[story] the other side of the mirror
author: usagi anami (pukingtoreador)
email: pukingtoreador [at] hotmail.com
artist: yue ix (yue_ix)
email: yue.ykx [at] gmail.com
Jordon opened the door and saw herself.
While the Jordon on the other side of the door had brown hair instead of bleached white hair, wore glasses instead of contacts, had no lip or ear or eyebrow piercings, wore tragically unhip clothes, and didn't have a Chinese dragon tattoo wrapped around her right arm, the woman who stood on the other side of the door was still definitely herself. Each had an identical cluster of pale white scars on her forehead, just below the hairline.
Jordon-who-opened-the-door blinked. The other Jordon's (who shall for the sake of clarity in this narration be referred to from now as Gordon) hair was quite a bit longer than Jordon's, twisted up into a professional ponytail. Gordon made a half-grimace that passed itself off as a smile, and cleared her throat.
Jordon cocked her head to the side, squinted a few times, took her contacts out and put them back in. When Gordon was still standing in the doorway, slick with rain and dripping water onto the apartment corridor, Jordon shook her head a few times for good measure.
"Okaaaayyyyy. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. Over."
"Erm, I can explain," Gordon explained.
Gordon changed into dryer clothes, at Jordon's insistence. Jordon sat on the bed and watched Gordon change from damp gray slacks and green sweater into a t-shirt with flaming skull and tight black jeans. Gordon gave a little start when she saw the intensity in Jordon's eyes. Jordon seemed to be looking through Gordon, as if Gordon was one of those magic eye pictures with an illusion inside.
They did not speak while the dryer ran and Gordon rubbed her hair dry.
"So, uh..." Jordon scratched the back of her head and clicked her tongue. "Do you want some tea or something?"
"Thank you," Gordon dropped the towel and ran her fingers through her hair. "Do you have ginger by any chance?"
Jordon grinned, "Of course."
They drank ginger tea and ate kit-kat bars (a candy which they both loved so much they only ate it during all-nighters at school, after break-ups, and other minor crises).
"Alright, I suppose I can start," Gordon started.
"No, no," Jordon waved her hand in front of Gordon's face, "Don't tell me. I want to see if I can guess. Hmmmm," she said. Jordon put her fist against her skull and closed her eyes. "Well, I'm ruling out evil half and pod person since you haven't tried to kill me yet. Are you from the future?"
Gordon frowned. "Do I look older than you?"
"Hey, don't get defensive. They might have made some big advancement in Botox by then. Robot? Alien? Mutant shapeshifter like Mystique in X-Men?"
At each of these Gordon shook her head. "And before you ask, this is not The Matrix."
"How did you know I was gonna... oh," Jordon blushed, and then eyes flashed with sudden recognition. "And I told you not to tell me."
"I didn't. I just told you what it wasn't. You know, via negativa."
"For the record, I don't know what that means, but whatever. But I do know what's going on.
"You're from a parallel universe," Jordon slapped Gordon's knee. "Right?"
Gordon's jaw dropped. Jordon cackled and her smile was nearly Cheshire.
"You know," Gordon closed her eyes after regaining her composure, adjusted her glasses, and finished her tea before speaking again. "It's really not as simple as that."
Jordon continued to laugh until she got teary-eyed.
"No, I really think it is as simple as that, however complicated the process itself is. You're probably some hot-shot scientist, right?" Jordon wiped the tears from her eyes and let out one final chuckle. "Well, I read comic books and I've seen Sliders, so I'll skip the lecture if that's okay with you."
Gordon shrugged.
"So you meant to go to some of the closest possible universes, find one where you were also a scientist, and you two could go back and forth, double the brain power and so on, and you ended up," Jordon sprawled out on the couch, one leg resting on the coffee table, one hand playing with her earrings, "with me."
Gordon took a big bite out of another kit-kat bar. The sugar was beginning to make her teeth ache, but she kept chewing. Together they had almost emptied Jordon's stash.
Gordon looked at Jordon's clothes, and the ones Jordon had given her to wear. She thought Jordon looked like a rock star, or a biker, or a suicide girl that grew up.
