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“I guess. Why haven’t they made contact then?”
“Same reason we haven’t. It’s fucking hard, no matter how smart you are, to travel through space to reach other galaxies. It would take three hundred years to reach the edge of our galaxy—well at least as it’s defined. No one really knows where the edge is. There are different measures, even within NASA.”
“Wow. It’s a wonder you’re a doctor and not an astronaut,” she says in awe.
I laugh and shake my head ruefully. “Until the year I decided to become a doctor, it was what I wanted to be. I had this book called Cosmos there was a time I thought it held the answer to everything.” Including my future with her.
“Huh, so, what happened? You lost interest?” she asks.
I sit down in the sand, gather a fistful of it, and let it sift through my fingers. Like she will in just a few days.
“No, I love space, but I couldn’t spend my life chasing something I could never catch.” I’m not sure if I’m still talking about space…or if I’m talking about her.
She walks over and sits next to me.
“You okay?” she asks. I hate the concern in her voice. I smile and toss the sand away, forcing my mind back to the conversation.
“Space discovery isn’t a challenge, it’s a quest without end. Voyager 2 launched in 1977 and forty years later, it’s only just reaching the edge of the heliosphere. Most of the people who launched that mission are dead. Imagine if there was a human being in there right now. Alone for forty years. Even if we could supply him with enough food and water to last that long, human beings are social creatures.”
“Why aren’t you an astronaut?” she asks in a whimsical, but still awed voice. Seeing her so relaxed and present, relaxes me, too.
I stare up at the endless sea of stars. I understand why human beings looked at the heavens and imagined it could only be the work of gods and goddesses.
“I used to want to be. But I want to spend my life answering questions and doing work that has an impact now. I admire the universe but ushering new life into the world…for me, beats it every time.”
“So, Venus lost you to babies?” she asks with a good-natured, ribbing smile.
“My Venus will never lose me.”
“You talk about her like she’s a person,” she remarks, and I have to force my shoulders not to tense. She can’t know, because I didn’t give her that book, how close to home she’s hitting.
“She is, kind of,” I admit.
“Tell me more about her,” she murmurs. And as if her voice was her body or lips, the words wrap around my dick and wake it up. But I wasn’t kidding about sunrise sex and we’ve got time to kill before that. So, I force my mind back to the topic at hand and sift through my mental encyclopedia of knowledge.
“She’s named after the Roman goddess of love. Myth says Venus was born from seafoam. She’s the goddess of love, victory, fertility and beauty. And even though she was married to Vulcan – she was in love with Mars, the God of War.”
“What happened?” Her voice is rapt with curiosity. I glance at her from the corner of my eye and have to bite back a groan. She’s stretched herself out in a pose similar to mine, and her breasts spill out of the sides of her tank top tempting orbs of smooth brown skin that makes my mouth water.
“They were lovers, in secret of course. Until her husband became suspicious and set a trap for them.”
“A trap?”
“He built a net out of a bronze chain so fine it was nearly invisible and hung it over the bed where they met to make love. When they were naked and joined, the net fell and ensnared them. They were trapped. Caught in the act and he invited all of the other gods on Olympus to come and bear witness to the couples’ humiliation.”
An awkward silence descends, and I could kick myself. Of all the parts of Venus’s mythology I could have shared, why did I pick the part about her husband and lover?
“So, is that why Mars and Venus are synonymous with male and female? Because he was the fire and she was the foam?” she asks.
Grateful to her for keeping the conversation moving, I do my part, too, and it’s not hard. I love mythology as much as I love science.
“Mars and Venus really represent one whole person. In the myth, they had a daughter named Harmonia, Greek goddess of…”
“Harmony,” she offers when I trail off.
“Bingo.” I wink. “In particular, she oversees the harmony of marriage and partnership. She’s the soother of controversy in all things. In mythology she tells us that the union between War and Love is cosmic balance. But when you think about them… they’re, in essence, polar opposites that couldn’t exist without each other.”
The flash of her bright, effervescent smile is all it takes to make my heart skip a beat. “Is there anything you don’t know?”
