Pandora's People: Gale
Michael jiggled the shower handle for the fifth time. There still wasn’t any water. He sighed. This was the third time in as many months that the water had gone out in this building. He could understand the outages over the summer—only a few faculty members had been in residence, and it had been a logical time to shut things down for maintenance. But the school year officially started in a week. Time to get the situation in order.
Except it wasn’t in order. And while his ability to create bursts of high frequency sound came in handy sometimes for disrupting clogs in pipes, it was useless when the water was completely shut down. And he was in desperate need of his morning shower.
With a sigh, he gathered his clothes and toiletries, as well as a towel and washcloth, and stuffed them in a gym bag. No choice but to head for the gym if he wanted a shower. He’d done it before. Many times.
A couple other male faculty members were in the locker room when he came in. Roger, in the process of getting dressed, merely smiled and nodded in greeting. Brett, however, quickly wrapped a towel around his waist. He always did that. He always smiled and said, “Hey, Mike,” afterward—as he did now—but he always covered himself up.
Michael just gave him a tired smile. “Hey, Brett,” he answered. As usual, he thought about adding, “Nice cock,” but he knew Brett wouldn’t take it right, so he kept his mouth shut.
He headed for his usual corner—locker 69, because the number amused him in an admittedly adolescent way. To his surprise, it was already open and full of clothes. Not locked, though, and the T-shirt and sweats that had been shoved into the small space spilled out, dangling.
Michael sighed and opened another locker. He took off his clothes, tossed them in, and grabbed a towel from the shelf. Towel in one hand, mesh bag of toiletries in the other, he headed for the showers.
He went to his usual stall, lost in thought by now, thinking about the work he needed to get done today. He pulled the door open and was greeted by an indignant, “Hey! Occupied!”
“Oh, God, sorry.” He backed out quickly, and only then realized who he’d barged in on.
It was Gale. Buck naked, slicked with soap, with his dark hair wet and hanging in his brown eyes. He was wiry and lean and –
Don’t look at his dick. Don’t look at his dick.
Michael looked at his dick. It was respectable. Very. He backed out quickly, making himself focus on Gale’s face.
Gale grinned. “See you at eight, boss. For coffee.”
“Yeah.” Michael closed the shower door and went to another stall. He turned on the water to his usual, warm setting, then, reconsidering, cranked it down to cold.
* * *
After his shower, Gale headed down to the cafeteria and acquired his usual morning fare of scrambled eggs and toast. He’d beaten Dr. Preston—Michael—here. Not unexpected. He wondered how long it had taken the good professor to find an unoccupied shower stall. Finding a seat, he settled down and dug in.
“Hi.” At the sound of the voice next to him, Gale looked up from his eggs. Michael stood in front of his table, holding his breakfast tray. “Are we still on for breakfast?”
Gale shrugged. “Works for me.”
With a smile, Michael took a seat. Gale grinned back at him. “So, what do you have planned for the day?”
Michael gave him a far-too-serious look. “I was thinking about working on the lab. There’s always cleaning, rearranging, sorting, that kind of thing, that needs to be done before the students come in.”
Gale nodded. “I could help with that.”
“You don’t have to.” Michael seemed surprised by the offer. “I’m sure you still have unpacking to do.”
“You said you wanted me to help you out,” Gale replied. “So I’ll help out.”
Michael smiled. “All right, then. It’s a deal.”
“So,” Gale ventured. “How long have you lived here?”
“I was one of the first residents.” Michael poured an excess of cream into his coffee and stirred it. “They hired me on as a teacher after I served as a consultant for the education program.”
Gale considered. “So you’ve been here since the beginning.”
“Basically.”
Gale poked at his eggs, mulling it all over. With his feelings about the community as mixed as they were, it would probably be better if he didn’t share them with Michael just now. “There was… a lot of controversy then.”
Michael gave a slanted grin. “Still is. It’s been better since Pandora came, though. She brings a certain… steadiness… to the entire community.”
This captured Gale’s attention. “Have you met Pandora?”
“Of course.” Michael poured more coffee from the carafe. “She lives here. Technically, she’s my boss.” He added cream, as before, in mass quantities. “You’ll meet her later.”
Gale was seized with a mixture of fear and anticipation. “What’s she like?”
“She’s very difficult to explain.” He smiled at Gale’s grimace of dissatisfaction. “You’ll see. Finish your coffee. We have work to do.”