The living room floor was littered with ginger candy wrappers and Chinese take-out boxes, and posters of grunge bands covered the wall. Incense ashes covered a burner on the coffee table, making it look like an ashtray had been dumped on it. A withered spider plant sat in the corner. A few Christmas lights dangled from the ceiling, weakly lighting the living room. Except for A Brief History of Everything (which was currently being used a coaster for old soda cans), some issues of Scientific America (most of which looked five years old), art books, tattoo magazines, and comic books, she saw no books and sighed. The sigh did not escape Jordon's notice, and she frowned.
"Well, I'm fortunate, all things considered," Gordon said, hands folded together in her lap. "I could have ended up in a universe where the Axis won World War Two, or Earth was a toxic sludge pit."
Jordon sat up and narrowed her eyes. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Why are you getting defensive? I'm just saying I'm lucky to have landed in a universe where a Jordon Chambers exists at all."
"This Jordon Chambers," Jordon pointed to herself, "is very happy that she doesn't dress like a librarian in her universe, thank you very much."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
What followed was the longest conversation in both their lives.
Jordon and Gordon talked, running a fine-toothed comb through their memories, seeking the place where their respective timelines split. From the scar they shared they knew they had been the same person until at least eight years old. The scar came from an accident: Jordon fell from her bike and scraped her forehead on the concrete. No siblings, parents never divorced. From that point they began their clumsy autobiography.
They talked of broken china plates, scratched glasses, nightmares from R-rated movies, spray cans hit with hammers, first prizes at the freshman science fairs, fake love letters from cruel boys, grape juice stains on favorite dresses, broken arms, black eyes, promise rings lost in the laundry.
They talked of their mother's obsession with Japanese food, their father's fixation with Stanley Kubrick, the best friend in fifth grade who knew all the scientific names of flowers, the cute deaf guy in 8th grade who was largely responsible for their learning of sign language (and turned out later to be gay).
They talked. And talked and talked, finally stumbling upon the fork in their road - the last day of their senior year in high school. Jordon spoke of an acquaintance, Harry, who bumped into her in the hallway and showed her a painting he'd done. Gordon vaguely remembered Harry, but not the painting Jordon described.
The painting was a curled dragon, fire-engine red, a bastard of Chinese and European, with a sinuous, razor-sharp body curling off into infinity against a black and purple sky while clouds of gray smoke erupted from its nostrils, its golden cat-eyes glowing, its face in a perverse fanged grin that seemed both human and inhuman.
Jordon/Gordon had wanted to be an artist since childhood. So she produced shitty little drawings in shitty little drawing classes from 1st grade to middle school. She decided to drop art altogether and focus on what she was actually good at, science and math. Everyone knew brainy people were shitty at arty stuff anyway.
The painting had filled Jordon with such terrible bitterness and envy that she nearly wept. She thought she would never, ever come close to creating anything as beautiful as that painting. She wanted to punch Harry for deciding to suddenly be a genius and taunt her. She wanted to break his jaw, tear his impossibly wonderful painting to confetti and cut off all his fingers so he could never make anything like it again.
Instead she went to art school for seven years. In the first four years she learned to draw a straight line, and three years after that she became a fledgling tattoo artist.
Gordon did not see this painting. Perhaps she was in the wrong hallway, or perhaps Harry was feeling a bit more bashful, or sick, or cutting class that day. Whatever the reason, Gordon went to a respectable university on her scholarship like she planned. She originally planned to become a math teacher, but her adeptness in physics caught the attention of a government-funded program in "experimental research in temporal physics", called Project Wardrobe.
Project Wardrobe was an attempt to determine whether other realities existed, and if so, whether it would be possible to access them. The stated purpose was to access other worlds and exchange knowledge with them - perhaps find an Earth where a cure for cancer or AIDS was found. Or plunder an Earth that humans never evolved on, leeching its fossil fuels, unpolluted water, trees, and other natural resources. The results of the project were, as they say, history.
They talked well past dawn, and fell asleep on the couch, curled next to each other like kittens.
Jordon woke up first, just after six o'clock. Her heart stood still when she heard someone breathing, and the events of yesterday slowly trickled back through the haze of sleep.
"Oh, right," she muttered, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and yawning. "Twilight zone."
She sat up and watched her other self sleep. Gordon had fallen asleep with her glasses on, and Jordon took the liberty of taking them off and putting them on the coffee table.
