Damn Loompas.

[acts_of_gord]

Some days are longer than others. Days where the weather outside is rainy and bleak, and an attempt to get to the target range involved several falls and a lot of scratches and mud, and the sleep the night before had been poorer, thinner stuff than usual are a fine example of this. All Gordon wants at the end of a day like this is the chance to get warm and put on dry clothes.

There is, however, a slight problem. Namely: the door to room 287 is not there.

And the replacement, a life-sized, hyper-realistic sculpture of Han Solo encased in carbonite- which appears to have been made from dark chocolate- does not seem to have a knob or handle of any kind...

Comments

[acts_of_gord]

"Water and climate control," agrees Gordon, "the hallmarks of civilization."

He's been on a few camping trips. Collecting water and purifying it or boiling it to use, he doesn't mind so much- but temperature issues and the use of pit latrines were another story.

"I'll try to be quick. Thank you, Alyx."

[vance_prime]

"Don't worry about it."

[acts_of_gord]

He'd originally planned on trying to mend his jeans in his room, but that's obviously not going to be an option now. Sitting around in his shorts, needle and thread in hand or no, is best done alone. So is waiting for his clothing to dry. Well... at least they're not getting any wetter, and he's clean again when he has to put them back on. That counts for something.

He's feeling a lot better when he emerges from the bathroom this time. "It hasn't spontaneously reverted, has it?"

[vance_prime]

Alyx peeks out the front door, then shakes her head. "Nope. Sorry."

[acts_of_gord]

"Mm." Gordon shakes his head. "And the vents in the residential areas are too small to climb through."

He checked.

[vance_prime]

Alyx shrugs. "You could always just stay here... I mean, a bed's a bed, right?"

[acts_of_gord]

"... uh."

Never mind the enthusiasm about running water. This is the point of delineation between someone who grew up on an un-fielded Earth and someone who did not.

"I... maybe I'd ... better sleep on the floor."

[vance_prime]

Alyx looks puzzled. "What? It's not like the bed's not big enough, it's huge."

[acts_of_gord]

"No, it- the-"

He glances at the bed worriedly. It is most assuredly not huge by hotel room standards. That's queen sized at best, maybe smaller.

"I don't think you realize how hard it is to get any actual sleep when there's an attractive member of the opposite sex in bed with- I said that out loud, didn't I?"

[vance_prime]

Blink. Blink.

"What?"

That's a 'what' of incomprehension, rather than a 'what' of 'you had better not have just said that.'

[acts_of_gord]

He's not quite the color of a Coke can, but he's really close right now. There is nowhere to hide.

"No field plus close physical proximity equals serious stimulation whether anyone's looking for it or not," he mumbles, eyes very firmly on a point somewhere several inches to the left of Alyx's right ear.


THIS IS WHY HE DOESN'T USUALLY TALK.

[vance_prime]

...

"Seriously? That's all it takes?"

Alyx is stepping awaaaaaaay from Gordon now.

[acts_of_gord]

"It doesn't- it doesn't mean anything's going to happen, necessarily- I mean, it is subject to willpower and self control- but... um... yeah."

Oh, how we wish we had a facepalming icon right now.

[vance_prime]

"And... you... really think I'm attractive?"

She sounds genuinely surprised by that.

[acts_of_gord]

"... yes?"

He'd thought it was kind of self-evident, really.

[vance_prime]

It is for someone who grew up with any concrete concept of sexuality.

Now it's Alyx's turn to blush and avoid eye contact. "Oh. Um... thank you?"

[acts_of_gord]

If he were an anthropologist or psychologist instead of a physicist, that might have occurred to him. ('Course, if he were either of those he'd probably be in a shallow grave wherever he'd been doing field work at the time of the Seven Hours War.)

"You're welcome," he murmurs, and tries very hard to resist the urge to pull his head into his torso or something similarly physically impossible. "I'll just... the floor, or a chair or something. Not like I haven't had to do that before."

He'd say he doesn't want to make this any weirder than it has to be but honestly, he's not sure how it could get any weirder than it is right now.

[vance_prime]

The mun can think of a few ways.

"Well, okay... I guess..." A beat. "Um. Can I ask you something?"

[acts_of_gord]

"Um," says Gordon. "Sure?"

Who knows, maybe it'll be something harmless.

[vance_prime]

Since when has Gordon Freeman EVER been that lucky?

Alyx chews her lip, trying to think of how to phrase this.

"How do you know when you're attracted to someone?"

[acts_of_gord]

Once. When he was eight. It involved cookies.

It's Valerie all over again, isn't it. Maybe not as extreme, but...

"Well," he says, trying to sound like this is perfectly normal everyday conversation for who is he kidding, this is the kind of thing that happens to other men entirely, but he's going to try anyway even if he has to keep his eyes on the floor the whole time, "for one thing, you notice them more than other people, whether you mean to or not. At least I do. For starters?"

[vance_prime]

"How do you mean?"

Alyx sits down on the edge of the bed. This sounds like it's going to take a while.

[acts_of_gord]

"Well-" Gordon runs a hand over his hair. "In a crowd or a group of people, if you're not actively trying to look somewhere else, you wind up sort of drifting your attention their way more often than anybody else's. You don't necessarily mean to, but it happens. Uh, you probably notice more about the details of how they look or sound or move than other people, like I could pick out the way you walk from other people-" That might be a bad example, since it implies he's been watching, but it's the first thing he could think of. "You might, um... there's physiological responses, too, but that sort of implies more than just being attracted, usually."

[vance_prime]

"Like what?"

She's not offended at all, just curious. She doesn't have the cultural context required to be offended.

[acts_of_gord]

The logical thing to do here would be to treat this as if it were nothing but a classroom situation. Slight problem: Gordon stinks at classroom situations. Ask anybody who took his freshman year physics class at Boston University. It just wasn't meant to be.

"The, um, accelerated heart rate, for one, that's pretty common," he says instead. "There's the pupils of the eyes, those tend to get bigger when you're looking at or thinking about the person in question. Sometimes-" He looks down at his hands and his expression goes very rueful. "-sometimes there's localized sweating. And the odd feeling in the stomach, sometimes. Not always."