* * *
The lab was a mess. Michael regarded it with resigned disapproval. He walked farther into the room, picking scattered equipment up off the wide tables. “Summer school students always leave it a God-awful mess.” He sighed and picked up a textbook, leafing through it. “Next year I’m doing summer school. Then I won’t have to deal with this.”
“No, you won’t. I bet you like the break too much.”
With a surprised grin, Michael turned. Gale was regarding him with amused skepticism. Michael gave a resigned shrug.
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
Gale chuckled. “Let’s get started on this, then.”
The job mostly consisted of picking up scattered equipment and textbooks, wiping down the tables, and putting things in order. “Every year,” Michael said to Gale as they wiped down the last table. “Every damn year. I file the same papers, I make the same complaints, I bitch to the same people.” Gale’s biceps bulged against the cloth of his shirt as he worked; Michael found himself momentarily distracted by the sight.
“And nothing gets straightened out?”
“Nope.” He frowned, making himself pay attention to what he was doing instead of Gale’s arms. “I’ve even spoken to Pandora. Nothing seems to get any results.”
Finished with the table he was cleaning, Gale tossed his damp rag into the bucket. “Well, it’s done now.”
“Yeah.” He gathered the last of the rags and set all the cleaning supplies by the door. “So.” He paused, not sure he should go out on a limb. “Lunch?”
Gale shrugged, nonchalant. “Sure.”
There. Out on a limb wasn’t so bad. No, wait—now he had to worry about whether Gale was interested in just lunch, or in lunch with him specifically.
He shook his head. Worthless speculation, the kind of thing that would just make him crazy if he thought about it too much.
In any case, Gale looked up at him and smiled, and headed toward the door. “Any place in particular?”
Michael shrugged, suddenly nervous. “I could cook.”
Gale’s smile seemed completely without suspicion or ulterior motive. “Sure. Sounds good.”
So, a half-hour later, Michael stood in his kitchen sautéing green peppers and onions while Gale sat on the couch in the living room, drinking a diet Coke.
“Decent place,” Gale commented, looking around at the small but nicely-appointed room. Michael had made use of several of the pieces of furniture that had come with the place, but had added his own touches here and there—a charcoal drawing of a man’s torso a friend had drawn, some furniture he’d picked up in Japan, knick-knacks from various places he’d visited in the course of trench coat operations for Pandora.
“I like it.” Michael put thinly sliced beefsteak into the skillet and turned it quickly a few times, then deposited it into the large rolls he’d already prepared. He set the plates down on the table.
“Here you go,” he said to Gale.
Gale got up and headed into the kitchen. “Smells good. You like to cook?”
Michael shrugged, sitting down. “Yeah. It’s relaxing. Not that this is exactly haute cuisine.”
“Can’t cook for shit, myself.” Gale took a seat and snagged a potato chip off the plate. “Pretty much do the fast food take out or frozen food type menu.”
“So how do you stay in shape?” He worried immediately that the comment might be inappropriate. He’d been out of the dating game for years, and he had no idea what was appropriate or inappropriate anymore. He should have gone back to the bar scene, he thought. It was simple there. Find what you like, fuck him. But he was too old for that, and he’d never liked it much to begin with.
Gale shrugged. “I work out. Couple times a week. Try not to be too obsessive about it.”
Michael surveyed Gale’s taut, fit body. “Well, you do a good job of it.”
Gale smiled. “Thanks.”
He tore into his lunch with a gusto Michael admired. Young, lusty, good-looking… Michael remembered those days. Not all that well, though. It seemed like a century ago when he hadn’t had to obsess over the fact that last year’s pants were too tight—again. Or the fact that his hairline seemed to be creeping up a little more every year, or that he was probably going to have to finally give in and get glasses.
He was only thirty-eight, but some days he felt fifty. At least.
Watching Gale’s enthusiasm as he devoured his cheesesteak didn’t help. It made Michael wonder if he was that enthusiastic in bed… and then wish he hadn’t. But Gale looked up at him and grinned and said, “You can cook for me any time.”
A jolt of arousal hit Michael at the words. It must have shown on his face, because Gale’s expression changed to one of quickly quelled panic.
Of course. He didn’t want to accidentally come on to the old man, after all. Michael managed a smile. “Yeah. We should do this again.”
Gale swallowed. His expression changed again, and this time Michael thought he looked like he was gathering courage. “We definitely should.” He took another determined bite of his sandwich and stared at the table.
