’s going to commit full bore to a rather naughty round of innuendo. “Anything special you look for in a headboard? Other than leverage? Iron rails, slats, posts to tie…things to?” He splutters and blushes and decides this round goes to her.
“Erm…is that something…I mean…is that a particular selling point for…some people?” he manages to ask his hand rubbing at the back of his neck. He is not asking her if it’s a selling point for her. He’s not. If she happens to volunteer that information…
She shrugs, completely non-committal in her response. “Oh, judging by several of our customers many people seem to like that particular feature in a headboard,” she tells him with a straight face. “Obviously it’s not everyone’s…thing, but if it’s yours, it’s something to look forward to.” She stops, backs up, adds innocently, “Look for, I mean.” She takes a breath and her tone turns teasing again. “Iron rails for example will hold up to vigorous tugging movements better than wooden slats unless they're solid oak, cedar, or pine. Or so I’m told. And you did say you were rather vigorous,” she pauses, grins, “in bed.”
That’s not quite what he’d said but he doesn’t feel the need to correct her. “Now,” she says moving across the ends of several twin and double beds to where the queen and king size ones are displayed, “judging from your length; and you have quite a substantial length, don’t you? You’ll definitely need some serious room. Are you a king size man?” Her eyes sparkle and she smirks at him.
“Definitely a bit more than average,” he tells her.
“How much of a bit?” she asks.
“You weren’t wrong when you said substantial,” he informs her and as her eyes widen again and her face flushes he realizes he’s won round three. But she’s not done playing yet.
She coughs to clear her throat and get her raging blush back under control. “So,” and her voice squeaks and she has to start again. “So, are you soft or firm?”
“Oh, I’m quite firm, I think.” She blinks and he grins and says, “Oh, you mean mattresses. Erm…somewhere in the middle. Soft enough to fall asleep, firm enough to not wake up with a crick in my back.”
“Ah,” she says recovering quickly, “like me.”
“An added benefit, then,” he says and this time she holds his gaze steadily.
“Perhaps.” She turns away abruptly and walks over to a suitable mattress. “Here, lay down on this one. Slip off your shoes first.”
He toes off the nice lambskin dress shoes and stretches his lanky frame out on the bed then glances over at her and catches her biting her lip as her eyes drift down his form. “It’s comfortable,” he says and her eyes trip back up to his. “What do you think?” he asks shyly, the blatant flirt now gone and his warm brown eyes seek out gilded amber ones.
“Me?” She’s shy now, too.
“Yeah. I trust your opinion.”
“But you’re the one who has to sleep on it,” she says.
“Yeah, but you might--.” His jaw snaps shut. He can’t believe he almost said that she might be sleeping on it, too, one day. Even for slightly naughty flirting he’s sure that’s going too far. He closes his eyes and tries desperately to think of something, anything to change the subject. He’s assuming just because she’s flirting like mad with him that he actually has a chance at a relationship with this young woman. He’s behaving like an idiot, a love struck school boy, a--. He feels the bed dip slightly beside him and the movement of someone carefully stretching out.
He opens one eye and glances at her out of his peripheral vision. “What do you think?” he asks and it barely comes out above a whisper.
She’s quiet for a long time and when she finally speaks her voice isn’t much louder than his is but her smile speaks volumes. “I think,” she says, “we should try out a few more beds for variety.”
“I’ve always heard variety in the bedroom is a good thing,” he murmurs. She turns her head and looks at him in surprise and he wonders if she’s misinterpreted him this time. “You know, between committed couples. Not with excessive partners,” he explains softly.
The relief on her face is too clear to be imagined. “I suppose as long as they love each other, trust each other to look out for the other’s comfort and enjoyment, variety could be fun.” She turns on her side to face him and he mimics her movement.
He is just reaching for her hand when a voice comes from the foot of the bed. “Am I interrupting anything?”
Rose springs from the bed like she’s been fired from a canon. Not just an ordinary canon either, but one with enough force to blast her across the universe. “No, of course not, Brendan!” She turns back to him. “This is my manager. Brendan, this is Dr. Smith. A very good customer.”
Jonathon sits up. “I’m buying a bed,” he says smoothly. “And quite a lot of other furniture. Furnishing my entire flat, in fact. I asked Miss Tyler to help me as I have no one with me to counterbalance my movements in bed and make sure I don’t disturb a second sleeper,” he says smoothly.
