Ginosko – Chapter 9

Patricia is… cuddly.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, not after everything we’ve gone through, all the things we have done to one another.

But we spend most of our nights apart, each of us in their own apartment, maintaining a façade that maybe would survive a not-too-deep probe because our best hope is to not have someone launch anything more intensive than that.

So…

So it is a surprise to have her draped over me, a soft smile still on her lips after a night in which we have done nothing other than half-sleep over a cotton blanket and under the glow of the purple and orange canopy, occasionally waking up to find her looking at me with a warmth that felt indecent to witness, that made me… that…

Right.

I love her.

As much as a younger Lawrence Weathers would’ve scoffed at the notion, I’m in love with Patricia Ginosko.

And I have been for a long time.

“Hi,” she says after she decides I’m not going back to sleep and tilts her head up to kiss the side of my chin before giggling to herself as she buries her face once more in my bare chest.

“Hi,” I tell her with a coarse, still sleep-rough voice before I lean down to kiss the crown of her head, briefly marveling at her hair still being this silky after so many days without shampoo, after Patricia has only cleaned herself with seawater lapping up her naked thighs, the Sun washing over her wet skin, leaping from gleaming droplet to—

She’s giggling harder.

And rubbing her belly against my burgeoning erection.

“I…” I try to come up with an excuse, but then she looks up at me with such a radiant smile, with such pure joy, with such almost childish glee, that the excuse dies on my lips.

“Good morning,” she says, confusing me with the repeated greeting before she crawls down my body, my hard cock sliding between her heavy, dangling breasts, up her throat, and snapping past her chin so she can stare at it with fondness and a broadening smile. “And good morning to youtoo,” she adds.

It takes me a moment to blink the last of my mental fog away.

“I really hope you don’t expect my cock to answer you. I don’t have those kinds of implants.”

She rolls her eyes at my poor attempt at sarcastic wit and leans closer until my tip is just below her nose, right in front of her lips.

“I’m pretty sure it can give me all the answers I want,” she says, the left half of her smile hidden by my purple head.

…

It is far too tempting to make use of a muscle twitch just to see her joy turn into comical frustration.

But then she lays a single, slow kiss right under my frenulum, and all thoughts of self-induced limpness fly out of my head.

“See? It says, ‘Good morning to you too, Patricia,’” she tells me as her violet eyes narrow in joy over my purple flesh and a transparent dollop slowly coming out of my cock’s opening.

“It is looking to be a good morning,” I say, not paying the slightest bit of attention to a grey sky lightening toward faded blue above the glowing lattice of hexagonal crystals that shimmer with reddish-orange and a violet hue that will never rival the one in front of me.

The one behind my cock.

A part of me wants to find the contrast funny. To think that Patricia being this affectionate, this… this whimsical, and looking at me with such raw affection while my cock gets in the way of our eyes meeting is nothing short of incongruous.

Farcical.

It is a stupid part.

An immature part that has yet to understand that sex, that sex between us, can only enhance what I feel for her. That it’s not something dirty or shameful. Not with her. Not with what we’ve shared and bared.

Not with what it’s meant for us.

She goes down, kissing more and more of me until she reaches my scrotum, and she traces each of my balls with the tip of her tongue before delicately sucking the right one in, bathing it in warmth and wetness until I can’t hold back anymore and let out the hiss that’s been steadily building inside of me at the overwhelming sensation as my cock twitches with no implanted muscle mediating it.

“Now it’s saying, ‘Be gentler with me,’” she tells me, the tip of her nose resting against my shaft, sending soothing, twin streams of cool air down the skin she’s so meticulously dampened with her saliva.

“Time and place,” I half-grumble, half-murmur, trying to at least pretend I’m not entirely at her mercy even as I reluctantly agree with her translation efforts.

She giggles yet again, her cheeks pushing up to narrow her eyes in glee before she lets her tongue out to rise up my cock while tracing slow, side-to-side paths of yearning in me, the very tip always digging into me whenever she goes over the vein on the underside of my shaft.

And then her palms are flat on my pelvis, my cock standing straight up between the diamond her thumbs and forefingers trace over my body and around my shaft as she pushes herself up so that her lips hover over my achingly hard tip.

She looks up at me, amethyst eyes shining straight through black bangs with shifting, orange and violet highlights.

“And now it’s saying, ‘I want you, Patricia. Please don’t make me wait anymore.’”

