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Thanks Fuzz! I'm glad you're having fun..thanks for reading! Update follows... The Rosenberg Uncertainty Principle
Please read disclaimer on first page; everything still applies.
For Cath…
“And now good morrow to our waking souls
Which watch not one another out of fear,
For love all love of other sights controls
And makes one little room an everywhere.”
- John Donne from The Good Morrow
”The power of chance is widely underestimated. Our concept of randomness is shaped by quantum theory and thermodynamics, two theories in which chance is essential at the microscopic level, while at the macroscopic level it is insignificant. In the case of natural objects, the importance of chance tends to remain constant at all scales. Irregularity becomes hard to contain when randomness is let in.”
Even at her most distracted, Willow Rosenberg took better notes in her classes than anyone. She had been especially distracted today, fidgeting constantly through the lecture on Uses of Nonconstrained Chance, a topic that felt a little too personal all day.
She wandered from one class room to the next all afternoon, still in the clothes she wore from the night before, and feeling altogether unkempt and in need of a wash. She couldn’t stop flexing the digits on her right hand, still slightly red from the unusual space they occupied the night before – and much of that morning. Sitting in class, one ear on the lecture, she scribbled aimlessly, catching fragments of what was being said, her head occasionally nodding forward, not from exhaustion, but from a newfound compulsion. She could smellTara on her hand; a strangely sweet and salty musk, still pungent, assailing her senses like opium. Her mind drifted all day in the fragrance, like a kite caught in the wind, unpredictable where it would land.
An irregular unpredictable…let loose by a seemingly random choice; or was it a choice? She didn’t know if she was taking a chance or not, but Tara was not to blame, she was sure of that. She needed to apologize; Tara had become so important, so significant in so short a period of time, for reasons she still didn’t understand. Was Tara the unpredictable part? Or was she?
”While we recognize that the notion of chance evokes all kinds of quasi-metaphysical anxieties, we really shouldn’t worry about them….”
Once the last lecture had ended, she decided she shouldn’t put it off until her own anxieties had calmed somewhat. She had no intention of discussing the situation with Buffy; what would she say? Uh, Buffy, I think I might be kinda gay…No, it wouldn’t do. She had no idea what the depth of her feelings might be. She’d never thought about them before. But Tara was more important at this point, she decided. She had made some kind of unconscious assault on her, invaded her most personal of spaces, then completely humiliated both of them, no doubt hurting Tara immensely in the process.
She had arrived at Tara’s door without even taking note of her brief journey, and stood quietly, staring at the doorknob.
She wanted to knock, and she raised her hand several times to do so. She would hesitate the moment another student walked by, as if not wanting to be seen, or appear to desire entrance. Shame was nothing new to Rosenberg, she was raised to appreciate shame in all its glory, her mother was great practitioner, but this was something else entirely. She felt small.
“Hey, I think she’s still at the studio. You might want to check there.”
Willow barely heard the young woman as she unlocked her door, right next to Tara’s.
“I’m sorry, what?”
The woman was very tall and very thin, with a frazzled head of curly blonde hair, dressed in a pair of baggy denim overalls with streaks of paint down the front. Willow thought she looked like one of the actors from a production of Godspell she had seen as a kid.
“I’m sorry?”
The woman pointed at Tara’s door.
“She’s still at the student art studio. You can go down and check. She was still there when I left.”
Willow nodded and thanked the young woman, waiting until she had disappeared within her own room before setting off to find Tara.
###
The studio was sparsely lit from ancient lamps that hung high overhead, embedded in the dome ceiling. The art department held numerous rooms, a large lecture hall and smaller labs for the photography students. The student studio was large and airy, with student work framed along its circular walls. Several moveable screens split the geometry of the room, and it was behind one such screen that she found the only other occupant of the room.
Tara, dressed in a simple t-shirt and a baggy pair of cargo pants both covered in splotches of paint, was focusing intently on her work. A large canvas set on a wooden stand was her object of attention: a larger version of her “Mother and Child Reunion” sketch, incomplete.
From what little Willow knew of art, she could recognize Tara’s style as being vaguely reminiscent of John Singer Sargant, whose portraits she had admired very much in high school. But the painting itself would not keep her interest; it was Tara, so involved and unaware of anything outside the sphere of her activity. In her left hand, she held a messy palette, dripping with color. Her right arm, crooked high like a pale branch, reaching upward to some unknown point in space, waved in front of the painting, a small brush flashing in her fingers, just barely grazing the canvas.
Willow couldn’t help but examine her, the curve of her, how her balance would shift from one leg to the other as she moved before her work; the swiftness of her arm as it would dart out to add another layer of color. Her strokes alternated between sharp, staccato stabs to long, smooth arcs of liquid motion. When she would stretch, her shirt would lift so slightly, exposing just scant inches of bare skin. Her long, blonde locks, dancing around her shoulders, grazing her neck, sharp, like soft angles of near-solid sunlight.