Looking at Gordon (superficial differences aside) was not the same as Jordon seeing herself reflected in a mirror or the curve of a wineglass or a black TV screen. It was a completely different thing to see herself walking and talking and sleeping, to look at herself without her eyes looking back, the way others must see her.
In the dark, the scar they shared looked like a bunch of tiny stars. Jordon had never thought of the scar that way before, and her stomach fluttered at the thought.
Gordon was a geek, and about ten times more of a geek than the geek Jordon had been in high school.
But a very, very cute geek.
Jordon shivered and thought of sixth grade.
In sixth grade Jordon learned about the Greek myths, Zeus and his lovers (except Ganymede, she learned later), Achilles, Pan, Pandora, Orpheus. One myth rubbed her brain with the wrong side of the sandpaper.
"How could Narcissus not know he was looking at himself?" Jordon demanded of the teacher. "That's just stupid."
The class snickered.
"Well, Jordon, how did Zeus turn into a swan?"
"But that's not the same."
The bell rang and the piffle of papers and pencils drowned out any further chance at conversation. Jordon could not explain how the gods transforming into animals made its own sort of sense and one sexy guy not recognizing himself was retarded, but she knew she was right.
And now she knew she wasn't completely right. She knew what she was looking at, and didn't know at the same time. Nine years ago, they were the same person. But nine years was a long time. Jordon knew at least she was a heavy sleeper. She and reached out and touched Gordon's face, running her fingertips over Gordon's lips. Soft. Gordon did not stir.
Jordon leaned forward and kissed Gordon. The first thing she noticed was Gordon had no smell she could detect. Deepening the kiss, flicking her tongue in Gordon's mouth, she found Gordon also had no taste. When Jordon pulled back she saw Gordon's eyes looking back, wide and blinking.
"Erm... I can explain," Jordon explained.
Gordon, now almost neon-pink, looked at the floor and said, "You don't have to, actually."
"Yeah?"
Gordon cupped the back of Jordon's head, pulling her close and kissing her. "Yeah."
What followed was an act of self-love that was really nothing at all like masturbation.
Jordon's fingers combed through Gordon's hair, pulling the hair tie out and letting the hair trail down her shoulders. They kissed again, lips pushing apart, and Gordon felt the cold metal stud in Jordon's tongue click against her teeth. When they finally pulled apart a sting of saliva dangled between their lips.
Gordon's pants came off in stages. Jordon tried to rush the job by bypassing the zipper entirely. She started by grabbing the two sides of the spilt and pulling them in opposite directions, which cracked the fly open an inch and then snagged. Growling, Jordon ducked her head down and tried to catch the zipper in her teeth, but the zipper kept slipping out of her mouth. When her teeth found had a firm grip on the zipper, the thing popped out of her mouth the moment she tried to pull her head down. She heard stifled laugher and looked up to see Gordon covering her mouth with her hand. Gordon managed to undress once Jordon stopped interfering.
Jordon shoved Gordon's leg back, moving so Gordon's knee rested on Jordon's shoulder, and closing the space between their bodies so their heat and wetness ground together. Jordon's fingers hooked into Gordon's hips, fingernails biting almost too hard as they writhed against each other, mouth to mouth, cunt to cunt. Gordon came first, whimpering in the hollow of Jordon's throat.
Afterwards, they held each other tightly, heads resting on each other's shoulders.
"Would you tattoo me?" Gordon whispered.
"Sure," Jordon kissed Gordon's neck. "What do you want?"
"A daffodil. On my shoulder."
"Huh?" Jordon paused a moment and then laughed. Narcissus was one of the names for the daffodil, because it was the flower he turned into after he died pining for his reflection. "Hey, can I ask you something?
"Sure."
"What's via negativa mean anyway?"
"It means understanding something by what it isn't."
"Oh. You know, I'm thinking about taking some classes. On audit, probably." Jordon wrapped a finger around Gordon's hair. "Not too heavy a load, so I can keep working. My... our parents are going to feel so vindicated when they meet you. They threw a total shitfit when I turned down that scholarship."
"Do you wish things had turned out differently?"