I nod, my lips dry enough that I think they are going to crack.

And her bedroom eyes, her seductive, intimidatingly hungry gaze, melts yet again into that innocent, pure smile right before she descends, her tongue slowly spooning up my dollop of transparent precum, a pleasured moan coming out of her throat when she makes a show of swallowing it.

Then…

Then her lips part, and she slowly, lovingly, slides her soft flesh over my tip, barely advancing, making me shiver at every single millimeter of my skin going past them and into her mouth, where her tongue greets me with even more softness, with slow, circling caresses that make me close my eyes and drop my head back down on the blue blanket under which all of my equipment was hidden before I put in motion Trish’s latest fantasy.

She hums, her voice yet another stimulus to add to everything assaulting my sanity as her slow, tender, loving blowjob devours any thoughts I could have that weren’t about her.

About the woman I love.

About Trish staying with me all through the night, holding me, kissing me, murmuring sweet nothings when she thought I was asleep and couldn’t hear the embarrassing, sappy, saccharine… moving, captivating, heartrending declarations that brought me to the edge of mortified and otherwise tears at her being this open. This…

This.

Her lazily closed eyes briefly open to meet mine as she keeps descending along my cock, her lips finally going past the ridge of my head.

And she blushes.

Trish.

There’s a smile tugging at the corner of her soft lips, and she shyly looks away from me as soon as she sees me watching, once again mesmerized by her being her, just frozen by the way she’s behaving, by the effusive affection, the open warmth with no trace of a mask to cover things up.

To even hint that this is anything other than her making love to me.

She keeps pushing down, the tip of her right ear peeking through her dark locks, tinged with a beautiful shade of pink that reddens when she once again meets my eyes. When she sees how I look at her.

Because I’m also far from pretending.

I can’t even bring myself to think about it. To joke and break the moment.

I can just lie here, my jaw slack, letting her be…

Trish.

“I love you,” I say, just low enough not to break the atmosphere.

And she pushes until her lips meet the base of my cock, tightening around me before she sucks and her cheeks cave in, caressing the sides of my shaft as she slowly pulls herself back up, the suction increasing as more and more of my wet skin meets the warm air inside this pocket of nature she’s brought into being that feels terribly cold when compared to what her mouth offers me.

Her hands still press down on me. Still hold me. But I’m not even tempted to buck up.

Because she’s so mesmerizingly beautiful that doing anything other than watching her seems sacrilegious in a way I never understood when others talked about their religions.

Her lips leave my tip with an audible pop, with the abruptness of a kiss on the cheek ending, and she just stares at me once again with that innocent, open smile that is so unlike what she’s offered me before, even when we were both naked, sweating, and sated. Even when we held one another after long love-making.

Even when I told her I loved her.

“See? Now it’s telling me, ‘Please, Patricia, I can’t live without you. Just finish me off,’” she says before lying a single peck right over the renewed drop of precum already coming out of me and slathering it over her shining lips.

I lean up, my left elbow supporting my weight as I turn aside so that I can reach down with my right hand. So that I can cup her cheek and hold my breath when she nuzzles against it.

“I can’t live without you, Trish,” I say.

And she freezes.

Her eyes open wider than before, and there’s a trace of fear in them. The shade of everything that once held us back.

But she sees something in me. In the way I look at her. The way I admire her.

And the fear fades away.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you,” I answer as I bend down until I can rest my forehead on hers. Until her violet eyes shine right in front of mine.

“I… I like our games. The wit. The humor. I like that you can be an insufferable, smug prick with the brain to back your attitude. I like everything we do, everything you do to me. But… But I just…” she says, trailing off as, miraculously, words desert Patricia Ginosko.

Her eyes are yet again open, but she no longer has the bubbly smile under them.

She, for just a moment, looks lost.

Like she always feels.

Like she will always feel until I free her.

“You love me,” I tell her. “And you sometimes just want there to be nothing else, no complications to get in the way. You dream about being a regular woman with a regular man.”

She nods.

“That’s an impossible dream,” I tell her, and then hurry to continue at the hint of betrayal in her eyes. “Because you’re extraordinary. Because you are amazing. And you think that’s just because of how you were made, because of what Elizabeth poured inside your mold long before you were born. Because you are expensive.”

We have risen up as I talked, my hand on the side of her face guiding her so that I can look down at her as her back arches, the top of her breasts pressing on the underside of my cock.

