Page 6 of Spread Me

Over the course of the next two days, everyone gets sick except for Kinsey. The illness brings on a brief fever, a few rounds of vomiting, and a full-body rash that’s gone as quickly as it comes. It could be so much worse. All told, they get off lucky.

Kinsey stays as isolated as she can while the rest of the team succumbs to the virus, but she can still hear them. Saskia and Jacques, who share the room to the right of hers, vomit for most of the first day. Domino and Nkrumah, who share the room to the left of hers, groan through the night as the rash spreads rippling pink fingers across their bodies. Mads sleeps in the room across the hall—they occupy a solo berth because they need to be able to push both twin beds together. They emerge a few times to press themself to Kinsey’s door, their mouth close to the frame.

They have updates, they say. It’s a fast-spreading fever, freakishly fast, almost certainly a virus. Everyone’s confined to their bunks until it runs its course. The storm, they report, has taken down the landline and the Wi-Fi—not a surprise, it happens every time the dust kicks up, but the timing is bad. They release Domino from quarantine long enough to check Weatherman each morning, and the readouts seem grim—a system of sandstorms is moving toward the research station, each larger than the last. They tell her that they’re feeling too ill themself to do anything beyond implementing baseline precautions and keeping the base in a state of lockdown.

Kinsey says she’s fine. She says she’s mostly been sleeping. Those are both lies. She hasn’t been ill, but she hasn’t been resting, either. She’s surrounded on all sides by the thing she wants most, the thing that’s always just out of reach. It’s how she imagines other people feel when they see the outline of a hard nipple through a wet linen shirt: the urgency, the yearning, the delicious guilt of secret intrusion, the overwhelming weight of want.

She gets herself off over and over again to the sound of the virus trying to do its work. Her fingers ache. Everything aches. It’s not enough. It doesn’t matter how many times she gives herself over to the fantasy. It’s not the real thing. She can never have the real thing.

Mads declares an end to the quarantine five days after the specimen enters the station. Everyone got sick, everyone got better, the dragon is slain, it’s safe to re-emerge. Everyone, Mads announces, will need to assist with decontamination, and with shoveling sand from the storm out of the airlock—but Nkrumah puts her foot down, insisting that they should all be allowed to wash off the sticky layers of dried fever-sweat first.

The team agrees to follow their usual showering protocols, entering the dormlike double shower at the end of the residential hall in shifts. It’s the same thing they do at the end of every workday, pairing up to rinse off sand and sunscreen before retiring to the canteen for a reconstituted dinner. Saskia and Mads always go first, then Jacques and Nkrumah.

Kinsey showers last, with Domino.

Domino is, above all things, irrepressible. Everyone loves them, except Jacques first thing in the morning, but then again, Jacques doesn’t love anyone first thing in the morning. Domino is slow to snap, quick to joke, easy to share a lab table with. They always whistle while they shower. They’re an amazing whistler so it’s not annoying unless you’re hungover, which is why Jacques never showers with Domino.

Kinsey listens to their trilling rendition o.

“Superstition”

as she gingerly lathers her aching undercarriage with a palmful of Dr. Bronner’s. After a moment, Domino’s hand appears around the edge of the curtain.

“Is the Doctor in?”

Kinsey hands the bottle over.

“Careful. It’s eucalyptus.”

“I like the eucalyptus one best,”

Domino replies, conspiratorial.

“Like a slap from the hand of Papa Bronner himself.”

Kinsey laughs louder than she usually would. Her limbs feel loose, her thoughts soft around the edges. Exquisite soreness spirals up from the insides of her thighs to the creases of her hips. She is spent and tired and free.

Just for this moment, Kinsey is happy.

“Whew. Eucalyptus,”

Domino says a few minutes later when they emerge from their half of the shower, vigorously toweling their hair.

“Want to go poke the specimen with me after you get dressed?”

Kinsey looks up from the puddle of leave-in conditioner in her palm.

“Do I want to what?”

“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 matters is that everyone respects her blanket no 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.