Page 10 of Spread Me
“What don’t you like? I can fix it,” they insist.
The movement under her hands doesn’t stop. It’s a restless pulsating push, like something fighting to get out from beneath the cloth. “D,” she breathes. She means it with concern but it comes out wrong, like the whisper of a lover, and she sees them hear it wrong, feels them press closer to her in response.
“I can fix it,” they say again. “You like my mouth, right? I saw you looking at it earlier. You like this.” They flick their tongue out, run it across their bottom lip, and Kinsey realizes that she wasn’t confused or hallucinating when she noticed it earlier. It’s forked and flat, quick and flexible,reptile.
“Your tongue,” she says, and again it comes out all wrong. She can see it on Domino’s face—they don’t hear horror. They hear lust.
They lick their lips again, slower this time. “This,” they say. “You like this. That’s good. I can work with that.”
The pulsing movement inside their shirt turns into a ripple of flesh. She jerks away from them, slamming the small of her back into the metal edge of the exam table. It slides away with a screech of stainless steel on linoleum.She hears a crinkle, a slide of plastic over metal, awhumpas the specimen falls to the floor.
But she doesn’t turn to look. She can’t take her eyes off Domino. Their shirt is visibly moving now, something writhing beneath the fabric. Something spreading.
“Just give me a few minutes and I’ll fix it,” they say insistently. Their tongue flicks out of their mouth again, tasting the air as they look down at their own chest. They start undoing their shirt buttons with clumsy, trembling fingers. “You’re going to love this. I promise.”
Kinsey wants to run, but her legs won’t move. She drags herself along the edge of the exam table, willing herself to bolt for the door.You said no, and Domino isn’t listening,she thinks.Domino isn’t listening and they are taking their shirt off. They are taking their shirt off and you need torun.
But Domino isn’t pursuing her. Domino isn’t even touching her. Domino is unbuttoning their shirt and their eyes are wide with what looks for all the world like genuine hope, and something is moving under that shirt, and some part of Kinsey, some part of her that is stronger than her thinking mind, wants to stay and see it.
Three buttons in, Domino lets out a growl of impatience, then rips their way through the rest. One button flies off and hits Kinsey in the chest, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t even feel it.
“There,” they breathe, looking up at her with an open, earnest grin. “That. You like that, right?”
Kinsey has no words, because she knows now what was shifting beneath her hand.
Domino’s chest has erupted into a rash of mouths. Pillowy lips and blunt white teeth. Each one opens invitingly, revealing a warm wet darkness within. As she watches, the mouth closest to Domino’s collarbone stretches wide. Araw wad of new pink flesh pinches itself up out of that darkness, stretching and writhing to form a tongue just like the one in the mouth on their face.
“Well?” They look up at her with unadulterated hope. “Do you like that?”
Kinsey wishes she didn’t.
The video on Kinsey’s laptop judders as the hotel Wi-Fi throttles her signal. She sits in her room, drumming her fingers on the smearless glass of the desk, waiting for the candidate’s image to clear. “Can you see me?”
“I—see—can—?” Their voice comes through in robotic bursts.
Kinsey sighs and hangs up the call. She’s unwilling to wait. TQI is bringing her to their Albuquerque headquarters for some kind of paperwork bonanza, and she only has half an hour before the car they’re sending will ping her phone to tell her it’s pulling up. If she’s going to arrive with her first hire under her belt, she needs to be able to talk to the candidate now.
Her cell phone hotspot does the job better than thehotel internet was ever going to. She calls them back, and this time, they’re at least recognizable as a human being.
The conversation picks up quickly. The candidate jokes easily, apologizes after swearing and then immediately swears again, drops hints about hating TQI but loving the sound of the work. Kinsey is charmed. She asks questions about their research into dune ecology and wind patterns, and then gets into some specifics about their experience with Weatherman. Everyone at the station will be doing a bit of everything, but this person will take point on storm tracking; it will be their job to decipher the steady stream of weather data that will come into the base via satellite. They tell her about their love for the red glow of the screen when the incoming data indicates severe conditions.
When Kinsey asks the candidate if they have questions for her, they ask what she’s most excited to research out there in the desert.
“Me?”
Domino nods. “You’re the team lead. I want to know what you’re there to look for. Or are you just excited to make some sand angels and get a tan?”
She feels clumsy, trying to explain. She’s tired from the flight. But she tries anyway. “The thing about the desert is, it’s alive.”
On the screen, Domino nods politely. “Right, the ecological landscape is rich with—”
Kinsey waves a hand to cut them off. “Not like that. It’s—it’s alive. The desert itself. The whole thing. There’s the sand, right?” She holds a hand out flat, palm down. Then she points to the space beneath her hand. “But just down here, like five inches below the sand that you can see with your eyes—it’s alive. The entire desert. There’s this layer called the cryptobiotic crust. It’s all one huge livinginterconnected thing, made of algae and moss and bacteria and lichens—”
“Lichens?” There’s a spark in Domino’s eye already, just as Kinsey knew there’d be. Everyone loves lichens.
“Oh, yeah. Like you wouldn’t believe,” she says, the warm thrill of her work building in her. She loves this. She never spends enough time around people to get to talk about it. “And it’s active. It soaks up water and it forms these filament networks that keep all the sand from blowing away, and itbreathes,and it’s—”
Domino leans in close to their webcam, their eyes gleaming. “I’m in.”