"Like if I had been you? Even if I had been you then someone else would be me. There's no point in dwelling on it. I tattoo Betty Boop on dicks and you just made a major scientific breakthrough that's probably going to affect the whole multiverse. But I really love what I do--"
"And I don't," Gordon finished for her. "It's just what I've always been good at."
Jordon rolled over and playfully punched Gordon in the shoulder.
"Don't mope," Jordon sat up and bent down to grab her clothes. "Your mind is a razor and..." Jordon pulled her shirt over her head, "mine's a friggin' spade."
"If I had just worked hard like you I could have compensated for not being talented..." Gordon's voice was muffled when her clothes landed on her face.
"Cheer up. Focus on the positive. Like the fact you lost your virginity to a really hot girl."
Gordon rolled her eyes.
After the initial shock wore off, Jordon's family were indeed thrilled to see what Gordon had accomplished. During the visit Jordon sulked and took some solace in the fact they couldn't reap the benefits of having a successful daughter since no one had heard of her in this world.
Gordon eventually managed to contact members of Project Wardrobe, since the project also existed in this world. After some hard going to convince them she really was part of the project in a parallel universe, the first transportation device between Gordon and Jordon's worlds was created. The device was called, of course, the Wardrobe.
As more and more wardrobes were developed mass transportation between worlds became possible. Like Jordon and Gordon, people would sometimes fell in love with their doubles. But what usually happened was they stole each other's credit cards, or committed crimes in each other's worlds (this was considered one the biggest headaches the justice system had ever faced), or even murdered each other. One famous case was a neo-nazi who murdered his double who was married to a black woman.
Leaving most of the project in the hands of her colleagues after the Wardrobe was completed, Gordon began taking art classes at a nearby community college, making shitty little drawings that got a little less shitty with each passing semester. Jordon tried taking some math courses until she remembered how boring they were. She gave up on developing her mind in favor of helping Gordon make her work less shitty.
Gordon eventually got into making shitty watercolor landscapes that sold on ebay because of her fame. Gordon never made anything as lovely as Jordon's art. Jordon never made anything as lovely as the crazed dragon painting that spilt their lives apart. Neither of them cared terribly much, as long as their work today was better than their work yesterday.
They still live together, spending most of their time in Gordon's world, mostly because she has a nicer house.
the end
email: pukingtoreador [at] hotmail.com
artist: yue ix (yue_ix)
email: yue.ykx [at] gmail.com
Jordon opened the door and saw herself.
While the Jordon on the other side of the door had brown hair instead of bleached white hair, wore glasses instead of contacts, had no lip or ear or eyebrow piercings, wore tragically unhip clothes, and didn't have a Chinese dragon tattoo wrapped around her right arm, the woman who stood on the other side of the door was still definitely herself. Each had an identical cluster of pale white scars on her forehead, just below the hairline.
Jordon-who-opened-the-door blinked. The other Jordon's (who shall for the sake of clarity in this narration be referred to from now as Gordon) hair was quite a bit longer than Jordon's, twisted up into a professional ponytail. Gordon made a half-grimace that passed itself off as a smile, and cleared her throat.
Jordon cocked her head to the side, squinted a few times, took her contacts out and put them back in. When Gordon was still standing in the doorway, slick with rain and dripping water onto the apartment corridor, Jordon shook her head a few times for good measure.
"Okaaaayyyyy. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. Over."
"Erm, I can explain," Gordon explained.
Gordon changed into dryer clothes, at Jordon's insistence. Jordon sat on the bed and watched Gordon change from damp gray slacks and green sweater into a t-shirt with flaming skull and tight black jeans. Gordon gave a little start when she saw the intensity in Jordon's eyes. Jordon seemed to be looking through Gordon, as if Gordon was one of those magic eye pictures with an illusion inside.
They did not speak while the dryer ran and Gordon rubbed her hair dry.
"So, uh..." Jordon scratched the back of her head and clicked her tongue. "Do you want some tea or something?"
"Thank you," Gordon dropped the towel and ran her fingers through her hair. "Do you have ginger by any chance?"
Jordon grinned, "Of course."
They drank ginger tea and ate kit-kat bars (a candy which they both loved so much they only ate it during all-nighters at school, after break-ups, and other minor crises).
"Alright, I suppose I can start," Gordon started.
