Into the Light

 

 

Chapter 2

 

Shane transferred the last plastic bag from Julianna’s carry-on into the bin, put the bag and bin on the belt, and raised his eyes to his new wife.

She still looked like a princess–though an impatient one–as she stood waiting for him on the other side of the security gate through which she’d breezed, unencumbered.

Shane lifted another bin and emptied his pockets.  He watched as the last of their belongings disappeared into X-ray purgatory and then made his way through the metal detector and past the wand-wielding security personnel.

“I thought you’d never get here!” Julianna said, her blue eyes sparkling.

“My deepest apologies, fair damsel,” Shane said, “yon beasts delayed my arrival.”  He put a kiss on her nose.  “Miss me?”

“Every second,” she breathed.

Shane retrieved Julianna’s white, sequined shoes from the bin and knelt.  He lifted one foot and then the other, slipping the shoes onto them.

“A little higher,” Julianna whispered.

They laughed.  She’d said the same thing only a few hours before, while his hands traveled up her leg for the garter.  He’d had to go pretty high to get that.  He returned Julianna’s foot to the carpet and then stood to repack their things.

With bags on each shoulder, Shane took Julianna’s hand as they resumed their journey toward the gate.  Normally, she was only a little taller than his height of five-foot-two, but the heels gave her another three inches, so his arm bent at the elbow as they walked hand in hand.  He kept tension in his arm so it wouldn’t be a dead weight for her to carry. 

Strangers smiled and offered good wishes as they passed, and Julianna basked in the attention–at least, at first.

“How much further?” she asked. 

“Only a couple more gates,” he answered.  She was as capable of reading the signs as he was.

They stood at the window, watching planes come and go, until their flight was called.

Julianna’s eyes went wide when she entered the first-class seating area.  “I never imagined,” she whispered.

She was like a little girl as she explored the new surroundings, testing her reclining seat and television.  Shane always loved seeing her discover new things.

They held hands as the plane took off for the twelve-hour flight.  Not long after that, the flight attendant delivered their champagne.

Shane noticed the woman’s shoe on the train of Julianna’s dress and hoped she’d move before Julianna saw.  He hoped she wouldn’t make a scene as she sometimes did over slights, when she’d been drinking. Moments later the woman moved on.

Soon Julianna tired of her seat and made her way to Shane’s, settling beside him.  It was a tight fit but not an uncomfortable one.

“I can’t wait to see Hawaii,” she said.

Shane smiled.  Hawaii had been Julianna’s choice for the honeymoon; he’d never been, either.  They would discover it together.  They’d scheduled a few activities, snorkeling and visiting Kilauea among them, but had left most of the two-week stay free for whatever might appeal to them at any given time.

They talked about their plans.  Now and then, Shane put tiny kisses on Julianna’s lips.  He knew, from the way she leaned into him, that she wanted more, but he didn’t think the two children on the other side of the plane should see more.  Though seemingly engrossed in their laptop, they looked now and then to see what Shane and Julianna were doing.  Julianna’s tongue slipped between his lips.  He kissed her and pulled away.  When she ran her hand down his chest, he caught it and held it.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Kids,” he whispered.

She made a disgusted sound.  “What are they doing in first-class, anyway?”

Shane hoped the children hadn’t heard that.  He didn’t want them offended.  He thought the children, a girl of about ten and a boy of maybe six, were well-behaved.  They had as much right to be there as anyone.  Besides that, he thought they were traveling without parents.  A flight attendant had led them to their seats and buckled them in.

Julianna turned to scowl at the children.

The little girl responded with a tentative smile.  “We didn’t mean to stare,” she said.  “You just look so beautiful.”

Julianna softened.  “Thank you,” she said.  “You’re very pretty, too.”

The girl beamed.  “My mom braided my hair.”

“It’s a good style for you,” Julianna said.

“We’re going to Hawaii,” the girl said.  “Is that where you’re going?”

“Yes.”

“Because you just got married?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to see our dad,” the girl said.

Shane thought it likely the parents were divorced.  It was a sobering Honeymoon reminder that not all marriages ended in happily-ever-after.

