Seek not a reason, for I have none. Enjoy responsibly. Oh, and GO EAGLES!!!

Tetrahedral Position

He mutters. In bed with the lights doused and crickets harmonizing, she finds the hour of 2 am accompanied by the under-the-breath ramblings of a man seeking elusive sleep. This is new and though the reason is unclear, she's getting used to lectures on things like…

"… the results of analogous calculations in bcc materials. A helium atom is fixed in each of eight interstitial positions to determine the minimum energy configuration and activation energy for helium mobility…"

No one but her, she decides, could find it soothing to sleep with the unlikely soundtrack of textbook quotations involving interatomic potentials. If there wasn't something wrong with her before they'd entered this relationship, there is now.

"If the saddle point for helium activation is assumed to be the tetrahedral position, then…"

And she kisses him until he can't speak anymore. Because the baritone murmuring about position, regardless of scientific context, quite simply makes her hot.


He mutters. In bed she sprawls with a slight panting from what that mouth had been doing before this moment of pseudopotential theory. Eyelashes have just waved goodnight to consciousness when the deep lull coaxes her to wakefulness.

"…the vacancy is introduced by removing the ion from the center of a finite solid containing N atoms…"

Of all things finite he should consider, the most pressing should be her patience. In truth, it's not the talking that bothers her. It's his increasing inability to fall asleep without it, spinning a rare occurrence into a growing pattern. And she's gun shy about patterns. Plus, he'd be the first to admit it drove him bonkers when his father babbled in numbers. And concerned questioning of what kept him from sleep has yet to be answered.

"The phonon dispersion curves calculated for the alkalis and aluminum according to the parameters…"

She can't help notice his hand stroking the curve of her hip when that very word is whispered and the urge is there, strong and immediate. So she angles her head up to trap future words from escaping his lips to the benefit of both.


He mutters. In bed there are two people and roughly three brains. That he can recite passages from three-decades old MIT books proves the man is brilliant. And she lies amongst words and pain, trying to determine the penalty for slaughtering a genius. Because there's only one other thing that will make him stop and she just can't manage it at present.

"…the matrix of ions used is periodic along the dislocation line, the lateral dimension of…"

On this night when her skull continues to protest an earlier collision with concrete, when her bones ache from a foot chase in heels and the report is still due, the woman needs a quiet bed and ten hours of blissful coma. Whatever contentment might normally be derived from his voice droning in the silence has taken a turn toward chalkboard-meets-nails.

"The ions are assumed to interact via a two-body effective ion-to-ion potential calculation…"

Federal agents can be as slow as any mere mortal but eventually, they catch on and the punishment is swift. She turns and gapes at handsome features playing with moonlight. Two-body interaction indeed. What had been an innocent, involuntary sleeping tool has morphed into a ruse for getting... a little extra something. But her academy education taught her how to play, too. So she slinks down to the spot that's eagerly awaiting her, works him up and then leaves him incomplete and dismissed. But there's a pillow and a couch and the furniture will hear mutterings of a different sort.


Much thanks to the 1972 classic "Interatomic Potentials and Simulation of Lattice Defects," a light read at 781 hardback pages.