"No, no," Jordon waved her hand in front of Gordon's face, "Don't tell me. I want to see if I can guess. Hmmmm," she said. Jordon put her fist against her skull and closed her eyes. "Well, I'm ruling out evil half and pod person since you haven't tried to kill me yet. Are you from the future?"
Gordon frowned. "Do I look older than you?"
"Hey, don't get defensive. They might have made some big advancement in Botox by then. Robot? Alien? Mutant shapeshifter like Mystique in X-Men?"
At each of these Gordon shook her head. "And before you ask, this is not The Matrix."
"How did you know I was gonna... oh," Jordon blushed, and then eyes flashed with sudden recognition. "And I told you not to tell me."
"I didn't. I just told you what it wasn't. You know, via negativa."
"For the record, I don't know what that means, but whatever. But I do know what's going on.
"You're from a parallel universe," Jordon slapped Gordon's knee. "Right?"
Gordon's jaw dropped. Jordon cackled and her smile was nearly Cheshire.
"You know," Gordon closed her eyes after regaining her composure, adjusted her glasses, and finished her tea before speaking again. "It's really not as simple as that."
Jordon continued to laugh until she got teary-eyed.
"No, I really think it is as simple as that, however complicated the process itself is. You're probably some hot-shot scientist, right?" Jordon wiped the tears from her eyes and let out one final chuckle. "Well, I read comic books and I've seen Sliders, so I'll skip the lecture if that's okay with you."
Gordon shrugged.
"So you meant to go to some of the closest possible universes, find one where you were also a scientist, and you two could go back and forth, double the brain power and so on, and you ended up," Jordon sprawled out on the couch, one leg resting on the coffee table, one hand playing with her earrings, "with me."
Gordon took a big bite out of another kit-kat bar. The sugar was beginning to make her teeth ache, but she kept chewing. Together they had almost emptied Jordon's stash.
Gordon looked at Jordon's clothes, and the ones Jordon had given her to wear. She thought Jordon looked like a rock star, or a biker, or a suicide girl that grew up.
The living room floor was littered with ginger candy wrappers and Chinese take-out boxes, and posters of grunge bands covered the wall. Incense ashes covered a burner on the coffee table, making it look like an ashtray had been dumped on it. A withered spider plant sat in the corner. A few Christmas lights dangled from the ceiling, weakly lighting the living room. Except for A Brief History of Everything (which was currently being used a coaster for old soda cans), some issues of Scientific America (most of which looked five years old), art books, tattoo magazines, and comic books, she saw no books and sighed. The sigh did not escape Jordon's notice, and she frowned.
"Well, I'm fortunate, all things considered," Gordon said, hands folded together in her lap. "I could have ended up in a universe where the Axis won World War Two, or Earth was a toxic sludge pit."
Jordon sat up and narrowed her eyes. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Why are you getting defensive? I'm just saying I'm lucky to have landed in a universe where a Jordon Chambers exists at all."
"This Jordon Chambers," Jordon pointed to herself, "is very happy that she doesn't dress like a librarian in her universe, thank you very much."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
What followed was the longest conversation in both their lives.
Jordon and Gordon talked, running a fine-toothed comb through their memories, seeking the place where their respective timelines split. From the scar they shared they knew they had been the same person until at least eight years old. The scar came from an accident: Jordon fell from her bike and scraped her forehead on the concrete. No siblings, parents never divorced. From that point they began their clumsy autobiography.
They talked of broken china plates, scratched glasses, nightmares from R-rated movies, spray cans hit with hammers, first prizes at the freshman science fairs, fake love letters from cruel boys, grape juice stains on favorite dresses, broken arms, black eyes, promise rings lost in the laundry.
They talked of their mother's obsession with Japanese food, their father's fixation with Stanley Kubrick, the best friend in fifth grade who knew all the scientific names of flowers, the cute deaf guy in 8th grade who was largely responsible for their learning of sign language (and turned out later to be gay).
They talked. And talked and talked, finally stumbling upon the fork in their road - the last day of their senior year in high school. Jordon spoke of an acquaintance, Harry, who bumped into her in the hallway and showed her a painting he'd done. Gordon vaguely remembered Harry, but not the painting Jordon described.
