I leaned on the sofa arm, stretched across Steve, and picked up the remote. I twisted around, and turned the TV on. “Here you go Steve.” I handed him the remote. “While I get changed, you can find something to watch, if you want.”

Finding the right dress-up clothes to do my laundry was going to be interesting. I never dress up to do my laundry. Hmm. I pulled my telltale slacks off and tossed them in the laundry hamper, then pulled my blouse over my head and put it in. OK. Maybe I could treat it as a date with a side trip to the laundry room. Yes, that would work. I padded over to my closet in knee-highs, panties, and bra. How dressy? A dress? That would be too much. How about a skirt and a blouse? Yes, that would work. As Steve was wearing yellow and brown, perhaps I could contrast. A white blouse and a red skirt would go well. My white v-neck knitted blouse and my red button front skirt should work nicely.

Now that I had decided what to wear, I visited the bathroom to splash some water on my face and brush my teeth. A blowjob was a great way of making an impression on Steve, but having him smell paja on my breath all afternoon was not.

Returning from the bathroom, I put on my white v-neck knit blouse, then slipped my skirt on. My red pumps would round things out. I walked over to the closet door mirror to make sure everything worked. ¡Mierda! The tops of my knee-highs showed! Now I had to put on pantyhose . . . or did I? I had shaved in the shower yesterday evening before Mass, so why not go bare? I smiled. All sorts of possibilities there. Off with the shoes! Off with the knee-highs! Slip on my red sandals, brush my hair out, and I was ready. Not sure for what, but I was ready for it. Talk about overdressed for doing laundry!

Steve was watching a news feature when I walked back into the living room. It seemed that some Intelligent Design advocates had managed to get elected to the Milford School District, and they were being interviewed by a reporter from one of the local stations.

“So what do you think, Steve? Do you expect another few years of hostile debate about the Science curriculum?”

“That all depends on how good these ID folk are, I guess.” Steve pointed at the talking heads with the remote. “They’re the new kids on the block.” He looked at me, let his eyes slide slowly up and down my new outfit, smiled and said “My, don’t you look nice. Yes indeed, very nice. Thank you.”

I did a pirouette and then a little curtsy. “I didn’t want you to be embarrassed to be seen with me.”

“Niiiiice!” I could feel him ogle my legs; then he whistled.” You aren’t wearing hose?

Quick frown. “No. Is that a problem?”

Steve backpedaled quickly. “Not at all! I like what I see!”

“Good. Glad you like them. I try to keep in shape.” I pointed at the TV. “Why do you say the ID people are the new kids on the block? And how can they avoid the inevitable science-religion fight?”

“Well, the public school curriculum in general, and the sciences in particular, have been pretty well stripped of any moral or ethical values for many years now.” Steve patted the sofa beside him and beckoned me to come sit by him. ”And the ID folk, pretty much by definition, have an intentional agenda.”

I sat down beside Steve on the sofa. He leaned back, put his left arm across my shoulders, and helped me snuggle in beside him.

Turning back to point at the TV, he said, “Be it ‘thick’ ID or ‘thin’ ID, intelligent design assumes that the universe has a purpose or intent, and if they try to squeeze ID in as ‘yet another theory’, I’m sure they’re going to be slapped with a lawsuit. And they’ll lose. They’ll have to show how science and religion coexist before they can try to get ID taught in public school.”

That caught my attention. “But science and religion butt heads all the time; they can’t coexist easily, can they?”

Steve laughed harshly. “Sure they can. They usually have. While it is obviously false that the two have never clashed, they are not mutually exclusive. Too many people today assume that it's either one or the other, and never the two shall meet, and that’s ridiculous. Sure, sometimes religious leaders are hostile to scientists, and scientists are sometimes hostile or demeaning to religious people, but that does not mean the two are by nature opposed. What you’re talking about is the ‘conflict model’ of science and religion interaction. That’s only one of several ways of describing the interaction between them. The conflict model is a fabrication – and I mean fabrication - of the late nineteenth century. Two men, John Draper and Andrew Dixon White, created it only a hundred and thirty years ago and they had specific political and social purposes when making their case. The thing is,” he turned and looked at me “and this is the funniest part, the foundations for their work are almost totally unreliable.”

“I had no idea.” I looked over to the TV, and saw that there was now some bright, perky, blond bimbo showing the weekend weather map. “Steve, would you mute the TV please?” Turning back to Steve as he searched the remote for the mute I said, “It’s the button on the lower right.” Then, ”So how do you know all this? Do you teach?”

Steve finally found the mute button and the TV went silent. “Yeah. I’m an Instructor at Delaware State.” He gestured towards the window. “This semester I’m teaching at the Sussex campus.”

