The Strangeness Within Pt. 02

"Javier," he heard vaguely, and he moaned and held her tighter.

"Javier, I'm too warm," Esther said.

He blinked to awareness. It was dark outside. He'd pulled her against him in his half-sleep, and of course he was holding her too tightly. His dick was trapped against her stomach, something she must have noticed.

"Sorry, Esther," he mumbled, quickly pulling away from her. She rolled on her back and sighed.

"It was nice," she said. "I fell asleep, and I had some really nice dreams. But this stupid body -"

"We'll figure it out," Javier said lightly. "Anyway, it gives us an excuse for fewer clothes."

She didn't respond to that, so he must have been too flippant.

"I was joking," he said. "Sort of, I mean. As I said, I'm not in a rush."

He felt guilty saying it. But that was just his body, his little fantasies. He was willing to wait for Esther, as long as they needed.

"Let's eat some dinner," Esther finally said. "And I guess this time I'll have to use the bushes."

* * *

Esther took the wipes and toilet paper from Javier, then started to walk. She didn't want Javier to hear anything. She was shy about that even in the school restroom.

Eventually she reached a stand of trees that felt private enough. She looked around for the right spot, feeling foolish. Finally she leaned back against a tree, as though she were sitting on a toilet, and tried to relax.

It was cooler outside, and she shivered a little. Too hot or too cold: she wished her body could decide sometimes. Her legs were starting to shake when she finally let out a halting stream.

She wiped and stood up awkwardly. The cool air swirled around her private parts in a way that was vaguely uncomfortable. She realized it was a little arousing. She was still worked up from lying next to Javier. Quickly she pulled her shorts back up.

Javier had obviously been aroused as well. It had been so odd to feel his penis pressing against her. Exciting, of course, and also depressing. Because she knew how disappointing it must be for Javier to keep being pushed away. And she just couldn't let him know, not yet.

They ate their rather pitiful dinner and sat in the front seat for a while. Esther said grace over their peanut butter and jelly while Javier bowed his head respectfully. She'd never been entirely sure about her relationship with God, if there even was a God. But she'd loved her parents, and her parents had loved God. That was reason enough to keep an open mind.

The moon shone brightly, lighting the hills in silvery white as the stars came out.

"I want to sleep in back with you," said Esther. "But I might have to wake you up again."

"That's all right," said Javier. "That sounds just fine."

It was cool enough now that she welcomed his body heat against her. She rolled over, trying to get comfortable, and he hesitantly came closer, until he was curled against her back. Like a big friendly animal.

"This is lovely," she said with a sigh. She brought one of his arms against her stomach and stroked his hand.

"It is," agreed Javier contentedly. She felt a warmth spreading through her, and she pressed her back into Javier. He was just a little lumpy, the snap on his shorts or — oh. She felt the lump growing.

Javier shifted away slightly, but she pressed against him again. There, if she tilted just right, it rubbed against a good spot on her back.

Javier sucked in his breath slightly, squeezing her hand.

"That feels really good," he said. She felt his lips on the back of her neck, and she shivered.

The skin on her chest was itching badly, and she wanted to undress. To let him see her, feel her strangeness, kiss her right there. She realized she'd never really believed she'd have this kind of closeness. But there was something intruding on her thoughts.

Father. He'd loved Mother so much, and of course he'd wanted that for Esther. He used to stoop down and kiss Mother on the back of the neck sometimes, just like this. And now they were both gone.

She started to cry, wracking sobs that scared her with their strength. Javier murmured something, pulling back slightly, stroking her shoulder, and she just shook her head.

"It's Father," she finally mumbled, so he wouldn't think it was his fault. "I can't believe he's gone, truly gone. Both of them."

Javier found her hand, and for a long time they lay there, him stroking her hair and squeezing her hand, and not trying to tell her it would be all right.

* * *

There was a bang on the window. Javier bolted upright, whacking his head on the ceiling.

Esther shrank down, as though she could hide under the sleeping bag. Javier turned his head, squinting in the morning light.

A policeman stood impatiently by the window. Swallowing his terror, Javier crawled over to roll down the window.

"Yes, officer?" he asked in his most polite voice.

It was a sheriff's deputy. County police, not state. And not some secret security force or something.