The painting was a curled dragon, fire-engine red, a bastard of Chinese and European, with a sinuous, razor-sharp body curling off into infinity against a black and purple sky while clouds of gray smoke erupted from its nostrils, its golden cat-eyes glowing, its face in a perverse fanged grin that seemed both human and inhuman.
Jordon/Gordon had wanted to be an artist since childhood. So she produced shitty little drawings in shitty little drawing classes from 1st grade to middle school. She decided to drop art altogether and focus on what she was actually good at, science and math. Everyone knew brainy people were shitty at arty stuff anyway.
The painting had filled Jordon with such terrible bitterness and envy that she nearly wept. She thought she would never, ever come close to creating anything as beautiful as that painting. She wanted to punch Harry for deciding to suddenly be a genius and taunt her. She wanted to break his jaw, tear his impossibly wonderful painting to confetti and cut off all his fingers so he could never make anything like it again.
Instead she went to art school for seven years. In the first four years she learned to draw a straight line, and three years after that she became a fledgling tattoo artist.
Gordon did not see this painting. Perhaps she was in the wrong hallway, or perhaps Harry was feeling a bit more bashful, or sick, or cutting class that day. Whatever the reason, Gordon went to a respectable university on her scholarship like she planned. She originally planned to become a math teacher, but her adeptness in physics caught the attention of a government-funded program in "experimental research in temporal physics", called Project Wardrobe.
Project Wardrobe was an attempt to determine whether other realities existed, and if so, whether it would be possible to access them. The stated purpose was to access other worlds and exchange knowledge with them - perhaps find an Earth where a cure for cancer or AIDS was found. Or plunder an Earth that humans never evolved on, leeching its fossil fuels, unpolluted water, trees, and other natural resources. The results of the project were, as they say, history.
They talked well past dawn, and fell asleep on the couch, curled next to each other like kittens.
Jordon woke up first, just after six o'clock. Her heart stood still when she heard someone breathing, and the events of yesterday slowly trickled back through the haze of sleep.
"Oh, right," she muttered, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and yawning. "Twilight zone."
She sat up and watched her other self sleep. Gordon had fallen asleep with her glasses on, and Jordon took the liberty of taking them off and putting them on the coffee table.
Looking at Gordon (superficial differences aside) was not the same as Jordon seeing herself reflected in a mirror or the curve of a wineglass or a black TV screen. It was a completely different thing to see herself walking and talking and sleeping, to look at herself without her eyes looking back, the way others must see her.
In the dark, the scar they shared looked like a bunch of tiny stars. Jordon had never thought of the scar that way before, and her stomach fluttered at the thought.
Gordon was a geek, and about ten times more of a geek than the geek Jordon had been in high school.
But a very, very cute geek.
Jordon shivered and thought of sixth grade.
In sixth grade Jordon learned about the Greek myths, Zeus and his lovers (except Ganymede, she learned later), Achilles, Pan, Pandora, Orpheus. One myth rubbed her brain with the wrong side of the sandpaper.
"How could Narcissus not know he was looking at himself?" Jordon demanded of the teacher. "That's just stupid."
The class snickered.
"Well, Jordon, how did Zeus turn into a swan?"
"But that's not the same."
The bell rang and the piffle of papers and pencils drowned out any further chance at conversation. Jordon could not explain how the gods transforming into animals made its own sort of sense and one sexy guy not recognizing himself was retarded, but she knew she was right.
And now she knew she wasn't completely right. She knew what she was looking at, and didn't know at the same time. Nine years ago, they were the same person. But nine years was a long time. Jordon knew at least she was a heavy sleeper. She and reached out and touched Gordon's face, running her fingertips over Gordon's lips. Soft. Gordon did not stir.
Jordon leaned forward and kissed Gordon. The first thing she noticed was Gordon had no smell she could detect. Deepening the kiss, flicking her tongue in Gordon's mouth, she found Gordon also had no taste. When Jordon pulled back she saw Gordon's eyes looking back, wide and blinking.
"Erm... I can explain," Jordon explained.
Gordon, now almost neon-pink, looked at the floor and said, "You don't have to, actually."
"Yeah?"
Gordon cupped the back of Jordon's head, pulling her close and kissing her. "Yeah."
What followed was an act of self-love that was really nothing at all like masturbation.