Had she ever been entranced by anyone before? She couldn’t remember. She took a few tentative steps toward the young painter. Tara was beautiful in thought and movement; Willow was certain Grace had to be a genetic trait in her family.
It certainly doesn’t run in mine, she thought to herself, before she hit the floor, face first.
“Willow?!”
Tara had spun around the moment she head the jangling cacophonic thud, a shock that nearly had her palette flying right out of her hands.
The young hacker stumbled slightly as she lifted herself painfully off the floor, pausing only to check for any bruises before raising her head to eye level with a curious Tara.
“Tara! Hi! Um…just a little clumsy, huh? Sorry about that, no harm I think, though.”
Tara made no move in the direction of the other student, but held her ground, and her brush, firmly.
“W-what are you doing here?”
Willow’s nerves made a curlicue as they missed the left turn to Albuquerque; her eyes were dilated and nearly fixed and a painful rigidity had set up shop along her spine.
“Oh! Right, me here, for a reason, that’s me. Um, well, you know, I just wanted to, you know, apologize about this morning, I mean, it wasn’t very nice of me to go gallivanting off like a robber baron thief-type person, but I was kind of, well, sort of a little, maybe, not so much freaked or anything, I was just a tad unprepared and um, not really myself, you know? What with the head banging and um, sleep-walking or whatever that was, I certainly didn’t mean to, you know, do anything, or try anything or try to do anything, I wasn’t aware of, anyway, doing anything, I mean. Did that sound convincing?”
Tara was momentarily concerned her brow might never un-furrow; she had not moved an inch since Willow began speaking and she remained still, just in case.
“Um, o-okay? I mean, you don’t have to apologize, Willow, I mean, it was just a f-fluke or something. It happens.”
Willow did not look convinced.
“Really? Oh. Um, well, I just didn’t want you thinking that I was like, um, um –“
“Interested in me?”
Tara’s expression melted a little, her eyes had taken on a sad aspect Willow found hard to resist. Stupid!
“Oh! Well, yes, I mean, I am interested in you, friend, you, you, my friend, my interesting friend, very interesting friend…who I like very much. I like all about you, all the Tara bits, which are very nice…not just the girl bits, although they’re very nice, too, but that’s not the why, because you know, I liked Oz, a lot and he was boy, but it wasn’t the boy part that I liked specifically, it was the Oz part, and now I like the Tara part. Did that make sense?”
Tara had never before been taken by anyone who could ramble as well or at such length as Willow Rosenberg. A smile crooked from one corner of her mouth, and she set down her palette and brush, moving slowly in Willow’s direction and stopping just short.
“That’s okay, Willow. R-really. I like the Willow part, too. But I’ve got girl parts and your girl parts are nice, too, but especially the whole Willow part is n-nice. I like all of you, all the bits and parts and pieces.”
Willow found her smile, involuntarily, unable to look anywhere but Tara’s face, so open and sincere before her.
“Y-you said you wanted to kiss me goodnight.”
“Oh! Did I? I did, I do, I mean, did I?”
“That would require some of our girl bits, I think.”
“Oh! Right! Yes, well, I didn’t say that I don’t like your girl bits, I like them very much! You have amazing girl bits, I mean they’re not bits, they’re significantly more than bits, of course, big bits, um, not massively big bits, but nicely proportioned bits, but, you know, I mean, I don’t mind your bits. Your girl bits, that is.”
Taking a breath deeper than she intended, for she wasn’t quite sure what she was doing, Tara stepped closer to the red head.
“That’s good. Really. Would you like to?”
The hacker’s program was hanging; she couldn’t re-boot the system; she just had to wait. Tara was so close.
“Um, like to do what?”
“Kiss my bits goodnight.”
For Willow, the world had suddenly contracted into that tiny space that only the two of them now occupied.
“Oh, right! Of course, that’s what I said, is it? I wanted to do that, right? Yes, and again, it’s night time, so that’s okay, because it’s okay and fine with me. The kissing thing is –“
She wasn’t allowed to finish her sentence; Tara swiftly closed the distance between them, taking Willow’s face between her hands, her lips seizing Willow’s, wet and warm, with wild, random, unpredictable kisses that left them both utterly breathless.
TBC...
"Human kind cannot bear much reality." - T.S. Eliot
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Thanks for stopping by and I hope you don't think I'm cruel. I wouldn't want anyone to think that....but I am deliberately obnoxious sometimes...don't worry, it's almost wakey time...
Ah, poor Will and Tara. Especially poor Willow - 'a fish out of water', LMAO! Hey, that's the first time I've ever used that. 
I loved it that Willow found the courage to go and see Tara, she did kinda owe her that after running off 
Totally wonderfully fantastico update!! Had to laugh at Willow falling over... that girl really shouts 'elegance', doesn't she?!