Chapter 11: Proprioception

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Chapter 11: Proprioception

Cora lay beneath the covers with Jamie's hands cupping her face. She sensed that he was looking into her eyes, though how he could see them in the pitch-black darkness was anyone's guess.

She'd always had terrible night vision. To this day, Cora kept her childhood nightlight in her apartment back at home. In total dark, she lost not only her sense of sight but also proprioception—the sixth sense most people took for granted. The sense of one's position in space, guided by the pull of gravity on the tiny structures of inner ear. The sense that makes us dizzy when we spin.

But Cora's brain relied on visual stimuli more heavily than most to tell her where she was. Here in the total darkness, the sensation was not unlike swimming underwater, losing track of the surface, not knowing up from down. A disorienting sensation, but not entirely unpleasant. It was relaxing to float through space this way, as long she wasn't in any danger of falling.

No chance of that, she assured herself.

Jamie's fingers against her cheeks were the main thing keeping her anchored. If only she could see the expression on his face, she might have some inkling of what was going through his head. She knew better than to rely on his words to tell her. Without her sense of vision, she was lost.

Maybe it was sleep deprivation catching up with her, but she was having trouble keeping track of what was real and what was only an act. Was he attracted to her or not? She thought he must be from the way he moved and touched her in the darkness. But he kept stopping and pulling back, throwing her off balance, like a dance where she didn't know the steps.

In front of the cameras, he'd said he wasn't that into her. That was fake, of course. All part of their "storyline" for the show. She'd said insulting things about him as well, and she hadn't meant a word of it.

But this game they were playing at night, away from the viewing public... Was it any more real? His movements toyed with her, making her pulse race and then leaving her hanging, again and again.

Real desire, or just a shadow play? She felt like one of her research subjects in the lab back home, unable to tell the color red from green. They all suffered from a common form of color blindness, or "protanopia" as she termed it in her scientific papers. Red or green. Real or fake. It all looked indistinguishable. All a muddled, muddy mess.

It was giving her a headache.

"Is it your turn again?" Jamie asked. "I've lost track."

Join the club, buddy.

He let go of her face, casting her adrift once more. Cora tried to keep the frustration out of her voice as she posed her next question. "Answer me this," she began. "If you encountered me in any other context besides this show, would you ask me out?"

The rustling of the sheets told her he had rolled away from her onto his back. She groped, sliding her hand forward along the surface of the mattress until it encountered his elbow. She latched on and held to it as she waited for his answer.

"Depends on the context."

"That's not an answer." She moved to pinch him as she had before, but he anticipated her this time. He removed his elbow from harm's way and caught her by the wrist.

"Give me a moment to think!" he protested.

But he was taking more than a moment. He was taking his sweet time, and the hesitation wasn't lost on her. "It's a yes or no question."

"No, it's not. I need to visualize."

She twisted her wrist to free it from his grip.

"Right," he said as he released her. "Let's say if I walked into an optometry shop and you were fitting me for a pair of glasses."

"I work in a research lab, not a shop. But go ahead."

"Would I ask you out?"

"Be honest. I won't pinch you again."

He chuckled. "I would find some way to test the temperature before I jumped into the pool, if you know what I mean."

Cora didn't. "What would that look like? How exactly would you go about hitting on your optometrist?"

"Give me your hands," he said. "Relax your knuckles." He guided her thumbs and fingers into a pair of circles. He pressed them to his eyes, a crude pantomime for being fit with a pair of glasses.

She played along, adopting the brisk tone of an optician at a shopping-mall Lens Crafters. "And how do those feel, sir?"

He swiveled his head around so that his eyes and the fake glasses pointed in her direction. "Oh," he drawled, letting his voice dip low. "So, that's what you look like."

Cora giggled. It made her chest cave in, the way he said it. Thank goodness for the cloak of darkness, so he couldn't see her blush.

"Go on," he prompted when she made no reply. "What would you say to that?"

He released her hands but she kept the two circles pressed to his face. "I'd say, look at the chart and read the fourth line."

Jamie laughed. "I certainly wouldn't ask you out if you said that."

"But I'm shy!"

"I wouldn't know that. I can't read your mind."

She couldn't read his either. That was the whole point of her question, but somehow he'd managed to answer it without clarifying a thing. She scowled and removed her fingers from his face.

"My turn." His hand was on her waist, drawing her closer to him again. "Would you want me to ask you out?"

She raised and lowered a shoulder. "No, I swore off dating."

"What? Completely?"

"Completely and forever. I'm supposed to be on a honeymoon for one, remember? I exchanged vows with myself and everything." She said this in a light-hearted tone meant to make him laugh. She enjoyed his laughter. The dry quality, wrenched from his throat begrudgingly, like a cough he couldn't suppress. She felt a small tingle of achievement every time she elicited the sound. But he didn't grace her with it now. His grip on her relaxed.

Cora found his waist instead and used it to lever herself closer to him. "But I'm open to situationships," she clarified. "As long as it's purely physical. No emotions involved." She let her hand slide lower, toward the waistband of his boxers.

"I see."

"So, I suppose my question isn't if you would ask me out in the optometry shop. It's whether you would want to sleep with me."