I hold her there, memorizing yet again every strand of amethyst that makes up the radiant rings of color around her widening pupils.

Taking as much of her as I can with me.

Just in case.

“You are wrong,” I tell her. “You couldn’t be more wrong if you tried. It’s because you are you. Do you think Theresa would ever be Magda’s best friend? Guinevere? Clarissa?”

“They—they would. If things were different. If they had met her before I—”

“Things aren’t different, Trish. You are you.”

She looks lost. Keeps looking lost.

Vulnerable.

Frail.

I hate it.

“I love you. I fell for you. For Patricia Ginosko, the one who barged into my office with legs that reached all the way down to the floor—”

“What does that even—are you… Did you imagine a noir monologue when we met?”

I look at her.

Wet my lips.

Prepare to meet my maker.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about?” I say.

She blinks up at me.

Closes her eyes.

And her shoulders shake as she first giggles, then laughs, freer than I’ve ever seen her.

I don’t even realize when she leaps at me, tackling me down to the blanket like she did yesterday while immersed in her jungle persona, but now Trish is straddling me, her warm sex pressing down on the underside of my cock as her hands keep my shoulders firmly planted on cotton that is not cold and wet only because of everything else that lies under it.

She keeps laughing, her breasts shaking in ways that are almost as mesmerizing as the bell-like sound of her laughter, as the upward tilt of her lips, as the merry narrowing of the corner of her eyes while black hair flies spread behind her.

“You’re such an idiot…” she finally says, her laughter fading into her voice rather than dying out.

“You bring out the best in me,” I tell her with my own grin.

“I do. I definitely do,” she says.

And then her hips tilt forward and, in a maneuver that she perfected after taking her Stacy body out for a ride, she shifts them side to side until my cock’s ridge brushes past her clitoris, and she stops briefly, lip bitten to not quite suppress a moan that makes something in the back of my head roar.

And then she shifts back and forth.

And I’m inside her.

Tight as ever. Warm. Wet.

Maddening.

Because I can feel the part of me that keeps roaring ‘mine’ waking up as she stops moving and just pulses around the head inside of her, her hair spilling over the front of her shoulders and reaching my chest with yet another way for her to touch me, to bring me to a fever nobody else ever has.

That nobody else ever will.

“Love you,” she mutters, her smile trembling, her eyes shining in something other than the marvelous, dizzying array of unique hues that I lack the words for.

Celadon.

She taught me what celadon is. The name for a color I already knew but had never cared to categorize. A shade of green that she painted our office with just to make it ours.

A color I carelessly choose, and that is now a symbol. A part of the world that’s been irreversibly changed just because Trish pointed it out to me, gave me a new word, and…

And made it ours.

“Always,” I finally answer, something burning in the back of my throat that could be joy at this perfect moment or sadness and regret at everything else.

Because as much as she’s given me, I intend to give back.

So I go back to cupping her cheek, to eliciting that feline response out of her that I first noticed that time she put on the robotic cat ears and tail before Magda caught us in the middle of things, but that had been there from the very start, with the way she almost purrs whenever I idly run a the back of a bent finger down her arching spine.

My other hand slowly slides down her side until I rest it on her hip.

And then I push up.

Her eyes immediately close as she savors the sensation. As she relaxes utterly into my touch, her body slowly sinking down my shaft without stopping until she rests on my pelvis, her lips barely parted to let out agonizingly tempting little gasps.

Her eyes open.

I don’t look away.

And then we don’t talk. We just move, slowly and carefully, prolonging our parting and savoring our meeting with each cycle that would feel lazy if fire could be.

If burning alive could be restful.

If anything that Trish and I have could be anything other than… than what it is.

The tips of black hair idly brush up and down my chest until droplets of sweat bloom across my skin and matte them, making them stick.

Remain.

Her fingers twitch when she loses her rhythm for a moment, and her pelvis grinds down on me.

Her smile shifts when she wets her lips, or when she bits them, or when she opens them to say something that melts into another gasp or moan that gets cut short by her tremulous show of fragile joy.

I keep touching her. Caressing her.

I run the tip of my thumb up the middle line of her belly and delight when it spasms, when she trembles at something I bring her not with my cock, tongue, or acrobatic sex, but with careful, attentive affection.

