Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“You bastard! You stinking, shitheaded bastard!” she whispered. Then she all but ran into the shower. She’d used it not long before he came over, but so what? Now she wanted to scrub every trace of his touch off her body. She didn’t usually use a bath sponge. Tonight she made an exception. She turned the water up as hot as she could stand, too.

Once she finally came out, she stripped the sheets off the bed. She wanted to throw them out. She really wanted to douse them in gasoline and make a bonfire out of them. Wasn’t some ancient movie called The Burning Bed? If she could douse Hagop in gasoline and make a bonfire out of him…

But she couldn’t. Oh, she could, but she was much too likely to get caught. The asshole wasn’t worth doing hard time for. As a cop’s kid, she knew better than most how godawful state prison was.

And she couldn’t even toss the sheets. Replacing them wouldn’t be cheap. After making this move-making this move for that worthless, reptilian turd! — she couldn’t afford a lot of grand gestures. She’d just have to shove quarters into one of the building’s machines and wash that man right out of her bedclothes. Any of Amalgamated Humanoids’ products had more in the way of warmth, more in the way of feeling, than he did.

So why hadn’t she realized that when she fell for him after she gave Bryce the heave-ho? She shrugged. She’d been looking for a lifeline, and she’d found one. Now she discovered it had an anvil on the end, not one of those cork floats.

She pulled fresh sheets out of a cabinet in the hall. All the bed linen in there had been washed since Hagop’s nasty sweat last polluted it. It would have to do. Grimly, she started making the bed. Pickles thought it was a game, and tried to help. In lieu of punting him, she tossed a couple of kitty treats out into the hall and bribed him to go away.

Bryce Miller wondered if he would ever see a job after he finally finished his thesis. The way the economy looked these days, odds were against him. He’d played the grad-school game as well as anybody could. He’d been a reader. He’d had research assistantships and TAships. He’d tutored high-school kids. He’d taught at a couple of community colleges. The proof of his success was that he could see the end of the dissertation ahead, and he wasn’t broke. Yet.

Maybe if he’d chosen a sexier field than Hellenistic poetry… He shook his head. Wrong comparison. Hellenistic poetry could be plenty sexy. It could, here and there, be downright filthy. Maybe if he’d chosen a more practical field than Hellenistic poetry…

“But then I wouldn’t be me,” he murmured. He had his laptop set up on the table in the dining nook of the little one-bedroom place he’d hastily found after Vanessa decided change was in the air. Papers and books covered about two-thirds of the tabletop. When he needed to eat, he had to put the computer away.

If he hadn’t found a secondhand copy of The Persian Boy when he was in high school, he might never even have heard of the Hellenistic age, much less ended up trying to make a living studying it. Somewhere out in the big, wide world, there might be people, possibly even English-speaking people, who could resist getting drawn in by Mary Renault’s prose. There might be, but Bryce wasn’t any of them. He’d started trying to find out how much in the novel was real and how much she was making up. Most of it and not a whole lot, respectively, he’d soon discovered.

Writers were dangerous people. They could warp the lives of readers they’d never met, readers they couldn’t meet because they were dead by the time some beat-up old copy of one of their books fell into the right-the wrong? — hands.

Bryce wondered if he would ever write a poem that affected even one person as much as The Persian Boy had changed him. He laughed at himself. Talk about setting your sights high!

Out in the courtyard, one of the poolside regulars did a cannonball that raised a splash like a young mushroom cloud. Three or four of the others gave forth with whoops and applause. Maybe a dozen people-more men than women-pretty much monopolized the pool here. There was no law that said Bryce couldn’t swim in it. He didn’t think they would have gone out of their way to make him feel unwelcome if he had.

But that was the point. They hung out there, and he didn’t. The same kind of group, down to sex ratio and precancerous tans, had ruled the roost at the building where he’d lived with Vanessa.

He looked down at his own hands. He was pale almost to invisibility. No need for him to worry about melanoma, no sir. He’d probably die of some fungus infection he caught from an Egyptian papyrus of the second century BC, or else of pneumonia brought on by aggressive library air-conditioning.

Another cannonball, this one even bigger and wetter than the last. More cheers from the regulars. Bryce eyed the waves rolling across the pool and slopping over the coping on the far side. If you threw an asteroid into the Pacific somewhere near New Zealand, waves would swamp Los Angeles the same way.

“Cheery thought,” he said. The longer he lived alone, the more he talked to himself. He would have worried about it more if Vanessa’s dad (which was still how he thought of Colin Ferguson most of the time) hadn’t told him he did the same thing.

Susan thought it was funny-peculiar that he’d stayed friends with his ex’s father. It wasn’t even that they both found themselves in the same boat at the same time (or that the boat was named Titanic). Dammit, Bryce liked Colin, and for some reason it worked both ways. Had the older man’s life worked out differently, he would have made a good scientist instead of a good cop. He had that restless itch to know, to put pieces together till they formed a satisfying whole.

It probably wasn’t an accident that his new lady friend was a geologist. Bryce wondered what he’d seen in Louise, back in the day. She was nice enough-she worked at being nice, in fact, worked hard at it-but she wasn’t what you’d call long on brains.

“So what?” Bryce wondered, again out loud. Chances were Colin had been so happy he was getting laid regularly that he hadn’t cared about anything else.

Kai su, teknon? Bryce wondered. That was Greek, and it was what Julius Caesar had really said when he saw that Brutus was one of the guys shoving knives into him on the Ides of March. It meant You, too, kid?

Bryce was aiming it at himself. Now that Vanessa was gone, he wondered what he’d seen in her past a pretty face, nice tits, and long legs that opened for him like the door into heaven. What more did you need? When you were first starting out, you thought everything was just like the movies and you were guaranteed to live happily ever after.

He knew what she’d seen in him. She’d been fighting with her then-boyfriend, and Bryce looked like an escape hatch. That she’d been fighting with the other guy should have been a red flag. But when you had a boner that wouldn’t quit, it was easy enough to figure the fights were all the fault of the SOB she was ditching.

Did Hagop What’s-his-name figure Vanessa’s fights with Bryce were all his fault? Maybe, but then again maybe not. Hagop had a good many miles on the odometer. Chances were he’d seen that things were rarely as one-sided as the person talking about them made them out to be.

Of course, why would he care? When you landed a girl young enough to be your daughter, why would you care about anything? It might not last long, but wouldn’t you have fun while it did?

When I’m in my fifties, will I troll for girls in their twenties? Bryce was sure he’d still look at girls in their twenties; that was one of the things they were for. But to touch instead of just look? He hoped to n agaappily settled with someone by then. He’d hoped to be happily settled with Vanessa. Whatever else might happen, that wouldn’t, not now.