Heavy Weather

"Jerry?" she said. In the still of camp-the ticking of insects, the distant whoosh of the wind generator-even a tender whisper sounded loud as a gunshot.

"Mmmph."

"Jerry, I'm getting better now, I really am. Maybe we should try something."

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"Okay, maybe you're right, but that's no reason why you should have to lie there stiff as a board. Let me try something, darling, let me see if I can make you feel better." Before he could say anything, she slipped her hand down and gripped his cock.

His penis felt so odd and hot in her fingers that for one shocked instant she thought something had gone terribly wrong with him. Then she realized that he didn't have a condom on. She'd touched it before, and even stroked it and kissed it, but never without the condom.

Well, no harm done. Not just with fingers.

"All tight?" she said.

"All right."

He didn't seem to lack enthusiasm. And if she stopped and got out in the pitch darkness and made him put a condom on, it would be a mega drag. Forget it: so far, so good. She stroked him patiently and persistently, until she got a bad cramp in her forearm. Then she burrowed down into the sleeping bag and tried kissing for a while, and although he didn't come, he at least began to make the right noises.

Then she came out of the bag for some much-needed air and tried rubbing some more.

It was taking a very long time. At first she felt intensely embarrassed; and then she got used to it, and began to feel better, thinking that even if this was a very ungainly and unsatisfactory substitute for sex, at least she was doing something practical. At least she was taking charge of their troubles. Then she thought that he was never going to come, that she wasn't skilled or sweet enough to make him do it, and that brought the threat of a cavernous sense of failure.

But he was stroking her neck and shoulder in an encouraging way, and finally he started breathing seriously hard. Then he groaned in the dark, and she held it carefully, and she felt it pulsing.

The wetness on her fingers felt viscous and drippy. It felt rather like motor oil. She had seen semen before, and she even knew that odd and particular smell that it had, but never in her life had it actually touched her skin. It was an intimate bodily fluid. Intimate bodily fluids were very dangerous.

"I'm twenty-six years old," she said, "and this is the first time I've ever touched this stuff."

He put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her to him. "My sweet darling," he said quietly, "it wont hurt you.

"I know that. You don't have any viruses. You're not sick! You're the healthiest person I how!"

"You have no way to really know that, though."

"Have you ever had sex with anybody, without using a condom?"

"No, never, of course not."

"Me either. So then how could you possibly have any STh?"

"Blood transfusion, maybe? IV drugs? Anyway, I might be lying about the condom use."

"Oh, for heaven's sake! You're not a liar, I've never known you to lie. You never lie to me!" Her voice trembled. "I can't believe that I've known you all this time, that you're the man I love more than anyone else in the world, and yet I never really knew about this simple thing that you do, this simple thing that comes out of your body." She burst into tears.

"Don't cry, sweetheart."

"Jerry, why is our life this way?" she said. "What did we ever do to deserve this? We don't hurt each other! We love each other! Why can't we be like men and women used to be? Why is everything always so difficult for us?"

"It's for protection.

"I don't need any protection from you! I don't want any protection from you! I'm not afraid about this! Christ. Jerry, this is the part of being with you that I'm never afraid about! This is the part that's really wonderful with us, it's the part that we're really good at." She held on to him and sobbed.

He held her close and tight for a long time as she shook and wept. Finally he began to deliberately kiss the tears away from her inflamed and aching face. When their mouths met, she felt a rush of passion so intcnse that her soul seemed to flow from her lips. She slid on top of him in a patch of cooling stickiness and jammed his cock into her aching, needful body.

And it really hurt. She wasn't at all well, she was sick, she had yeast. It stung and burned, but nowhere near enough to make her want to stop. She put her arms out straight to support herself and started rocking on him in the darkness.

"Juanita, yo te quiero."

It was such a perfect, intoxicating thing for him to say at that moment that she lost all sense of herself. She went way past the hurt and into frenzy. Maybe forty seconds of it, something like forty aeons in the hottest Tantric circle of Nirvana. Her yell of exultation was still ringing in her ears when he grabbed her hips hard enough to bruise and rammed into her from underneath and he came, he pulsed, deep inside of her.

She slid off him, exhausted and drenched with sweat. "My God."

"I didn't know it was going to feel like that." He seemed stu

"Yes," she said thoughtfully, "it was sort of quick."

"I couldn't help it," he said. "I didn't know it was going to feel so intense. It's like a completely different experience."

"Is it really, sweetheart? It's nice for you that way.

"Yes. Very." He kissed her.

She felt perfectly calm now. Everything was becoming very clear. That mean-tempered tight-stretched whine in her nerves was completely gone, turned to something like the mellow vibratory afterglow of gently plucked angelic harp strings, and everything was suddenly making a lot of solid good sense.

"Y'know, Jerry, I think maybe it's the latex that's at fault."

"What?"

"I think the condom is my health problem. That I'm allergic to the latex, or whatever they make condoms out of these days, and that's why I got all messed up in the first place."

"How could you suddenly develop an allergy like that, after a whole year?"

"Well," she said, "from repeated exposure."

He laughed.

"I do have allergies, you know. I mean, not like Alex does, but I have a couple of them. I think we should always have sex this way, from now on. It's sweet, it's good, it's perfect. Except that ... well, everything's all wet. But that's okay."

"Jane, if we always have sex like this, you're going to get pregnant."

"Holy mackerel! I never thought of that." The concept amazed her. She might get pregnant. She could conceive a child. Yes, that astounding event could actually take place; there was nothing left to stop it from happening. She felt like a fool for not considering pregnancy, but she simply hadn't; the long shadows of disease and disaster had over-whelmed that whole idea.

"Just like men and women used to be. Before birth control." Jerry laughed. "Maybe we should count our blessings. If these were the 1930s instead of the 2030s, you'd be a downtrodden faculty wife with five kids."

"Five kids in less than a year, Professor? You're some kinda guy." Jane yawned, sweetly and uncontrollably.

Sleep was near, and sleep was going to be so good.

"They've got those pills for taking care of that, though. Those month-after pills."

"Contragestives."

"Yeah, you just eat one pill and your period comes right back. No problem! Government-subsidized and everything." She hugged him. "I think we've got this beat, darling. We're going to be all right now. Everything will be all right. I feel so happy."

MOST OF THE Troupers were hard at work shuffling data. They were assembling some fairly major net-presentation, to impress some bigwig netfriend of Juanita's, who was due for a visit to camp.

None of the Troupers struck Alex as showing a particular dramatic flair for net-presentation work, with the possible exception of Juanita herself. But net-presentation was the kind of labor that could be distributed to a million little cut-rate mouse-potato desktoppers all over the planet, and knowing Juanita, it probably would be.