He was silent.

"Tell the truth," she whispered.

"Hold on, I'm picturing it." He found her hands placed her fingers around his eyes again. "So," he went on, "if I could read your mind and knew you meant the fourth line of the chart as a proposition of some sort—"

Cora squeezed her eyes shut tight and buried her face in his shoulder,  but he carried on unfazed.

"—then I would not look at the chart. I would keep looking at you."

He paused. She lifted her head. The darkness told her nothing of the expression on his face, but she could sense him staring at her intensely. Cora counted ten seconds in her head before she broke the silence. "What are you looking at, sir?" she whispered.

His voice dropped deep and low again. "I'm looking at you, Dr. Glass."

He reached for the small of her back and pulled her against him. Cora didn't know what to do with her hands. They still rested on his orbital bones, but she lowered them and wrapped her arms around his neck. He pressed her closer still, and then he rolled her backward, hovering above her.

Dear God, he was killing her. The fire in her stomach had returned, consuming any remaining oxygen inside her lungs. She had an urge to drop her hands to his hips and drag them down against her.

But he pulled back. Again. He left her there, helpless, and returned to his side, resting his cheek on the pillow, close enough that she could feel his expelled breath. "My turn," he whispered.

Truth or dare, she reminded herself. Would this game never end? He had to know she was aching for him at this point.

But he definitely had not answered her question. Cora wouldn't let him off that easy. She nudged her elbow somewhere in the vicinity of his ribs. "Would you try to sleep with me though?"

"Would I try to bang you right there in the optometry shop?" He clunked his forehead into hers. "No. Probably not. Too much breakable glass."

His face was still achingly close. His breath felt hot against her ear as he whispered into it. "Would I ask for your number? And take you out for a drink? And then walk you home afterward? And kiss you outside your door?"

"No." She shook her head. "No kissing."

"Not even imaginary kissing?"

"You can do other things to me. Just not that."

"In that case, I'd wait and see if you asked me to come in."

"And if I did?"

"Then I would."

"And what would happen then?" And if you're telling the truth, she thought but didn't say, why don't you demonstrate. Right now.

But no. He insisted on treating it like a genuine question.

"I would follow your lead from there."

She could strangle him. How much more leading could she be? But that strangled sound was coming from her own throat, not from his.

He took pity on her, chuckling, and ran his hands up and down her back. "Are you always this transparent, Dr. Glass?"

"Are you always this annoying?" she shot back.

"There, there." He slipped a hand beneath the hem of her nightgown. His palm rubbed soothing circles against the bare skin of her back. His voice dropped once again, low and deep in his throat, like the rumbling of far-off thunder. "Don't worry yourself. There's no shortage of physical attraction, I promise."

Cora closed her eyes and enjoyed the sensation of his touch as she floated in the nothingness. Where up was down, and down was up. Where she wasn't in his bed, but wrapped up in a thundercloud, floating through the night, above a stormy sea.

Who cared about reality? This entire trip bore no resemblance to her reality back home. She would never have encountered this man in her real life. He would never really hit on her if he did. It was all a pretty fiction. A lovely little bedtime story to tell each other in the dark.

It was liberating, when she thought of it like that. No point worrying what he thought of her, any more than she would worry what some fictional character thought about her when she read a book.

His hand kept up its rhythm, tracing slow circles from her shoulder blades to the edge of her panties. It was torture. Or it was heaven. She couldn't tell the two apart. Like her patients, Cora thought, who couldn't tell reds from greens. She'd given him the green light. She couldn't have made it clearer. Maybe he had a touch of protanopia himself...

Another moment later, and she opened her eyes again, but the sense of weightlessness had gone. Cora could see her surroundings once more. A dull grey pre-dawn light filled the room.

Not his room.

She was back in her own room somehow. Jamie was pulling up the covers over her shoulders, but he was on the wrong side of them.

Disoriented, she blinked. "What happened?"

"Nearly dawn," he whispered. "We can't have the cameras catching you in my bed."

"Did you carry me in here?"

"I told you I would bore you to sleep," he said by way of non-answer. "We found a cure for your insomnia at least."

At what point did I drift off? She longed to know. In her memory, the line between sleep and wakefulness had blurred. That whole scenario in the optometry shop—had she dreamed it on her own, or had they daydreamed together?

He stood to leave the room, but he paused and sat back down on the edge of her bed. She felt his eyes on her.

"Remember not too look at me too long," he said at last.

"Why not?" She stretched and yawned. "Will I see through you?"

He laughed. "That too, but I meant when the cameras are around. No lingering looks. We're not supposed to want each other yet."

She wrinkled her nose, catching his meaning. "I like the nighttime better."

"So do I," he said softly. "But we're still enemies in the light of day. We have to draw out the suspense."

"I'm not much of an actress."

"And I'm not much of a gentleman. We'll both make believe."

"Too much of a gentleman, if you ask me." She fixed him with a sullen glare, but he ignored it.

"Not really." He made two circles with his fingers and held them to his eyes. "Just a master of disguise."

With that, he padded from her room and clicked the door closed behind him.

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