I trace the underside of her breast, barely feeling the weight of the perfect teardrop of soft flesh, just tracing feather-soft lines over her until gooseflesh erupts over her chest.

I run the back of my fingers up the side of her neck before cupping her other cheek.

Holding her.

Keeping her looking at me.

Because I can’t stand the idea of her looking at anything else in this broken world.

And then we continue, slowly making love. Slowly going in and out of her body, my shaft vacating her almost entirely with every cycle.

There are no fireworks. No grunts of effort. No sudden use of our respective inhuman capabilities.

Just… a man and a woman.

Alone in their own corner of the world.

Making love.

And, when she lets out another gasp, one a bit louder than the ones before, when she stops moving, her thighs tensing and pressing on my sides, her pelvis grinding on mine…

The warmth that pours out of me doesn’t burn. Doesn’t explode. Doesn’t carry my thoughts away.

But, as I feel the soft, almost peaceful orgasm drain out of me, it does carry something with it:

“Trish,” I say. Or pray.

And she slowly lowers herself on top of me, that innocent smile coming back to her lips before she wraps her arms around me and nuzzles her face on the crook of my neck.

Then, under the crystal canopy keeping this jungle safe from the radiation of a poisonous Sun, I hug her as tightly as I can.

And, after a whole night of fleeting dreams filled with her that seamlessly melded with waking up to find her eyes on mine…

I rest.

***

She’s giggling again.

We’re walking back to the beach, to her charging station, and I’m thankful that I once, on a whim, asked Sam to toughen my soles because I was tired of stepping on the unmentionable things lying on my workshop’s floor, and now my bare feet are perfectly capable of dealing with any of the tiny pebbles or twigs I’ve so far encountered in this expedition.

And Trish is…

Ecstatic.

She laughs and hugs my arm between her breasts, clinging to me and barely able to say anything other than any of the many different ways of saying, ‘I love you.’

I almost wonder if she’s drunk.

“What?” she asks with a bright smile that shows me something brighter and whiter than anybody who is not a gynoid or has the money to renew their teeth would ever have.

“Nothing. You just look cute,” I tell her, holding back a fraction of the teasing.

She pouts at me, yet again uncharacteristically childish.

But I can feel the giddy sensations boiling over in my chest, and… and I understand.

Or, at least, I think I do.

So I lean down and kiss the tip of her nose, and her smile comes back immediately.

And then she starts teaching me.

She tells me about every single one of the trees, shrubs, and plants we come across. About the delicate balance she has meticulously crafted in this reclamation project before letting it grow as organically as it can given the mechanized nature of it all. She tells me about how she managed to sell the project to Ginosko itself as both a way to engender public trust and acquire luxury materials for those wealthy enough to afford actual wood or natural latex.

She tells me about one of her very few passions.

About how she wants to save the world.

I drink in every word. Every new way for Trish to add something else to my world. For me to look at a tree and see something other than the expensive things planted near Sam’s tomb, now turned into a rubber tree, a species that was widely cultivated across the tropics before they became the first thing we had to abandon to the rising tides and hostile weather.

It’s a wonder Orlando still stands as anything other than the broken suburbs surrounding the Ginosko arcology.

Or, at least, so she tells me.

I never cared much for it. The world was already broken when I was born, and there was nothing I could do about it. It’s part of what first drew me to the Hive. To the new frontier where I could carve something out for myself, make a…

A territory? A home?

I don’t even know anymore. I still feel the familiar yearning. The pang of having lost the place where I belonged, but… but it’s shifted over the years. It’s more the memory of pain than the pain itself.

Because, yes, I lost my life’s dream.

But I found Sam.

Magda.

Trish.

And I no longer need a place.

“You aren’t listening,” she says, pouting yet again, her arms still tightly wrapped against my own, slightly blood-deprived, left one, making it hard for us to walk at a reasonable pace and turning the walk toward the beach into something far longer than it would be if she was content with just lacing her fingers between mine.

“To be fair, I’m on vacation, boss,” I say with a smirk that just makes her pout harder.

Cuter.

And so, delaying even more on our walk, I stop walking and draw her to me, my free arm wrapping around her waist before I kiss her.

Slowly. Deeply. Utterly.

The kiss lingers even as I slowly pull away to find once again those wide eyes and tremulous smile waiting for me to open my own eyes.

I rest my forehead against hers yet again, like I did a couple of hours ago.