Jordon's fingers combed through Gordon's hair, pulling the hair tie out and letting the hair trail down her shoulders. They kissed again, lips pushing apart, and Gordon felt the cold metal stud in Jordon's tongue click against her teeth. When they finally pulled apart a sting of saliva dangled between their lips.
Gordon's pants came off in stages. Jordon tried to rush the job by bypassing the zipper entirely. She started by grabbing the two sides of the spilt and pulling them in opposite directions, which cracked the fly open an inch and then snagged. Growling, Jordon ducked her head down and tried to catch the zipper in her teeth, but the zipper kept slipping out of her mouth. When her teeth found had a firm grip on the zipper, the thing popped out of her mouth the moment she tried to pull her head down. She heard stifled laugher and looked up to see Gordon covering her mouth with her hand. Gordon managed to undress once Jordon stopped interfering.
Jordon shoved Gordon's leg back, moving so Gordon's knee rested on Jordon's shoulder, and closing the space between their bodies so their heat and wetness ground together. Jordon's fingers hooked into Gordon's hips, fingernails biting almost too hard as they writhed against each other, mouth to mouth, cunt to cunt. Gordon came first, whimpering in the hollow of Jordon's throat.
Afterwards, they held each other tightly, heads resting on each other's shoulders.
"Would you tattoo me?" Gordon whispered.
"Sure," Jordon kissed Gordon's neck. "What do you want?"
"A daffodil. On my shoulder."
"Huh?" Jordon paused a moment and then laughed. Narcissus was one of the names for the daffodil, because it was the flower he turned into after he died pining for his reflection. "Hey, can I ask you something?
"Sure."
"What's via negativa mean anyway?"
"It means understanding something by what it isn't."
"Oh. You know, I'm thinking about taking some classes. On audit, probably." Jordon wrapped a finger around Gordon's hair. "Not too heavy a load, so I can keep working. My... our parents are going to feel so vindicated when they meet you. They threw a total shitfit when I turned down that scholarship."
"Do you wish things had turned out differently?"
"Like if I had been you? Even if I had been you then someone else would be me. There's no point in dwelling on it. I tattoo Betty Boop on dicks and you just made a major scientific breakthrough that's probably going to affect the whole multiverse. But I really love what I do--"
"And I don't," Gordon finished for her. "It's just what I've always been good at."
Jordon rolled over and playfully punched Gordon in the shoulder.
"Don't mope," Jordon sat up and bent down to grab her clothes. "Your mind is a razor and..." Jordon pulled her shirt over her head, "mine's a friggin' spade."
"If I had just worked hard like you I could have compensated for not being talented..." Gordon's voice was muffled when her clothes landed on her face.
"Cheer up. Focus on the positive. Like the fact you lost your virginity to a really hot girl."
Gordon rolled her eyes.
After the initial shock wore off, Jordon's family were indeed thrilled to see what Gordon had accomplished. During the visit Jordon sulked and took some solace in the fact they couldn't reap the benefits of having a successful daughter since no one had heard of her in this world.
Gordon eventually managed to contact members of Project Wardrobe, since the project also existed in this world. After some hard going to convince them she really was part of the project in a parallel universe, the first transportation device between Gordon and Jordon's worlds was created. The device was called, of course, the Wardrobe.
As more and more wardrobes were developed mass transportation between worlds became possible. Like Jordon and Gordon, people would sometimes fell in love with their doubles. But what usually happened was they stole each other's credit cards, or committed crimes in each other's worlds (this was considered one the biggest headaches the justice system had ever faced), or even murdered each other. One famous case was a neo-nazi who murdered his double who was married to a black woman.
Leaving most of the project in the hands of her colleagues after the Wardrobe was completed, Gordon began taking art classes at a nearby community college, making shitty little drawings that got a little less shitty with each passing semester. Jordon tried taking some math courses until she remembered how boring they were. She gave up on developing her mind in favor of helping Gordon make her work less shitty.
Gordon eventually got into making shitty watercolor landscapes that sold on ebay because of her fame. Gordon never made anything as lovely as Jordon's art. Jordon never made anything as lovely as the crazed dragon painting that spilt their lives apart. Neither of them cared terribly much, as long as their work today was better than their work yesterday.
They still live together, spending most of their time in Gordon's world, mostly because she has a nicer house.
the end