Michael took the opportunity to change the subject. He had a feeling Gale would be as relieved as he would. “I noticed in your resume that you went to school in England. Not even a registered aberrant school. Why?”
Gale sobered. Maybe the subject change wasn’t as helpful as Michael had hoped. “My parents thought it would be better for me. Figured I had to be out in the real world eventually, so I might as well start getting used to it.”
Michael nodded. “That rarely works. Especially with a touch talent like yours.”
“Yeah, but they were rich. I didn’t manifest until puberty, and they didn’t want to pull me out of this exclusive British school they’d paid umpteen thousands of dollars for, so they left me there. After a couple of years and a few difficult accidents, they hired an aberrant tutor to work with me.”
“But you learned control eventually.”
“After working with him every night through an entire school year, plus two years of intensive workshops with other aberrants over the summer.” He sighed. “It would have been a lot easier here, I think.”
“Yes, it would have.” He had waxed a bit pensive, toying with his potato chips. “My parents did what they thought was best. Unfortunately, they were wrong.”
“They are, sometimes,” he said. “I guess they do the best they can.”
“Yeah, guess so.”
Gale picked up his plate and took it to the counter. He seemed far away, Michael thought. He swallowed, gathering courage, then asked the question that had been niggling at him. “What kinds of accidents?”
Gale turned toward him with a weary smile. “Not-good accidents. The kinds of accidents where people die.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.” He set his plate in the sink, shoulders sagging a little. “I was sixteen. I’d had my talent evaluated by then, but they figured it would be easily controllable. The human body’s electrical field only produces so much current. The doctors said no matter how much or how little control I had, I’d only be able to produce low voltage, maybe short out a toaster, jumpstart a truck if I was lucky.”
He fell silent. Michael waited. Too many aberrants had stories like this in their pasts. It was one of many reasons the Academy had come about—that plus the government’s none-too-gentle insistence, but that was an entirely different matter.
“It was a pool party,” Gale finally went on. “I think… I think if it hadn’t been for the water, she would have been okay. But water and electrical current–” He turned and looked at Michael, and the old pain still lay in his eyes. Seeing it made Michael uncomfortable, it was so raw. “They don’t mix,” Gale finished. “She never recovered.”
“I’m sorry.”
Gale shrugged, the nonchalance belying the heaviness in his eyes. It was grief, Michael realized. “Shouldn’t have been kissing girls, anyway.”
“Apparently not.” It wasn’t funny, except that it was, in that tiny, weird way that things could be funny when you were trying very hard to get past something that hurt deeply and painfully and permanently.
Gale pushed away from the sink. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to drag everything down.”
“It’s okay.”
Gale regarded him thoughtfully. “Truth is, there haven’t been many people I could talk to about it. It’s one of the reasons I came here. I was tired of being alone.”
“I get that.”
“Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. You’ve been here a long time, among your own kind… and I didn’t mean that to be as weird and head-up-my-ass as it sounded.”
Michael shrugged. “No, I know what you mean.”
“Anyway, thanks for lunch. I should go… do something. Finish unpacking I guess.”
“Okay.” Michael really didn’t want to see him go. There was something about Gale that drew him. Maybe it was that magnetic current he obviously kept under intense control. Or maybe it was his big, brown eyes and his tight ass. Hard to say.
He couldn’t tell Gale that, though. It would be forward, or pathetic, or something else unpleasant and embarrassing. Instead he walked Gale to the door.
“Good lunch,” said Gale. He opened the door, then paused and turned back.
Michael started to smile and say something benign like, “See you later.” But he couldn’t get it out, because Gale kissed him.
Automatically, Michael closed his hand around Gale’s arm and kissed him back. It felt good. It had been far too long since he’d kissed anybody, much less a good-looking, ridiculously young, attractive, fit man who made him hot just looking at him. That kind of guy never kissed Michael.
Gale kissed Michael. For more than a couple of seconds. His mouth was soft, the full lips mobile and skilled. And there was a slight pulse across that soft flesh, perhaps the current that manifested as Gale’s talent. It tasted metallic, and made Michael hard.
Well, the kiss did that. The current just made it a little more so. Gale’s hand came up to touch his shoulder and held him there for a moment, as if he thought Michael might run away.
Finally, Gale drew back. Looking befuddled, as if he didn’t quite know what to do, he moved past Michael and left the apartment.
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