"Son, you can't camp here," said the officer. "Day use only."

"Oh," he said, thinking quickly. "I didn't realize. We just pulled off the highway last night, you know, and then we kept driving a little, because it was so beautiful out here, with the moon, and -"

The deputy shook his head, glancing at where Esther huddled in her bag.

"Anything keeping you from moving along, then?" he asked, a small smile pulling at his mouth.

"No," Javier said. "Thank you for telling us."

The officer nodded and walked back to his car, though he didn't drive off. As quickly as he could, Javier got his shoes on and into the driver's seat.

"You need to get in the front, too," he whispered.

"I'm barely dressed!" Esther hissed.

"Just run around the other side," he said. "It's probably about what the officer expects. He thinks we parked out here to have sex."

Esther swallowed and rolled to open the other door. Shortly she was belting herself into her seat, breathing hard, and Javier drove off quickly. Not too quickly, of course. The officer followed them to the next intersection and then turned the other way. Javier sighed.

"We're OK," he said, as much for his own benefit as Esther's. "We're OK. And I guess at least we know there isn't some all-hands manhunt out for us."

Esther nodded, wiping her face nervously. She glanced down at herself.

She'd taken off her bra last night at some point. Javier had woken up and noticed that, and he'd gotten so overexcited that he'd had to sneak out of the car to take care of himself, something he'd managed embarrassingly quickly. And now he could see the little impressions of her nipples through the worn cotton of his old shirt. He shuddered slightly and looked away.

"Javier," she said. "Did you mean that? About him thinking we came out here to have sex?"

He laughed. "Yeah," he said. "It's kind of a stereotypical thing."

"Have you ever done it?"

Javier coughed. He couldn't believe she'd out and asked him that. But then, how would she know that question crossed a line? He didn't want her to think she couldn't ask him things.

"Yeah," he admitted.

"Oh," said Esther, her brow furrowing. He wished he knew what was going through her head. He wished he could have told her she was his first, though who knew if she was even worrying about that.

"You knew just what to tell the policeman," Esther said unexpectedly. "To keep him from being suspicious. You're good at that, aren't you?"

Javier supposed he was, though he hadn't really thought of it in those terms.

"We should find somewhere to get dressed properly," he said. "Maybe even a shower. A truck stop or something. And then get back to campus."

.........*** Chapter 7 ***.........

"All right," said Professor Patel. He set a bag down on the table and sighed.

"We're sorry to drag you into this, professor," Javier said. "It must be so stressful."

The professor waved his hands in a tired dismissal. "I still hope our caution is unwarranted. And please, call me Raj."

Esther handed him back the biography and the professor smiled. It was hard to think of him as Raj.

"During our meeting yesterday I realized we needed a private way to communicate. Like most number theorists I've picked up a little cryptography along the way. What the two of us have now is a large set of shared words, indexed by their position in the biography. Now, are either of you good with computers?"

They shook their heads. Javier had only used the ones in the school lab.

"That's all right. These ideas are perfect to communicate on the Internet, but we can do it the old-fashioned way too. The trick is to make it look ordinary. I sometimes do correspondence chess, you see."

Javier tried to follow as the professor explained, but it was no use. Esther drank it up easily, her face lighting up with a flavor of delight he'd rarely seen. The professor wrote down some equations and Esther asked one or two questions. Soon enough they were writing down little test messages to try out the whole system.

"I think I'll need a calculator," said Esther with chagrin. "I can do this in my head, but not very fast." The professor smiled, pulling a calculator for each of them out of his pocket.

Javier watched Esther steadily transform her message into a few chess diagrams. Across the table, the professor flipped quickly back and forth in his biography and did the same. Soon enough, the two cryptographers traded and began to reverse the encryption.

Esther laughed when she'd finished decrypting, but just shook her head at Javier's interest. Some kind of joke from the professor, he supposed. He was out of his depth in every possible way.

"Wonderful," said the professor when he'd finished. He described a spot on campus where they could leave messages hidden for each other in the near term.

"All right," he said. "Aside from a textbook on cryptography, in the bag there's a wallet with cash and a debit card. I recommend against using the card except in an emergency, because it will trace right back to me."

"Thank you so much," Javier said. "That is incredibly generous."