The boy had continued to play on the computer while Julianna talked to the girl.  He growled and made a disgusted face.  “We’re never gonna get this.”

“Whatcha playin’?” Shane asked.

“Morrow’s End,” the girl answered, reclaiming the computer.  “But we’re stuck.”

Shane nodded.  “That’s a hard one.”

Julianna snuggled into his side and they closed their eyes.

Shane half-slept.  Now and then, the children whispered.  He opened his eyes when something blocked the half-light that had filtered through his eyelids.  He encountered two big, brown eyes.

“Did I wake you up?” the little girl whispered.

“No,” he whispered.  He wondered if she’d crept that close just to get a better look at Julianna’s dress.  “What’s up?”

“Do you know how to get the egg from the dragon?”

Shane had never played the game but he did a lot of reading about games.  He remembered something about that.  “I think you gotta play the mystical lyre and that draws her outside.”

“The what?”

“Funny-lookin’ guitar thing.”

“Ohhh,” she said, her eyes going wide.  “We have that.”  She grinned.  “Thanks.”

She hurried back to her seat, just in time to avoid having the flight attendant escort her there.  The woman, whose nametag identified her as Stacy, gave Shane an apologetic smile.  She looked a little frazzled, which he could understand.  Having her young charge talk to a strange man could cause her problems on more than one front.  He smiled to let her know he didn’t intend to complain.  She blushed, looking even more ill-at-ease than before, and quickly turned away.

The children exchanged hushed words of excitement as they stole the dragon’s egg.  Shane smiled and closed his eyes.

A few minutes later, the plane hit patch of turbulence and shimmied.  The jarring came again moments later, more violent than before.

Julianna started awake, eyes wide.  Shane tightened his arms around her and kissed her forehead.  She snuggled back into him with a quiet sigh of contentment. 

“Are we going to crash?” the little boy asked, getting on his knees to look out the window.  His tone made it sound like a great adventure.

“No,” a flight attendant assured him.  “It’s just a little wind blowing.  But you need your seatbelt.”

The little boy turned from the window and allowed the woman to buckle him in.

The little girl wrapped her hand around her brother’s.  She looked more afraid than he did.  Clearly, at her age, she had a better understanding of the fragility of life than her brother did.  Lightning flashed and she jumped.

Shane hated seeing children go through frightening experiences without their trusted adults.  When he was ten, his mother had put him on a bus in California and sent him to live with his grandparents in Maryland.  He remembered the trip as it had been to him at that age, a horror of road dips, swerves and too-abrupt shifts in speed, all amplified by the absence of someone who would care enough to help look after him if things got bad.  His mother fell at the inattentive end of the spectrum but he’d felt confident she would at least try to save him in the event of a fire or other catastrophe.  That bus trip without her was the most alone he ever felt as a child.

The little girl’s eyes fell on his face.  He smiled, hoping to convey without words that he recognized she was there, she was important, and he wouldn’t forget her.

She grinned, looking like she’d gotten the dragon’s egg all over again.

The pilot made a couple announcements.  After a minor course adjustment, the plane steadied.

Julianna woke at lunch and returned to her seat for the meal.  She soon became engrossed in a movie.  She paused it when Shane pulled out his laptop.  “Tell me you’re not planning to work.”

“Was just gonna write a little bit of code.”

She none-too-gently pressed the button to make the movie resume playing.

“You wanna come back over here?”

“No,” she said, her eyes on the screen.  “Write your code.”

Shane’s primary focus was on semantics, the how and why of what things meant.  He did most of his programming in Ziggish, a computer language he’d developed to accommodate the fuzzy aspects of natural language.  Thus far, he’d only taken it operational for his phone-and-computer sex business, but he was doing development and running tests related to a host of other potential applications. 

Customer support technology for various business types would come next, followed by generalized library research capabilities, as he worked his way up to medicine, which he regarded as the most crucial of all fields and the one in which mistakes absolutely could not be made.

He had no room for furniture, aside from his twin bed, in his room in the apartment he shared with Julianna.  Components of his two computer clusters, Ziggy and Jezebel, took all the room.  He had to sleep under two quilts because of the computers’ air-conditioning unit.

