Chapter 11

Eric sat up on his weight bench and used a ragged gray towel to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. Good grief, she must think he was a complete idiot. He should have invited her out for a drink, or in for coffee, or something. He lay back down and began another set of presses. The "or something" was the problem though. He hadn't invited her in because he hadn't trusted himself to be alone with her in his house. There were just too many handy horizontal surfaces.

After half an hour of heavy reps on the weight bench, he still had a hard-on just from thinking about Dr. Lori Tremain. For the first time in a couple of weeks, his brain wasn't hashing over the puzzle caused by the WYRM virus. Instead it was intent on developing a plan to get the pretty biologist into bed.

Remembering the kiss they'd shared in the janitor's closet, his spirits, along with the relevant portion of his anatomy, rose. Judging by the way she'd responded to his kiss, she probably wasn't too opposed to the idea. Still, Eric reminded himself firmly, she was female and that meant he had no hope in hell of understanding what went on in her mind. For some reason, Eric had an almost zero success rate when it came to figuring out the opposite gender. He liked women and was reasonably successful finding occasional partners for mutually pleasant, no-strings-attached affairs, but he absolutely could not make any sense of what went on in the female psyche.

He lay back against the bench and continued his workout. A thought suddenly occurred to him and he sat up quickly, whacking his forehead on the barbell suspended above him. He rubbed at the sore spot absently, cursing himself out loud. He'd forgotten to get Lori's phone number or address. How was he supposed to pick her up tomorrow at six if he didn't know where she lived? He got up and padded barefoot into the other spare bedroom, which served as his home office. As he accessed her personnel records, he reflected wryly that there were decided advantages to having a network administrator's pass codes.

He tried, he really did, to limit his snooping to Lori's phone number. The temptation proved impossible, however and he couldn't help absorbing as much information about her as possible. She was thirty-three, he discovered. Actually, she was just about six months older than he was. Eric grinned to himself. An older woman, huh? Cool. He kept on reading. Lori, it seemed, had been at the university for almost five years and was, indeed, up for tenure in another eight months. He had lousy timing, as usual. He remembered all too well those last nerve-wracking months. Lori would be swamped and frantic. Not the most opportune time to start a new relationship.

Her file looked good though, he noticed happily. There were several commendations, even a nomination for teacher of the year, an award bestowed not by fellow faculty, but by the students themselves. She'd also been granted a relatively prestigious research award, published a couple of impressive-sounding papers and had been invited to speak at several prominent scientific meetings. No a single complaint or official sanction marred her record. It didn't look like the lady was in any danger of being denied her tenure. Eric wondered if he should just wait until after December to ask her out again, but decided that that would be terminally stupid. In the meanwhile, some other raving genius could realize what a treasure she was and beat him to the punch. Eric knew he wasn't God's gift to women and he figured that he needed every bit of advantage he could get if he wanted to catch the elusive herpetologist.

Feeling only slightly guilty, he exited the personnel system and pulled up old copies of the faculty newsletter, running a search for any information related to Dr. Lori Tremain. He found the teaching award nominations, the research award and the publication announcements. There, he was safe. If he accidentally gave away his knowledge of her achievements, he could admit to accessing the newsletter files. That shouldn't offend her, she might even find it flattering. She'd never need to know about his stroll through her official records.

He screwed around on-line for a while, trying to distract himself. An idea about the origin of the WYRM virus occurred to him and he began to access the newspaper files of SMU and other Midwestern universities, looking for any mention of computer viruses, back as far as the 1980s. The University of Michigan's TIGER was one of the most famous. Eric remembered hearing about it back when he was in college. It had operated much like the present version of the WYRM, popping up at random and "eating," or irretrievably deleting the file infected. He immediately sent off an email to a colleague in Ann Arbor, asking for more information. A few other localized problems had cropped up from time to time to time, but Eric found nothing that gave him any further leads regarding his current assignment.

He tugged off his glasses and rubbed tiredly at the bridge of his nose. A quick glance at the clock on the corner of his screen told him it was twelve-thirty. Since tomorrow was Saturday, he didn't have to worry about getting up in time for a morning class, which was a relief, since he didn't think he'd be able to go to sleep anytime soon. His brain and body were still too tangled up with thoughts of lizards and WYRMs and sexy herpetologists.

His stomach rumbled, so he stuck his glasses back onto his face and meandered into the kitchen that was still decorated in its original hues of avocado and harvest gold.

A rummage through the refrigerator yielded a quart-sized plastic bowl of leftover kung-pao chicken and fried rice, which he had cooked for his dinner a couple of nights earlier. Eric loved to cook, but he didn't always have the time, so he made large batches of filling entrees that would feed him for a number of lunches, dinners and snacks. Since there was only about a quart left, he stuck the entire bowl into the microwave, one of the few modern additions to his kitchen and a few seconds later the food's warm, spicy aroma filled the tiny room.