Drown #12.5: the scientist

July 2086. Madison Riley is 63, Keri is 25, Dominique Beech is 27, Tyler Jackson is 22.

* NSFW 


So it was all decided then? Keri would jet off into the great unknown, and the fabric of what little family Madison had left would disperse like stardust. The blood and cells and DNA that made up Madison’s existence would stop right here in this old, aging body. There would be no more grandchildren and no great grandchildren, and the Riley family name was dead, too.

Bryson wasn’t as upset as he should have been, Madison thought.


"I heard from your uncle Andy today. Your cousin Amelia is pregnant with her second now. Your cousin Bella has three."

"Good for them," Keri said.

"You're going to wish you could take it back," Madison said. "Maybe not now, but when you're older. You'll wish you hadn't done it."

"Or maybe I'll be glad I did it."

"So that’s it then? It’s done. You’re going traveling and you’ll see Lily once or twice a year, if that?"

"I’m not going traveling," Keri said. "I have work to do there. I’ll see Lily at the end of the month when I get back."

"Then we won’t see Lily?"

"Dad goes to see Lily all the time. You can go see Lily whenever you want as long as you don’t cause them grief, because they don’t have to let you see her. But they will if you’re not terrible to them."


"And I’m going to go do what normal twenty-five year-olds do. I’m going to interview some scientists, get gorgeous, go out dancing with my girl, and find some smoking hot dude to fuck me into oblivion."

"Oh, my goodness, Keri."

Keri relished the look of horror on her mother's face and laughed.


This is all I have left, Madison thinks, and before long, I won't have her, either.

—

Keri didn't consider herself cruel. She considered herself, among other things, ambitious and clever and improvising. Helpful, even. She wasn't going on vacation. She was going to Arizona to meet with an engineering firm to recruit scientists.

Nova Industries had agreed to let them interview some of their scientists for the Cassiopeia project on the promise of some government funding for some of their projects.


Other things Keri could be, if she tried: approachable, motivating, and persuasive.



But being allowed to interview the scientists was only the first of many hurdles Keri would find. Getting people to sign up for a five year interstellar mission was another matter entirely. People had houses and children, or else wanted to have them. Some of those who were brave enough to go into space had already served their time during the war. They had safe modern labs to work in and government benefits. Who would leave that?

The scientists that Keri interviewed were mildly curious at best.



Some of them were outright disinterested entirely.

They thought they might have better luck with Maya, since she'd worked for the space program before, but she was adamant that she would not like to go back to space, at all, ever.


"She’s prickly," Keri said. "What happened?"

"You kind of had sex with her boyfriend," Dominique explained.

"What? Who? When?"

"Tyler Jackson, on the moon."

"He was her boyfriend? How was I supposed to know that?"

"They were almost over," Dominique said. "You couldn’t have known and I doubt he would have told you."

"Ugh, geez."

"That's old gossip though, that's not why she doesn't want the job. She's just done with space."

"Fair enough. Wait, what do you mean old gossip? How many people know about that?"


With two mildly curious prospects, Keri and Dominique decided to wine and dine them to try to sell the project.


Julissa was young, but clearly intelligent. She talked passionately about science half the time, and the other half of the time she made flippant jokes. Any time they brought up the project, she just said, "Man, five years. I just finished college. I just moved out of my parents house. I just ... five years. Whoa."

Megan was the older of the two. She seemed friendly and level-headed. She listened carefully and then said, "No thanks, I'd kind of like to settle down and have a family. I'm thirty-one already. These ovaries aren't getting any younger."


They both said no. They all said no.

"Now what?" Keri said.

"We keep looking. We'll try the other place in Chicago. And for now, we go dancing."

"Dancing?"

"Sure, there's a night club down the street and we're off duty."



Keri didn't know how to be "off duty" in the way everyone else seemed to understand. She gave her work two-hundred percent, so when it was time to switch off, she felt at a loss for what to do and how to be a normal twenty-five-year-old woman.



This trip was a fail on all points. Except for the "getting gorgeous" part. She felt like she looked okay.

She had six weeks of vacation saved up because she never switched off. "We're not at war anymore, Keri," Cabe said to her. "You're allowed to take a vacation."

Keri wasn't at war anymore. She wasn't married anymore. She wasn't a mother anymore. So what was she?


Keri was all talk with her mother about getting laid. She’d had sex exactly once since Justin. Awkward fumbling sex with Tyler Jackson in twenty-three percent lunar gravity. One night of fumbling sex in over three years.

Granted, she’d been busy. Granted, she’d had higher priorities over the past few years above getting laid. But now Keri didn't remember how to be a normal young woman. None of the men in this club appealed to her.



The best looking of the bunch was the entertainer.


Keri liked men with a sense of humor. Or so she assumed, since Justin was always funny.

But this guy was blond. Not just blond, but his hair was light and fluffy and his little goatee was so pale on his skin that it might as well not be there at all.


This would be the logical point, if Keri was a normal young woman, where she might ask if he wanted to come back to her hotel room, but Keri was not going to bed with a blond. The idea of blond pubes on a man made her feel icky.

"Well, good show anyway," she muttered and pulled Dominique back to the bar.

She could only compare him to Justin. She didn't want Justin enough when she had him, but now that she'd lost him, she couldn't stop remembering him like he was the pinnacle of everything a man should be. Keri was bad at loving people, but she had loved Justin in her way.


"You used to complain about how moody he was," Dominique offered.

"He was," Keri said.

"You hated how sensitive he was, how he always needed reassurance. His fickle ego. Those weepy puppy dog eyes."

