nd tugs his hands towards her hips,
reeling his chest towards her breasts tilting her chin up and angling that long
jawline that's so long as to be almost horsey, but it isn't, it's strong and
clean. Art smells shampoo and sandalwood talc and his skin puckers in a crinkle
that's so sudden and massive that it's almost audible.

They've been together continuously for the past five days, almost without
interruption and he's already conditioned to her smell and her body language and
the subtle signals of her face's many mobile bits and pieces. She is afire, he
is afire, their bodies are talking to each other in some secret language of
shifting centers of gravity and unconscious pheromones, and his face tilts down
towards her, slowly with all the time in the world. Lowers and lowers, week-old
whiskers actually tickling the tip of her nose, his lips parting now, and her
breath moistens them, beads them with liquid condensed out of her vapor.

His top lip touches her bottom lip. He could leave it at that and be happy, the
touch is so satisfying, and he is contented there for a long moment, then moves
to engage his lower lip, moving, tilting.

His comm rings.

His comm, which he has switched off, rings.

Shit.

"Hello!" he says, he shouts.

"Arthur?" says a voice that is old and hurt and melancholy. His Gran's voice.
His Gran, who can override his ringer, switch on his comm at a distance because
Art is a good grandson who was raised almost entirely by his saintly and frail
(and depressive and melodramatic and obsessive) grandmother, and of course his
comm is set to pass her calls. Not because he is a suck, but because he is loyal
and sensitive and he loves his Gran.

"Gran, hi! Sorry, I was just in the middle of something, sorry." He checks his
comm, which tells him that it's only six in the morning in Toronto, noon in
London, and that the date is April 8, and that today is the day that he should
have known his grandmother would call.

"You forgot," she says, no accusation, just a weary and disappointed sadness. He
has indeed forgotten.

"No, Gran, I didn't forget."

But he did. It is the eighth of April, 2022, which means that it is twenty-one
years to the day since his mother died. And he has forgotten.

"It's all right. You're busy, I understand. Tell me, Art, how are you? When will
you visit Toronto?"

"I'm fine, Gran. I'm sorry I haven't called, I've been sick." Shit. Wrong lie.

"You're sick? What's wrong?"