Page 122 of Everything That Kills Me
Hopefully Jack wouldn’t have detected the chemical scent of the hospital, but Zeph still could. He showered, then went down barefoot, in his tightest boxers with a sachet of lube tucked over one of his arse cheeks, wearing the long baggy T-shirt with a nonsensical equation across the front that Paulo had bought him for his birthday.
Jack turned when he walked into the kitchen and his jaw dropped. Zeph loved seeing that. Jack was so rarely surprised.
“I’m hot,” Zeph said.
“You definitely are. Did you sort out your complicated thing this afternoon? Is that why you’re hot?”
“Nearly. And no. Another step on the path to world domination. What are we eating?”
“Chili con carne.”
“Great. My stomach is thanking you. Want to listen? You could put your head right here.” He patted his boxers.
Jack growled. “I have to keep stirring otherwise…”
“I should have done as much as I want to by Friday. We could have the weekend together, then go our separate ways. Or do you need to go to Thomas’s sooner?”
“Leaving on Monday morning is fine. How’s the dissertation going? I didn’t know there was anything else to discover about facial recognition.”
“I hope you can tell by my look of abject horror how wrong you are. Ready for a lecture? No? Tough. There’s always a need for increased accuracy in contactless authentication.Using systems like eigenvectors, which are derived from the covariance matrix of the probability distribution over the high-dimensional vector space of face images, we can form a basis set of all images used to construct the covariance matrix. Then produce dimension reduction by allowing the smaller set of basis images to represent the original training images. Shall I stop?”
“I am so turned on.”
Zeph giggled. “Classification can be achieved by comparing how faces are represented by the basis set. We’ll make advances with mask recognition and in very low lighting. Even with issues of privacy, the ramifications on security are immense. Tie in a city’s CCTV network, both council and businesses, and we’ll know where bad guys are almost before they’ve decided to go there.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Psychic too? Grab a couple of forks. We eating in here or the TV room?”
“Let’s watch Pottery Throwdown.”
“Oh God. You blow my mind with your brilliance and you want to watch that? I need wine.”
Zeph laughed. “Water for me please.”
He’d been normal, hadn’t he? Jack hadn’t seen through him?
They sat together on the couch and Zephhmmedas he ate. “This is delicious. Just the right amount of spice.”
“Eat all of it, then. You’re getting skinny. Is that another bruise on your thigh?”
Zeph looked down at it. “I can’t blame you for that one. I walked into a desk in the lab. However…” He pointed to his other leg and then his arm. “Those are yours. I bruise easily. Always have.”
Zeph ate more than he’d wanted but still left some. It was hard to keep forking food into your mouth when you felt full.
“I don’t know why you like watching this so much.”
“It’s watching Keith cry. He’s such a softie.” He put the bowls aside and snuggled up against Jack. “I don’t know if I can imagine you crying.”
“Neither can I.”
Zeph pulled off his T-shirt, then dropped to the carpet in front of him and looked up as he unfastened Jack’s jeans. “You’re dessert. I want you to go hard in my mouth.”
“Be quick then. I’m already on the move.”
Zeph wrapped his fingers around Jack’s cock, licked the head and he began to thicken.
“One lick?” Zeph widened his eyes.
“Staring at you has the same effect.”