“I see.”
Rose’s manager is about thirty years old and doesn’t seem like he entirely trusts Jonathon’s motives, which, he has to admit, have not been entirely pure. Or at all pure really if he thinks about it.
Rose edges towards her immediate boss. “He’s already dropped six thousand quid on a new wardrobe this week,” she says softly. “Don’t screw this up for me. I may only have to work part time for the last month of Uni after my commission this month and you know how much I need that with finals then.”
Jonathon wonders if that is why Rose is flirting so hard with him, but the look she shoots him is immensely reassuring. Yes, she needs the money and she will do her job, but the flirting is strictly because she likes him. Least he’s pretty sure it’s because she likes him. It might just be for the sake of flirting, but he doesn’t think that, won’t let himself think that.
“Just be careful, Rose,” Brendan warns so quietly Jonathon almost doesn’t hear him.
“I’m always careful,” she replies steadily. Her manager gives a single nod and then walks across the floor, but his eyes follow them for some time as they try out various beds. At last Jonathon settles on a mattress that Rose likes, too and then they move on to picking out bedroom furniture. The mood has settled away from the previous flirtatious banter, under Brendan’s watchful gaze.
“I think that’s it for today,” he says checking his watch in a gesture that feels strange to him. He has only started wearing one since he began work at Illuminate, never having really needed one since his university years as he’d always worked only for himself until then. “But you said you were working furniture tomorrow, right?” he asks.
“I did.”
“I still need a living room set and something for dining. And then after that I need to stock a kitchen with pots and pans, dishes, silverware and all of that. I’ll come by after work. You’ll help me again, won’t you?” he asks.
“Of course. With furnishings. I don’t work in house wares at all though.”
“Oh.” He looks down then looks back at her hopefully. “Do you have a day off? One where you could help me? I’d be willing to pay you for your time.”
“That’s not necessary,” she tells him. “I don’t work this Saturday and I’d be happy to meet you here, say tennish?”
He smiles and her slow grin meets his. “That sounds wonderful. Thank you.” They move to the purchasing counter and begin the paperwork and the arrangement of delivery of stock from the company warehouse to his flat. She is impressed when he gives her his address just a few blocks away in one of the poshest neighborhoods in the city. It’s all part of his benefits package as an Illuminate inventor, but he still likes that she is impressed by anything about him.
After a brief phone call she tells him, “You’re in luck. This batch of furniture is all in stock and can be delivered any time in the next seven days. When would you like it?”
“Do you deliver nights?” he asks.
“No, but we do Saturdays.”
“But we were going to…”
“Tell you what. I could meet you at…at your place and we could wait for the morning furniture delivery and then walk over here and buy kitchen stuff afterwards,” she says. There is hesitancy in her voice as if she feels she is being too forward by inviting herself over.
“I’d like that very much,” he tells her and the uncertainty fades from her expression. “If you don’t mind sitting on the floor waiting. It’s got very nice carpets. Very plush.”
She laughs and he adores the sound of it. “I don’t think I’ll mind one bit,” she tells him. She throws her head back and her hair untwists itself from its fancy updo. As the golden strands fall across her shoulders he wonders just what it might feel like between his fingers or what it might look like splayed against the floor of his very plush carpet. He puts a solid stop to that line of thought or otherwise Rose Tyler may find the subject of his rather substantial, firm length arising again very quickly.
I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says softly.
“Looking forward to it,” she tells him warmly. They say quiet good-byes and he’s not even sure his feet touch the ground for the rest of the night.
Later that night Rose tries desperately to study but all she can think about is the last few hours spent in the company of Jonathon helping him pick out first a bed and then much more easily some solid pine bedroom furniture with a warm, honey-colored finish that matches the mission style bed frame, wooden with slats, that he’d picked out. It’s beautiful and should last him a lifetime and even be something he might pass down to his grandchildren one day. Temmel’s has only the best in furniture, no cardboard inserts or shoddy plywood supports behind the scenes.
She thinks about the mattress he settled on and how very good it had felt. A far cry from the one she’s stretched out on now with a book entitled Circuitry in the Small Scale Robot. She’s building a robotic cat for her final project and double-checking some of the fiddly bits of her blueprints against the design schematics in the book. She should probably be doing it at her little desk but her bed’s always been more comfortable. Least until she’d discovered what his new one felt like.