He looked forward to getting into a house as much as Julianna did.  He wanted a place for the computers and maybe even one of his drum sets, which he currently kept at the house that the other band members shared.  Even better would be a house with a shed and some land so he could finally retrieve some of his dirt bikes from his grandparents’ shed.

He spent the next two hours giving the laptop an introduction to hematoma, tying it to concepts the computer already understood.  When he decided he needed a break from that, he turned his attention to his ongoing analysis of Supreme Court cases.  Justices could be long-winded and so it was no small feat to dissect their ramblings into salient points for analysis.

He had big plans for Ziggy but there was more work than he could do in a thousand lifetimes.  His goal was to develop a rich set of examples that he could turn over to subject experts so they could duplicate his processes for additional topics.  Ultimately, he hoped to teach Ziggy to find his own answers, but that would take a whole lot of examples and about two million man-hours of coding.  He hoped to use the money from early successes to cover ongoing acquisition and development. Hardware and software weren’t cheap, and neither were subject experts and programmers.

“Are you going to work all day?”

“No,” he said, still typing.  “One more minute.”  He needed to finish the current string.

She leaned her chin on her palm, watching him.  “You’re cute when you’re obsessively concentrating.”

He smiled.  “Okay,” he said, closing the string.  He saved the file.  “I’m done.”  He shut down the laptop and put it into its case, then opened his arms.  “Come here, you.”

She climbed onto him, covering them both with her blanket, and he held her.  Now and then, they kissed.  The children were napping.

“I was thinking,” Julianna said, walking her fingers up the center of his chest, “maybe the right thing would be to go ahead and join the Mile-High Club.”

He laughed.  “I thought we could do that on the way home.”

She growled and put her head on his shoulder.  “This flight is taking forever.”

He kissed her temple.  “We’ll be there soon.”

He’d tried to tell her they ought to schedule some time for themselves between the reception and the twelve-hour flight, but she’d said it just wouldn’t be the same as going straight from the reception to the honeymoon.  So here they were, nine hours into a twelve-hour flight.  And that wedding dress had to be uncomfortable.

“You wanna change?” he asked.

“Everything’s in luggage.”

“I got a shirt and pants in my carry-on if you want ‘em.”

“What kind?”

“Your black jeans and that white shirt with the black collar.”

“Why would you pack my clothes?”

“Thought you might want ‘em.”

“I told you I was going to wear my dress.”

“Well, I just… you know… thought you might change your mind.”

“Well, I didn’t,” she said.

“Okay.”

He kissed her again.  Her hand slid down his chest and abdomen.  He stopped it just before it reached his crotch.  He raised her hand to his chest, holding it there.

“You are such a prude,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “It’s just… there’s kids over there.”

“I know that,” she said.  “But that… that should bother you.”

“Why?”

She rolled her eyes.  “Because we’ve never had sex and now we can’t have sex and do you even care?”

“Well, yeah, I care,” he said.  “But we’re gonna be there soon.”

“See,” she said, “that is just… not how a man acts.”

“What do you want, Jul?” he said.  “You want me throw up your dress, drop my pants, and fuck you over the back of that bald guy’s seat up there?”

“Well, it would just be nice if you wanted to.”

“I do,” he said.  “Desperately.  I’ve been fantasizing about it since we first got here.”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

He sighed in frustration.  “Julianna,” he said, “I love you.  I’m sorry this isn’t the way you want it to be.  But we’ll make up for it when we get there.”  At least, he hoped they would.  He hoped he could.  He didn’t want to disappoint her.

He thought maybe they should have gone ahead and gotten the sex thing over with before the wedding, since he wasn’t sure he was what she wanted.  She’d declined, saying it would be ridiculous to fall into bed together so close to the wedding date when they’d spent so long together waiting for marriage.

She was as aware of the risk as he was.  She’d been there when the doctors explained that the aesthetic improvements she wanted made to his once-tiny phallus could jeopardize functionality.  She seemed confident that her appeal, combined with the pump the doctors had put into him, would be sufficient.  During the nights leading up to the wedding, Shane had spent quite a few hours praying that would be the case.

Now, he just wanted to get it over with… for better or worse.