Spoiler Alert (Spoiler Alert #1)(36)
“Ready for rocks?” she asked, after they’d finished.
He offered his arm, and she took it. “Ready for rocks.”
They spent an hour or so rambling through the museum, first peering at and handling a startlingly bright rainbow of minerals, then visiting the penguins and studying expansive dioramas rife with vegetation and animals preserved through expert taxidermy.
At the first text-intensive informational sign they encountered, she glanced at the display. Bit her lip.
Of course she remembered, cared, and wanted to know more.
“I can read it, but it’ll take me longer than you. Just . . .” He sighed. “Please don’t get impatient.”
Her brows drew together. “Of course I won’t get impatient.”
And she didn’t, no matter how long he took, although he still tended to favor displays that didn’t require much context to appreciate them. Hands-on activities, or the enormous blue whale and T. rex skeletons, or—to April’s delight—the Shake House.
“This is my first earthquake simulator.” Grinning, she tugged him through the doorway. “We don’t get many noticeable quakes in Sacramento, so I’m excited.”
He allowed himself to be dragged toward a spot near the faux-window. “Good news, then. Now that you live in the Bay Area, you’ll feel something every year or two, at least. Hopefully not a big something, though.”
Her nose crinkled in a wince. “Well, at least we’re not in Washington or Oregon. Sooner or later, those poor people are in deep, deep—”
Just then, the museum helper began talking, and he made a mental note not to move to Seattle.
As the polo-clad woman explained what would happen next, he studied his surroundings. Beside him, April was doing the same, her eyes sharp and narrowed in scrutiny as she scanned the cloth-covered ceiling, the screen disguised as a window, the blue-patterned walls and built-in shelves.
The simulator, built to resemble a Victorian drawing room inside, didn’t boast many decorations on those walls and shelves. Some books, decorative plates and glasses, a mirror, a painting, a chandelier. A fishbowl too, amusingly enough. White-painted metal railings crisscrossed the room, providing handholds each small group of visitors would need in due course.
Along one wall, the screen showed a window’s-eye view of the Painted Ladies near Alamo Square. The city as it existed in 1989, during the Loma Prieta quake, according to the museum employee. Eventually, she told them, the image would change to the city as it appeared in 1906, before the most infamous disaster in San Francisco history.
Compared to a Gods of the Gates set, the room was sparse at best. But in today’s scene, he got to hold April’s hand and interlace their fingers, knowing he wouldn’t have to die a stupid, stupid death on camera. All in all, he’d take that trade every time. Even though more than one cell phone was now pointed toward the two of them, rather than the room or the guide explaining the gist of what would happen.
First, as the polo-clad woman explained, the room would jolt through the 1989 earthquake, then the 1906 temblor. Or at least modified versions thereof, demonstrations safe and brief enough for casual visitors. If the first, weaker, quake simulation proved too nerve-racking, they could leave before the second.
In one nonsensical scene in Gates’s fifth season, Aeneas rode a pegasus to visit Venus, his mother, in her lofty celestial abode. To film that sequence, Marcus had spent hours and hours perched precariously atop a giant green-painted rig assembled in a cavernous green-painted hangar and programmed to simulate the movements of an enormous winged horse in flight.
For all the precautions taken, for all his love of physical challenges and performing his own stunts whenever possible, he’d found the experience . . . disconcerting. At least at first, until he’d gotten used to the rhythm.
He figured a room that required only railings as safety measures should be just fine.
As a recording briefly explained the circumstances surrounding each earthquake, he and April leaned against their patch of railing, hip to hip. Then the re-creation of the Loma Prieta quake began, the lights flickered out, and the room rattled and shook beneath their feet.
He put his arm around her shoulders, hitching her closer as the chandelier swayed and the books hopped out of place, millimeter by millimeter.
“As a precautionary measure,” he said when her gaze shot to his.
She snorted. “Right.”
All in all, it felt not entirely dissimilar to his memory of the actual quake, except happier. And sexier. Much, much happier and sexier. One of her breasts nudged his chest as she shifted under his arm, and he had to swallow back an embarrassing noise.
When the simulator’s version of the 1906 quake began, the difference between the two temblors was immediately apparent. This quake involved not just rattling but sharp jolts and an ominous rolling sensation too, and the whole experience lasted much longer. Long enough to recall, unwillingly, that a similar catastrophe could happen again, right where they were standing, at any time.
Yet the grin on April’s round, lovely face widened, moment by moment. In a burst of movement, she got up on her toes and nestled closer.
Her breast wasn’t merely nudging his chest anymore. The contact had become a blindingly pleasurable press of softness, a taunt rubbing against him with each jolt of the floor beneath them.
“This is fucking awesome,” she whispered in his ear as they bumped into the rail and clutched one another. “I wonder how accurate they were allowed to make it.”