Saviors 101

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

a week until Armageddon

Dana Murphy chose the sky of her birth night twenty years and nine months ago to display on the planetarium dome.

Not that her guest would notice. He wasn’t an astrophysics major. Most of the students in her department wouldn’t be able to tell either, but her own studies had included in-depth research of planetary positions, that effected the proper curve to apply when pitching a godly force.

No one else might notice the position of the planets, but she would.

She’d considered for a moment whether to use the current year or the year of her birth. The latter, she decided. After all, birth was more significant than s*x, though not necessarily by all that much.

A quick setting on the dial and the orrery spun the planets across the night sky in retrograde orbits, counting the years of her life backwards. While the planets were working their way backward in time, she set the small shining globe of the sun moving sluggishly across the star field of the college’s planetarium dome until it was just sunset above the western horizon. Then she turned back to her preparations.

She removed the first three rows of chairs and, after a little consideration, the fourth as well. It wasn’t all that big a planetarium after all. She replaced them with a sleeping bag and a couple of blankets. A small picnic basket with a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, three fresh pears, one each and then a third they’d share bite-for-bite…after, and a fair collection of condoms in case Sam forgot. An indoor picnic under the Christmas stars of twenty-one years ago this December. Indoors, because it was a fifty-and-drizzling October night outside, turning the University Washington campus into an extended mud puddle.

She shoved three-quarters of the condoms back into her pack, a whole box was perhaps being overambitious. She only had one or two really, really unsatisfying experiences to base her estimates and hopes on. Nowhere near enough for a best-fit curve analysis or any form of reliable numerical extrapolation.

At home, she’d first put on an apricot sheath dress that made her twenty-year-old body look even longer and slimmer than it already was. Then she tried a silk blouse and a swirling floor-length skirt that made her feel dangerous and gypsy-like. Next she’d modeled cutoffs and a tank top, stupid for October, she’d freeze into a marble statue in seconds. But damn she looked good in them.

In the end, she’d worn skinny jeans and a clingy girly t-shirt that declared “Oy to the World” in keeping with her Christmas in October theme.

They’d only had a couple of dates so far. Cokes at the HUB. A microbrew at the Blue Moon, he’d had a brew, she’d had a Coke still being underage for a few months. The best knockwurst in Seattle followed by a heaping cone of Baskin Robbins Burgundy Cherry ice cream had been the best. His Rocky Road had leant a nice chocolaty zing to their first serious goodnight kiss.

Kisses.

Good kisses.

Really good kisses.

How-much-can-we-do-standing-up-with-our-clothes-on kisses.

The projected planets slid into place and stopped. She switched off the sun and looked up at the planetarium dome. That was how the sky had looked at the moment of her birth on Christmas Day. Well, her view had probably been more of fluorescent ceiling lights and a fresh-out-of-school doctor dressed in hospital greens, but thankfully she didn’t remember that particular moment. Or the twelve weeks of screaming colic afterward, though Mama referred to it so often she felt as if she did.

She raised the western-rim lighting up halfway, causing a deeply red and gold sunset to wash across the dome. With the sequence timer at twenty minutes, it would give them a little time before they were plunged into the starlit dark of the night. The moon, a day past full, would rise shortly after sunset.

The heavy mahogany trim and paneling disappeared in the artificial dusk. If one didn’t mind the large planetarium projector silhouetted against the sunset-hued dome, it was a bit like being outdoors.

She wanted to make love outdoors. But not a hurried tussle in the campus bushes hoping security didn’t catch them.

No, she wanted to lie back against a mountain meadow, a bed of grass or clover that had been filled with the gentle sound of bumblebees slipping from one flower to the next through the long afternoon. Upon a great height, where there was nothing in the world but the stars. All the trappings that were not readily available in Seattle’s University District.

The images came so clearly. The desires so deep it was a great ache in her loins. Why it had taken her three years of running shows in the planetarium to think of a nighttime picnic, she didn’t know.