Rose thinks she’d love to spend some time on that bed and not necessarily for anything romantic to happen. She can easily see herself all spread out with her school books, gazing at him as he reads some article to her out of a scientific journal. Or just sleeping on it, not necessarily even next to him, it was that nice of a bed. It had been like the very heart of luxury itself and it’s been so long since she’s slept really well. And then there are the romantic possibilities… She tries to stop that line of thought.
She blushes at the very thought of what could happen in the future between her and this man and turns her mind fiercely back onto checking her plans again. She’ll start building the robot cat tomorrow and she really doesn’t want any last minute surprises tripping her up, even though she’s pretty sure she’s got the entire book memorized.
Some days it still surprises her that she ever entered the field of robotics. When she’d been tested at sixteen for job affinities and it had come up that she’d had all the skills for being adept at robotics, computer programming, and technology. Jonathon’s company (when had she stopped calling him Dr. Smith?), Illuminate, is very strong in such industries, is behind most of this sort of testing in the U.K. school system, and she’d been granted partial scholarships for choosing to study in any of those fields. It had been the guiding force really behind her decision to choose this particular path, that and knowing she’d most likely walk right into a very good job, probably with Illuminate Corporation at graduation. Graduates in robotics with her level of achievement generally did.
She’d not have thought even six years ago that she’d ever be interested in something like this, but the challenge has been good for her mind and she’s actually enjoyed it. And soon everything she’s been working for is going to pay off. She smiles, allows herself to daydream and returns to her work a few minutes later. When she is positive she knows all she needs to know cold, she puts the book away, prepares for bed and climbs beneath her covers.
She falls into an easy sleep, dreaming of warm brown eyes, really great hair and a smile that she hopes she’ll be seeing a great deal more of.
Rose wakes early the next morning, takes the seven a.m. bus to school and finds herself standing in front of campus health without really realizing what she is doing or how she got there. It is only a short wait for the doors to open and she is the only one besides the employees who are inside. She is shy and hesitant but determined to do this. She asks to speak with someone about birth control.
She has done very well in her life not thinking about things like sex much. Oh, she is as randy as anyone else with a fully functional set of hormones, but she is a clever girl and as handy as the next person and has dealt with such issues as they arose. It might not have been quite as satisfactory as a mutual relationship, but she’d seen the dangers of that a long time ago when her old pal Shireen had taken up with Jimmy Stone after Rose had dumped him.
That could have been her, dropped out of school without even her A levels, pregnant two years later and currently raising two children with a dead beat, semi-abusive man she wouldn’t leave. Apparently Jimmy had gotten better at sex, but Rose is glad she never waited around to find that out.
The risk of sex had never really been worth it again, but now, assuming her new acquaintance’s flirting and slips of the tongue meant precisely what she thought they meant, perhaps it was time to reconsider the issue because there is no doubt in her mind that if she’s actually here, and obviously she is, she wants this with him. As the receptionist leads her back to meet with the doctor and be given a brief exam she tries to still the nerves in her stomach.
She might be two months from graduation, but that doesn’t mean she is going to be careless right as she is about to begin her career. And anyway, she isn’t thinking about slipping into bed with him right away. So a couple of months for her body to adjust to some kind of birth control would be a good thing. She knows it takes a month for most forms to be effective anyway.
Rose hopes she isn’t jumping the gun, isn’t reading too much into things because from the moment she woke up she was no longer hiding from herself the fact that she is extremely attracted to this man and is very interested in a relationship with him both in and out of the bedroom, and by out of the bedroom she didn’t mean having sex in the kitchen, the living room, or outdoors. She meant getting to know him, building a friendship, and then building a romance that later led to sex in the bedroom, maybe one or two other rooms, and quite possibly if she was very brave, outdoors.
She snorts at her flight of fancy but somehow can’t get the idea of making love with him under the stars out of her too fertile new randy imagination. Fifteen minutes later she leaves the clinic with a three month supply of pills she’s to start after her next period and heads off to her first class of the day. It’s the right thing, she’s sure of it. She’s Rose Tyler and she learned a long time ago it’s always best to prepared.
Ch. 4: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/119062.html
