Free Timescape by Gregory Benford

scattering of jewel-like lights. La Jolla, the jewel. They were running down the bumpy canyon route and the fresh, minty scent of the eucalyptus stands filled the car. He tried to lace himself back in Manhattan and look on things from that angle, to anticipate what his mother would think of all this, and found it impossible. "Is it because I'm not Jewish?"
    "Good God, no."
    "But if you had told her that, she'd be out here in a flash, right?"
    He nodded ruefully. "Uh huh."

    "You going to tell her before she arrives?"
    "Look," he said with sudden energy, turning in the bucket seat to face her, "I don't want to tell her anything. I don't want her butting into my life. Our life."
    "She's going to ask questions, Gordon."
    "Let her ask."
    "You won't answer?"
    "Look, she's not going to stay in our apartment, she doesn't have to know you live there, too."
    Penny rolled her eyes. "Oh, I get it. Just before she gets here, you'll start hinting that maybe I should pick up a few of my things that are lying around the apartment? Maybe take my face cream and birth control pills out of the medicine chest? Just a few subtle touches?"
    He wilted under her withering tone. He hadn't thought that clearly, but yes, some idea like that had been floating around in his mind. The old game: defend what you have to, but hide the rest. How long ago had he gotten into that pattern with his mother? Since Dad died? Christ, when was he going to stop being a kid?
    "I'm sorry, I ..."
    "Oh, don't be a retard. It was just a joke."
    They both knew it wasn't a joke, but instead hung somewhere in that space between fantasy and a reality about to materialize, and that if she had said nothing he would have stumbled his way into the suggestion eventually. It was this uncanny way she had of seeing his mind working on a problem with its blunt tools, and then leaping ahead to the spot he would reach, that endeared her to him at the most unlikely of moments.
    By tipping over the rock and exposing the worms underneath she had made it easy for him; there was no alternative but to be honest. "God damn, I love you," he said, suddenly grinning.
    Her smile took on a wry cast. Beneath the flickering street lights she kept her eyes intently on the road. "That's the trouble with going domestic. You move in with a man and pretty soon, when he says he loves you, you hear underneath it that he's thanking you. So, you're welcome."
    "What's that, WASP wisdom?"
    "Just making an observation."
    "How do you girls on the west coast get so smart so fast?" He leaned forward, as if questioning the California landscape outside:

    "Getting laid early helps a lot," she said, grinning.
    This was another sore point with him. She had been the first girl he had slept with and when he told her that, at first she wouldn't believe it. When she made a joke about giving lessons to a professor, he had felt his veneer of eastern sophistication shucked away. He had begun to suspect, then, that he used that intellectual carapace to protect himself from rubbing against the uncertainties of life, and particularly from the spikes of sensuality. As he watched the stucco beach cottages go by, Gordon thought, a bit grimly, that merely acknowledging a flaw didn't mean you had overcome it. He still felt a certain uneasiness at Penny's direct, straightforward approach. Maybe that was why he couldn't think of her and his mother in the same world together, much less their meeting in his apartment, with Penny's clothes in the closet as silent testimonial.
    He impulsively reached out and switched on the radio. Its tinny voice sang, "Big gurrls don't cry–" and he snapped it off.
    "Let it play," Penny said.
    "It's junk."
    "Fills up the air," she said meaningfully.
    He turned it back on with a grimace. Over the refrain of "Bi-ig gurrls"
    he said, "Hey, it's the 25th, isn't it?" She nodded. "The Liston-Patterson fight's on. Wait a sec." He thumbed the dial and found a staccato announcer filling in pre-fight statistics.