"I have a comfortable job," the professor said. "And little enough opportunity to spend my money. Now, there is one more thing to discuss. When I first arrived at Stanford, I made many inquiries about Lukas. Someone noticed, because five years ago I received a strange phone call, from someone who claimed they were also interested in finding Lukas. It sounded like an older woman, and I found I trusted her. She knew — private things about Lukas that no one else had reason to. I assumed she was a family member. She gave me this address to write if I ever found information about him. And you are the closest thing to that in these ten years. With your permission, I will attempt to reach her."

Javier looked at the address: a post office box up in the mountains. He wasn't nearly as enthusiastic as Esther. But he supposed it was her decision.

"Go ahead and do that," she said.

All of a sudden the meeting seemed to be finishing. They each shook hands with the professor.

"I will have some more information for you soon, in our arranged spot," said the professor. "Esther, I hope this is all a misunderstanding. I hope I see you again soon, and that next year you and Anatoly and I can sit around the blackboard thinking of nothing but mathematics."

* * *

"This is just like a spy movie," said Javier that evening when they retrieved the message from under a rock. He felt sure someone must be watching them, but it was dark and the location was chosen well, amongst a dense stand of trees.

They hurried back to the car, and Javier breathed a sigh when they escaped Palo Alto again, this time to head for a Walmart parking lot. He went to do shopping while Esther decoded the string of chess boards.

She was still at it when he returned, poking numbers into the calculator and chewing on her lip in a terribly cute fashion. She hadn't written anything down, but he supposed it was safer that way.

He wanted to ruffle her black hair, or stroke her cheek, but he knew she was concentrating. Some minutes later she looked up, her eyes registering Javier.

"Thanks for getting food," she said. "Raj says he has a lawyer, someone he's trusted for private things. He didn't give the lawyer any details, but the lawyer is willing to draw up some paperwork so I can help manage things back home. The funeral, the estate, all that awful stuff."

"Oh," said Javier. "Wonderful! I'm sure Mamá is going crazy right now. But is that safe, sending a lawyer?"

"Raj thinks so. If he's acting as my lawyer, I guess there are built-in legal protections for things he won't reveal. And he said the lawyer is trustworthy. He gave us a phone number to call."

For some reason it grated on Javier how easily Esther used the professor's first name. He supposed he was just feeling left out of their whole interaction.

"That P.O. box," he said. "Do you really think it's a relative of Lukas? What could someone like that do for us, anyway?"

"I need to know who I am, Javier. I feel as though it's the key to everything, and without knowing it I don't even know what to be afraid of. Maybe this woman has a piece of the puzzle. We'll have to be careful, of course, but I have to feel like we're going somewhere."

He held her hand and for a while they sat silently under the orange parking lot lights.

"This isn't the most romantic place for a date," he said.

Esther laughed. "What should we do, then? You're the experienced one."

Javier winced. As though he were just re-treading all his previous romantic conquests. Esther was nothing like any of them.

In the end they went out for a movie. The movie was mediocre, but Esther had never once gone to a theater, and she gasped and grabbed his hand at all the suspenseful bits. Afterwards they sat on a bench sharing a giant ice cream cone, rushing to get it down faster than it melted in the warm evening air. Their tongues met a few times, and Esther laughed in pleasure.

When they'd finished the cone, he licked the spot of ice cream off her chin, and then he kissed her, their lips warming fast against each other.

"Wow," Esther said. "So this is what I've been missing?"

"Yeah," said Javier. "And me too. Because I've never gotten to do it with you. How about we find somewhere to bed down for the night?"

In the end Javier couldn't think of anything better than the off-ramp from two nights ago. He stretched out alongside Esther and tried to tune out the highway noise. Maybe they'd lost the mood from earlier, but this was their time to explore together. He put an arm over her and buried his face in her shoulder. Shortly Esther's small fingers caressed the back of his neck, so lightly that he shivered.

"That's nice," he said, stroking her along her ribs. Headlights briefly flashed as someone came down the exit ramp. She tensed, and he held his hand still until the car continued past their dead-end.

"We need to get out of the Bay Area," he said. "Go somewhere that it's easier to camp out. More public land."

Esther moved her hand further down his back and he scooted closer.