"He had such pretty eyes." Keri sighed. She was a cold woman, but still, to this day, he could make her melt with those eyes. "That's why we always fought more on the phone, because he couldn't flash me those weepy eyes."

"He ate cookies in your bed."

Keri nodded. "That was annoying."

"Keri, you just got divorced," Dominique said. "Let it rest for a minute."

"He didn’t need to let it rest."

"Well, that’s him. And you’re you."

—

When Keri got back to Potomac Heights, she put in for an extra week of vacation. Two weeks, although she didn't know what she would do with herself for all of that time.


Hanging out with her parents in an ice cream shop was fine for a while, but Keri felt like taking a walk, feeling the misty breeze on her face and breathing the home-grown Earthy air.


In a quiet moment like this, in between her work, she would have texted Justin to check in. He was never as far from her mind as he had always complained. He was buried in her mind, maybe. Now it was all over now and he was still there, buried in her mind, and she didn't know how to change that.

Now she wasn't obligated to check in anymore, she wasn’t even obligated to take her one or two weeks of visitation per year if she couldn’t swing it. That was just a formality that her lawyers thought she should her put in. She felt untethered from Justin now in a way that she hadn’t anticipated. She felt cut clean straight through to the bone marrow, even more so than with the divorce. She was more than divorced to him. She wasn’t even the mother of his child anymore. She was nothing to him now and it all changed so fast.

She said to her mother, They don’t have to include you, but they will if you’re not terrible to them.

Will that always be true?

She tried to think of something short and to the point to text to him.

Keri: Hey, I’m back in from Arizona. Thought I might stop by to visit one of these weekends. When is good for you guys? 

Justin: Fine, whenever.

His short but prompt response made her smile.


"Keri Riley?"

Keri turned around to find six-foot-three-inches of tall, dark, and handsome walking down the sidewalk toward her.

"Tyler fucking Jackson, what are you doing here?"


She hadn't seen Tyler Jackson for two years, since before the war ended, since the night she crawled out of his bed, half naked, because he was trying to cry at her about all of his failed love affairs after they'd just had mediocre sex. Shame that hadn't been better, she thought, because he was so handsome.

Tyler filled her in on the events of his last two years. He wasn't in the military anymore. He took his leave when it was offered, and he followed up on the stunted sports career that he'd passed up when he enlisted.

Keri felt awkward about their run-in on base. She realized now why she slept with him, not because they were friends in high school—they weren't, really—but because he used to have a raging crush on Stephanie. As if she could get back at Stephanie that way, because that wasn't really how revenge worked. In fact, revenge didn't work at all and she had to sort things out with Stephanie the grown-up way, with conversation and forgiveness. Now Keri just felt silly. She should have just slept with him because she wanted to and he was cute. Because he was totally cute.

Tyler was still talking about his life.

"I'm playing for the Capital Crushers," he told her. "My rookie year."

Keri hadn't told him anything about the past two years of her own life, because, she wondered if she didn't have anything positive to say. Certainly not, if you asked her mother, but maybe it depended on how you looked at it.

"I got divorced," Keri said.

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"No, don't be. It's a good thing."

"I got a sweet apartment over on Connecticut," he said.

"Hey, my parents have a place over there, too."

"What are you doing tonight? You wanna hang out? You should come stop by."


"How many girlfriends do you have this time?"

"I don’t have any girlfriends."

"How many girls think they’re your girlfriend?"

"You talked to Maya?" His eyes went soft. "It wasn’t like that, we weren’t a thing."

"She thinks you guys were a thing."

"Well, we weren’t supposed to be a thing. Wait though, what did she say about me?"

"Oh my God, no. We're not talking about Maya again."

He was staring at the door of the cafe. "Is that your mom?"

"Oh, God. Yes. She's nosy and judgy. She's judging me right now. She doesn't know you but she's judging you, too."


"So let's get out of here. Come see my new apartment."

"Come see my apartment?" Keri laughed. "You better work on your pickup game. I'm harder to get than that."


"Okay, how about this?" Tyler cleared his throat and lowered his voice, smooth and deep. "You wanna come over and take a dip in my hot tub?"

Keri laughed. The idea of a hot tub sounded nice, though. She could totally date a man with his own hot tub. A man who wasn't blond. She really wasn't that hard to get, after all.

"I know what you’re thinking," he said. "It was a little awkward, right? We were in space. Don’t you know that space sex is bad?"

"Really?" Keri perked up. Maybe the awkwardness hadn't been her fault after all.

Tyler shrugged. "Everybody knows that. It’s science, you know, moving bodies need gravity and weight and stuff."


What a disaster he was. What a disaster she was. They should be a disaster together, Keri thought. She felt like she sure could use something new to fill her body and mind. Just for fun. Why not? She was young and single and not the legal guardian of anyone. She had no obligations and all the freedom in the world, and wasn't this one of the perks of the deal?

"Hang on, let me just tell my parents I’m gonna … I don't know … take a walk. I’ll be right back."






And this little experiment was a wild success, because Tyler Jackson knew how to fuck a girl into oblivion. There was nothing left in Keri's busy mind but blinding pleasure.


"It was good, right? I told you Earth sex was better."

"It was alright." Keri grinned at him in a dopey orgasmic daze. "But I gotta get home."

"Call me," he said.

"We’ll see," she said.

She would definitely call him again, but she didn’t want to let him know that now.


It was five in the morning and she wanted to sneak back into her parents house before her mother woke up and started judging her again. Her mother wouldn't agree, but in Keri's opinion, she thought her life hadn't turned out that badly at all.

—

footnotes: Tyler and Maya // Tyler and Keri // Tyler and Stephanie, ha ha

outtakes: Keri Riley does not dance