I’d never known any teachers. “That sounds pretty cool.”

Steve looked at me and smiled ruefully. “Actually, it means that I’m at the bottom of the heap. I only get to teach the undergrad intro courses; tenure’s not even on the horizon, and people like me get jerked around by the administration.” He started waving the remote back and forth while he was talking. “Last year I had the schedule from Hell. I was teaching five courses, commuting between both campuses, and it was just crazy! Sometimes in the car, I had to look up where I was supposed to going next, which course am I teaching now? Which way should I be going? It really sucked.”

I winced. “That does sound pretty hectic. So do you have your PhD yet?”

He smiled and said, “No, not yet. And it’s not usually so hectic. My thesis has been accepted, and I’m working on it, but it’s still a year away, at least. Maybe more.”

Steve was sounding better and better. I wriggled out from under his arm, turned around to face him, leaned across his lap, and tucked my legs up on the sofa beside him. I reached up and stroked Steve’s scrunched up eyebrows with my thumb, and then ran my fingers down the side of his face.

“I guess I’ve always assumed that science and religion were at odds. I mean, they operate on different principles, don’t they?”

Steve smiled and relaxed. He was getting comfortable. “They’re a lot more alike than the culture warriors will admit. One thing there’s already plenty of in discussions of science and religion is self-serving rhetoric as well as polemics and gross oversimplifications. Something else I’ve found is that the real stories are almost always much more interesting than the rhetorical polemical versions, even if the real stories are less useful to use to bash people over the head.”

He was enjoying himself and we had plenty of time, so I figured I would play along. I touched Steve’s upper lip with my fingers to hush him, and then traced the outline of his lips with my fingertips. “So why not start by telling me what you,” and here I tapped him on his chest, ”mean by ‘science’ and ‘religion’?” I took this opportunity to hook my thumb into one, and then the other of my sandals, worked the strap past my heel, then slipped the sandals off and slid them under the sofa.

Steve started to teach. “Well, frankly, for definitions we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.” He stretched out his right hand, again pointing with the remote. “On the one hand, we need enough precision in the definitions so that the discussion won’t slip out from beneath us, because of ambiguities or unclear terminology.” He looked back to me to make sure I was following. “Many of the misunderstandings between science-religion and their interactions stem from the sloppiness with which terms are bandied about. Often they’re used more as rallying posts than as explanatory terminology.”

“OK. I’m with you so far.”

“On the other hand,” and here Steve turned his arm over so the remote was pointing to the left, “we also have to accept that any useful definition of either science or religion will have a historically contingent component.”

“A what?”

Steve made an ‘Oops’ face. “That’s just a fancy way of saying that nobody, except maybe for some philosophers and lexicologists, actually start by making definitions and then classify things in the world according to the definitions they’ve just made. Rather, the real things exist first and then the definitions are wrapped around them with more or less neatness.”

“I guess so. What’s your point?”

“Let me give you an example. Take the astronomer Johannes Kepler ...” Steve paused and waited expectantly.

“I’ve heard of Johannes Kepler, Steve.”

“Sorry Anna. You would be surprised how many adults have not. What he was doing at the turn of the seventeenth century was certainly scientific to him, but it might not fit our modern definitions of science, because those modern definitions were hammered out and rigorized in the nineteenth century. So my point is if we start out setting down definitions that are too rigid, too absolute, too modern, we automatically limit ourselves to speaking usefully only about modern times.”

“All right, we need to be sensitive to how science was practiced in the past. So what? Everyone accepts that Kepler was a scientist.”

“If we start out with definitions distinguishing science clearly from religion, which probably seems reasonable enough to most people today, we start out on the wrong foot. Again, take Kepler, one of the most important astronomers and mathematicians of the early seventeenth century. He is cited in every elementary physics text as the discoverer of important laws of planetary motion.”

I wasn’t sure what Steve was getting at. “Right. That’s what I learned about him. That’s what he’s famous for. Surely he was doing science?” I stroked Steve’s chin, then his ear.

Steve suddenly became very earnest. “No doubt about it. Nevertheless, he was also explicit in saying that his motivation for uncovering the laws of nature was to give glory to their creator. At one point he writes,” Steve looked up at the ceiling, cocked his head at an angle, and quoted from some old memory, “‘God is praised through my work in astronomy.’”

“I didn’t know that. So, was Kepler’s motivation scientific or religious? Was he more involved in science or religion?”