"That P.O. box is in Sierra City," she said. "That's a lot emptier, isn't it?"

"For sure," said Javier. "Lots of public land. But we don't have to go that far. Lower in the foothills would work too, with all that forest. And it would be easier if we need to meet again with the professor. Raj."

"That sounds nice," she said. "Surrounded by forest."

Esther shifted, and Javier tipped his head up to meet her in a kiss. She was trembling, her kiss a little desperate. She pressed more tightly against him, and he got his leg between hers.

"Oh," she murmured, squeezing her thighs around him. He reached lower and slipped a hand under her shirt, finding a sensitive patch and stroking lightly.

He felt her hand moving lower, tentatively, and he slid higher to encouraged her. Cautiously she moved lower, exploring the shape of his ass.

She was breathing heavily, trembling with every stroke of her back. He suspected she was too hot.

"Do you need space?" he asked.

"No," she murmured into his chest. "I need to take some clothes off, though."

Javier wasn't going to say no to that. They separated, and when he realized she was pulling off her sweatpants too, he undid the snap on his jeans. His dick was hard as a rock in his boxers. When they settled back together, it pressed firmly against her stomach.

She grew bolder, her hand squeezing his ass lightly through his underwear, and he moved a hand down to match her. She sucked in her breath when he caressed her ass through her panties, then moved out to her hip. Her body hair was short but very dense, almost like a beautiful soft pelt. He loved the way it felt to run his fingers through it, and Esther obviously enjoyed it.

She pulled away slightly, kissing him deeply. And then he felt a tiny hand touch his dick through his underwear. He groaned.

"Sorry," Esther said quickly.

"That was a good groan," Javier said. "When I'm this hard, almost anything you do will feel good."

Her hand returned, running gently along his length. She was breathing quickly again, and he kissed her on the neck, working his way down ever so slowly. She tasted of dried sweat and roses and forests. He reached the top of her chest, and she gasped.

"That was good," she giggled. "Unexpected."

Then she found his fly and slipped her hand inside his boxers, encircling his dick with her warm fingers.

"Esther," he moaned as she pulled his dick out into the open.

"Oh," she mumbled nervously. "It's big."

Javier tried not to be unreasonably flattered. She was a small person, and this was the first one she'd seen.

"Not really," he said uncomfortably. "Pretty much average." At most average, in truth. He'd always been a little nervous about that, though none of his previous girlfriends had ever said anything. He kissed her lightly around the very top of her chest. Her strange, pretty freckles were just visible in the darkness.

Esther didn't say anything for a while, but she kept exploring his dick, so everything was right with the world. He'd give her some tips eventually, but for now this cautious touching was as thrilling as anything he'd ever felt. His dick twitched lightly.

"What was that?" Esther whispered.

"It means it feels really good," he said. She sighed and pressed one thigh against him. He stroked her gently, higher and higher, fingers brushing through her soft body hair. She opened her legs, as clear an invitation as he could have hoped. Ever so lightly, he brushed his fingers against her crotch.

She jolted and let go of his dick, rolling away and breathing hard.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "I should have asked." He'd made a mistake, assuming she'd use the same body language as his other lovers.

Esther was curled up on her side, facing away from him.

"Esther?" he asked. "Are you OK?"

"It's my fault, Javier," she said. "I was so excited. I was enjoying that so much. I'm — I'm just not ready. I feel dizzy."

"It's all right," said Javier, trying to will away his erection. "We got ahead of ourselves. We have time."

Esther started to cry. When he put a hand on her shoulder, she just shook her head. In the end, he pulled her sleeping bag to cover her. After some time, she stopped sniffling and fell asleep, leaving Javier alone with his fantasies.

* * *

Esther woke to hear Javier slipping out into the night. She had a moment's panic, but of course he'd only gotten out to use the bathroom or get some fresh air. It wasn't as though there was anything out here.

She felt terrible. All her muscles ached, as though she'd been holding herself tense while sleeping. And the worst of it was she was still horny.

She had to tell him. It wasn't fair for him not to know that she wasn't a functional woman when it came to sex. But she could already hear it, the way he'd calmly accept it, hiding his disappointment from her. He was so good at saying the right thing. Too good.