Belief in the Stars

She sits with her back against the ottoman, her head tilted, long silken strands of her hair extensions swooping around the curve of her delicate neck, ultimately getting caught in her cleavage. Her lips pursed as she sucked in a long thread of smoke and exhaled it up into the shadows. She balanced her elbows on her knees -- knees that had small round patches of vivid red where the carpet had irritated her sensitive sable skin.

He didn't last long this round, but some big day at the office always heralds a quickie, and a few more romps later. He never calls her before a breakthrough. He says she confounds him. That means he starts thinking with his little head and ignoring his big one, so much as she has been able to figure out.

He gets up to wash off, leaving a trail of words staggering behind him, falling to distant murmurs as he reaches the bathroom to clean himself off. He's trying to explain something to her. Planets, maybe, or quasars, black holes. Something. He loses her every time, but usually he doesn't notice. He's always got his head in the clouds, or what was it he called it? Status-sphere? Anyway, he never seemed to be on her plane of existence, always up there somewhere. So much so that she hardly believes he's of this world at all, sometimes. She asked him what he thought of heaven once, and he went off on a lecture about molecules and gas. Frankly, sometimes all his planet talk gave her gas.

At the same time she admits, though only to herself, it must be nice to have faith in things you know are there. In some ways even the stars are like Gods, people wishing on them all the time, wanting all they can get from them while they live and as they die.

His sharp tone and the cessation of the taps make her aware he is expecting something from her. "Are you listening? Paging Isis."

Norda left her cigarette burning in the ashtray and rose. She shook her thoughts out of her head with a toss of her glossy black hair and assumed the identity. Her professor had called her. Time to do the only thing she believed in.