Steve looked at me, took my hand in his, and said “Now don’t get pissed off with me Anna, and thank you for being patient, but there’s a problem with the question as to whether his motivation was scientific or not, or if he was doing science or theology.” This wasn’t a structured environment like in one of his classrooms, and he was a bit timid. “Those questions assume that our twentieth-first century definitions of science and religion are valid when applied to people living in the seventeenth century. For Kepler, a clear distinction between science and religion, which seems so obvious to us today, so unquestionable, simply did not exist as such. Moreover, Kepler is not some oddball exception. The same is true for Isaac Newton, or any of their contemporaries.”

This was a different take on things. “So if I’m following your argument, what you’re saying is that part of the current conflict between science and religion is that we are applying current assumptions of what science and religion should be to events in times when science and religion didn’t mean the same things as they do now, right? And that judging what happened then by the standards we use now can lead us to faulty conclusions.” I noticed that I was now pointing back and forth. ¡Maldicion! Now he had me doing the pointing thing!

Steve was beaming. He had connected, and was now a happy man. “Yes, exactly!” He let go of my hand and quickly raised his index finger to begin qualifying his point. “This isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of self-serving jerks taking advantage of the situation to advance themselves.”

“Mmmmm. Interesting. I’ve never thought to question the questions. I take it that you teach a freshman course on science and religion?”

“Yup! It’s pretty popular too. You sound interested. You could sit in a couple of lectures and see if you like it.”

Avoiding Steve’s eyes, I smoothed the front of his shirt with my fingertips, and then adjusted his collar. I leaned forward, cupped his chin in my right hand, and kissed him lightly on his lips. “Actually, I’m getting fond of the lecturer.”

I pulled his head down and kissed him lightly on his nose, and then his eyebrows. Then, before Steve could respond, I wriggled off the sofa, stood up, and said, “Would you like some cheese and crackers? Maybe with a glass of wine?”

“Sure. That’d be great. Thank you.”

As I smoothed my skirt and blouse I said, “I’ll just be a moment. It’s a little something we can enjoy while we wait for your laundry to get done.”

I turned and walked slowly through the living room to the kitchen, hoping that Steve would appreciate the symbolism, even if he didn’t notice it. Once in the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator and removed the small tray of assorted cheese cubes I had purchased Saturday afternoon at Food Lion. Propping the door open with my leg, I put the tray on the counter beside the box of Water Crackers that just happened to be lying there, and then took out the mustard pot and the bottle of White Zinfandel. Moving back to the kitchen counter I reached up into the cabinet to get a couple of plates, and heard the refrigerator door thump close. I popped the lid off the cheese tray, placed the mustard pot in the middle, and poured the crackers into the provided space around it.

My corkscrew has a neat feature. There’s a cutout on it where you can place the top of the bottle, and when you squeeze the corkscrew and turn the bottle, it cuts off the foil covering the cork. Once the foil was off, I started to extract the cork. I heard Steve walk into the kitchen, and stopped opening the wine once I felt him standing behind me. When I felt him slip his arms around my waist, put his hands on my tummy, and squeeze me back against him, I set down the corkscrew and bottle, and ran my hands up his arms. This was working out very, very well. I leaned back against him, and tilted my head to the side as Steve lowered his head to begin nuzzling and nibbling my neck. His breath was warm, and his lips were wet. I reached behind me with my right hand and began stroking the side of his face. His right hand slid up my waist, and cupped my breast.

His kisses grew stronger, more passionate, and then he slowly turned me around to face him and bent me backwards in his arms. ¡Ah Mi Dios! he was strong! Reaching up and holding onto Steve’s shoulders, I leaned back, exposing my neck and chest. He reached behind me and wrapped his right hand in my hair, forcing my head further back, jarring my neck, stretching the muscles in my throat. His mouth explored my neck to its fullest, and then left wet traces down my chest, towards my breasts. I felt his breath in my cleavage, and when I felt his tongue there, it was all I could do to run my hands into his hair, pull his head away from my chest, and up towards my face.

Steve devoured me with kisses! He kissed my forehead, and then my eyebrows. As he moved his lips further down I closed my eyes, and he kissed my eyelids. Then he pressed his lips to mine, we opened our mouths and kissed hard. I lashed his tongue with mine. He fucked my mouth with his tongue. He reached behind me with his left hand, slipped it between the kitchen counter and my ass, grabbed and pulled me hard against him. ¿Arrecho? But it had only been thirty minutes! He was getting stiff again!

I finally broke the kiss and dropped my hands from his neck. We were both breathing heavily. “Steve, I believe your colors are done. I think I heard the spin cycle stop.” Holding onto the counter top with my right hand, I placed the palm of my left on my Viking’s heaving chest. “Go start your whites, or it will be midnight before we get to your place to dry our clothes.”

© 2009