Page 8 of Spread Me
“The specimen. We should probably check him out.”
Kinsey tilts her head to one side, combs leave-in through her hair. “Is it safe to go back into the exam room? I haven’t checked with Mads about that whole decontamination thing yet. And you should stay on top of Weatherman.”
“I already checked it today. No news except the same news, which is that we’re stuck inside. Anyway, Mads told me it’s fine. I think the specimen is kind of cute. Don’t you?”
Kinsey wrinkles her nose, considering. “I don’t know if I see it. I don’t want to say you’re wrong, but—”
When she straightens, she realizes that Domino has taken a step closer. They’re standing right beside her. “Oh, Boss,” they say, their voice dipping low. “Am I ever wrong?”
Kinsey feels as though her easy smile has chipped loose, detached itself from her real mouth to float an inch in front of her face. “D,” she says. “What are you doing?”
She’s used to fielding playful flirtation from the team. With her, they deal in the kind of goofy winking that contains not even a whisper of true invitation. Everyone knows she doesn’t date, knows she’s not interested in participating in their game of sexual musical chairs. They all think it’s because of her professional boundaries—she’s mentioned more than once that since she’s the team lead, it would be unethical for her to donate her orifices to the office potluck.
Maybe some of them think there’s more to it—that she’s asexual, or that she’s secretly monogamously married, or that she took some kind of vow of celibacy in her wayward youth. Most of the time she doesn’t concern herself with the possibility of their speculation, because what mattersis that everyone respects her blanketno thanks. Everyone knows where she stands.
Nobody ever gives her the kind of look that Domino is giving her now.
“What do you want me to be doing?” Domino asks, their voice rough. Their tongue slips forward to slide slowly across their front teeth. Kinsey’s eyes are drawn by the movement, then snagged by something that doesn’t look right.
Kinsey has never paid much attention to any of her colleagues’ tongues, but she knows she’d remember if one of them had a snakelike fork at the tip.
Domino’s tongue stills, as though caught by her gaze. After a few seconds it vanishes again, reeled back into the dark cavern of their mouth. Kinsey forces herself to meet Domino’s eyes again.
They take another half step closer. There wasn’t a half step’s worth of space between them and Kinsey before, and now they’re pressed together airtight. She can feel the quick drum of Domino’s heartbeat where their chest is mashed against her arm. Just as she draws breath to speak—to ask a question that hasn’t fully formed in her mind yet—Domino lets out a too-loud laugh.
“You wouldn’t believe the look on your face,” they crow. “Honestly, Boss, you need to loosen up. You’ve got goose bumps.”
They grab her shoulders, give her a little shake. The sudden movement loosens the twist in her towel, and she clutches at the cloth to keep it from slipping off her breasts. She’s been naked in front of Domino so many times. Hell, they were the one to pull a tick off her nipple when she couldn’t stomach doing it herself. It shouldn’t matter.
But something is different now. Their hands are still on her shoulders and their palms are pressed close to her skin and their eyes keep dropping to her lips and they’re laughing, but the laugh isn’t quite right.
More than any of that, Kinsey is troubled by how much she wants to see that forked tongue again. But she knows that’s impossible, because the forked tongue wasn’t real. She imagined it. She turns away from them, runs a shaky hand through her damp hair, tells herself to get her shit together. “You’re right. I need to loosen up. Let’s go poke a dead thing, huh?”
“Sounds like a date,” Domino says. They head for the door and whistle their way down the hall toward the room they share with Nkrumah.
Kinsey doesn’t follow until she hears their door close.
The specimen is exactly where Kinsey saw it last. The edges of the exam room door are sealed with multiple layers of duct tape, and there’s a torn half sheet of printer paper taped to the window that saysdon’t virus open insidein Mads’s handwriting.
“Do you think it’s safe to go in there?” Kinsey says, as if the sign isn’t clear on that question.
“Definitely,” Domino replies. They shoot her a lopsided grin, tug at the collar of their floral button-down shirt. “It’s just a virus, Boss. It can’t hurt you.”
Kinsey frowns. She knows that the logic of what Domino just said doesn’t follow—of course a virus can hurt her, it can hurt anyone. But it feels right, what they’ve said. It’s always felt right. Some part of her, deep down in a placethat can’t access reason, believes that viruses reallycan’thurt her. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that she believes viruseswon’thurt her—that the strength of her desire, the force of her love, would be enough to make them treat her differently from everybody else.
That belief is part of what made her seek out remote research postings in the first place. She needed some distance from the constant waves of viral illnesses that kept washing over all of humanity. It was too hard to make herself get the vaccines and wear the masks and bathe her hands in sanitizer—to enforce that distance between herself and the thing that made her entire body pulse with desire. She couldn’t stand the sound of her neighbor coughing on the other side of her thin apartment walls. The knowledge that if she just put her tongue into that neighbor’s mouth for a few seconds, she could have their virus inside her body.
She couldn’t keep waging the war between the part of her mind that knew she could die from something like that—and the part of her heart that was absolutely certain she wouldn’t.
She’s never heard anyone else put voice to that feeling.It’s just a virus. It can’t hurt you.She waits for Domino to laugh, to give her some sign that they’re joking, but they don’t.
Kinsey gestures to the duct-tape-sealed door. “After you,” she says. Once they’re inside, she pauses. “Huh. Did Mads already do their decontamination thing in this wing?”
“Hm? Oh, probably. Why?”
“It should fucking reek in here. Wonder what gives,” she says as she pulls a fistful of blue nitrile gloves from the wall-mounted dispenser, a hard-won concession from TQIafter the first month of Mads’s campaign for basic personal protective equipment.
“Why would it reek?”
