Free Black Flame by Ruby Laska

to within one second per thirty million—that was an incontrovertible truth.
    Unlike, say—Jimmy thought as he knocked gently on the bathroom door, as he had promised to do—his feelings about the current guest of the ranch. Last night his dreams had featured Deneen Burgess doing any number of illogical and confounding things. Oh, he understood the erotic dreams; these were a natural consequence of a healthy sex drive and visual and olfactory stimuli (because Deneen smelled quite pleasant, like a blend of flowers and spices and lemons). But there had a been a dream in which she had been sitting primly on the tailgate of his truck, wearing a sparkling evening gown and reading aloud from his Advanced Physics textbook, a tome he’d carried around all senior year until he’d memorized every formula and corollary. And another in which she was wearing safety goggles and her sister’s bathrobe and working at his workbench, fiddling with the controls of a wax-melting heater. In that dream she’d come after him with a red-hot spatula smeared with wax, a look of intense concentration on her face.
    Perhaps most disturbingly, in the dream Jimmy hadn’t attempted to disarm her of the dangerously hot implement, but had only closed his eyes and waited for the burn.
    He brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face as quickly as he could. He would start the coffee, then wake Deneen; by his calculations, even factoring in her longer-than-average preparation time to apply her cosmetics and arrange her hair, she ought to be ready to go by the time the coffee was prepared and the truck loaded with the gifts and decorations.
    Jimmy was halfway across the kitchen when he spied the object in the middle of the kitchen table, and did a double-take.
    A beautifully decorated cake, iced with frills and scalloped piping and holly leaves and berries. On closer inspection, the leaves were sculpted from frosting and the berries from the red gumdrop candies Mrs. Osterhaus had given Deneen last night.
    Could that really be his cake underneath? The rough size and shape—circular—were right, but all evidence of his cake’s failure, including the swollen muffin top and the burned bits, were gone.
    Tentatively, Jimmy poked a finger into an iced scallop along the bottom edge of the cake, and tasted it. It was delicious: not too sweet, creamy, and faintly spiced with almonds. Well, his roommates were in for a treat tonight.
    A stab of discomfort shot through him at the thought. Zane and Cal, back from their long night out in the winter storm, would encounter not just a luscious Christmas cake but an even more luscious woman who would be staying with them. Cal, of course, would be bringing his girlfriend Roan, but that left Zane, who was single despite a number of false starts with girls he’d met in Conway. Zane worked on the rigs, but he had a law degree and horn-rimmed glasses and pale gray eyes, features which Jayne had explained to Jimmy were very attractive to many women, as they implied hidden depths of creative and intellectual acuity. Jimmy knew that myopia, despite common media portrayals to the contrary, did not correlate to higher than average intelligence, his own nearsightedness notwithstanding, but he couldn’t deny that women were drawn to Zane.
    And in a matter of hours, Zane would be meeting Deneen for the first time. Smelling her intoxicating perfume. Tasting her cake…
    Jimmy started the coffee, banging the filter basket into place with more force than necessary, pouring too much coffee from the bin and getting it on the floor. He stomped into the living room to get the broom he’d left by the front door after sweeping snow from the porch—
    —and stopped. Deneen had left the Christmas tree’s lights plugged in overnight, and Jimmy’s irritation over the wasted electricity was quickly overcome by the beauty of the moment: the tree shimmering in the pre-dawn stillness, the few ornaments she’d left behind winking in the