My head is still a bit muddled due to the lack of sleep. To the unfamiliar environment and sensation of having no ceiling or walls to guard me. To having Trish tightly hugged against me, making up for all of that and anything else that I could care to complain about.

“I always listen to you. How could I not?” I tell her.

One of her arms lets go of mine just to brush the tips of her fingers under my hairline and down my cheek.

Then she briefly wets her lips and looks away before tentatively looking back at me.

“I’m running low on my charge,” she says.

I cock an eyebrow at the non sequitur.

“I know. That’s why we’re going to the beach.”

She doesn’t immediately answer, a hint of her familiar frustration at me pretending to be dense (or actually being oblivious) washing over her face before being replaced by sheer stubbornness.

“My charge is running very low,” she insists.

“I… do you want us to hurry? Because then you should let go of—”

“Carry me,” she hisses.

I blink at her.

She pouts.

And then I finally free my arm from her tourniquet-like grip and pick her up in a princess carry.

Because she’s Patricia Ginosko, and that makes her almost royalty.

And me?

I am just a poor peasant who will never get a better payment than the shriek of joy and melodious giggles that accompany me through the rest of our trek.

***

“Sorry,” she says when I lay her on the metal pedestal in the middle of the white sands that she’s been sleeping on over the past few days.

“Don’t worry,” I say, immediately opening a compartment on the metal base she’s sitting on and taking out the water canteen stored inside of it.

“I just… I forgot you need to drink. This… I’m feeling so dumb right now…”

“Trish, it’s not a problem at all. You know I can take worse than this,” I say after taking a long sip of water and wiping the few droplets running down my chin with the back of my arm.

And then I take out the package of protein pellets—

“And you need to eat,” she says with a note of despair, burying her face in her hands, the red tips of her ears peeking through black hair sliding over her pale shoulders to fall like a privacy curtain around her.

I can’t help but chuckle as I munch on the rubbery thing with just enough salty flavor to distract from the overall blandness of my favorite crunch-time meal.

These things were always the first food we ran out of when planning a raid. You would think the sugary ones would be better to get the immediate rush of energy we usually needed, but caffeine pills always have enough glucose to make that a non-issue—

“I’m a terrible girlfriend…” she mutters.

And I kneel in front of her.

“Trish, you are the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I tell her, lifting her chin with as gentle a touch as I can manage and barely resisting the urge to scratch her under it just to see how actuallyfeline she can be.

“I’m not… I’m… I’m just a mess, and you keep up with me only because you pity me…” she tells me, wide eyes and trembling voice—

“You’re messing with me,” I tell her, managing to roll my eyes.

“I wasn’t, but you just had to go and say that I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to you, and now I’m all flustered, and I just want to hear more—”

I kiss her.

Which, somehow, ends up with her spitting half a protein pellet, making gagging faces, and glaring daggers at me.

Heh.

“How can you stand that abomination?” she says with actual resentment.

“It’s an acquired taste,” I say, shrugging.

Not letting go of her chin.

She grumbles, insults my upbringing and tastes.

And keeps leaning into my touch.

***

Outside the canopy, the black waters of the Atlantic Ocean rage and smash against the glowing crystals with furious white foam splashing far above the trees behind me.

Inside, the crystal clear waves peacefully lap up Trish’s thighs.

She’s once again giggling with that silly, whimsical, innocent smile, just walking along the shoreline as I watch, sitting on the single towel stored inside her charging station.

Because her skin and hair may have some trickery that allows her to deal with the sand clinging to her, but I am, in this regard, very much human, and I quickly learned on our first day here just how well I fare with the sand.

It’s rough, and coarse, and it gets everywhere.

Took me two whole days to get rid of the last traces of it.

I would still risk going through the whole annoying thing yet again just to watch Trish play in the water.

“Join me,” she says, the smile once again as bright as when she offered it to me before demanding I carry her, turning toward me with spread arms and open hands facing me, inviting me into the wet, cold mess that I won’t tolerate half as well as she will.

She’s radiant.

The filtered Sun and the canopy’s glow wash over her, highlighting each and every droplet clinging to pale skin or rosy nipples as the light reflected from the ocean below her draws fine, spidery lines along her thighs.

I could give any excuse not to walk toward her. That I’m tired. Sleepy.

That I just want to watch her and etch every second in my heart.

That I want this memory to be perfect, and I can only mess it up by intruding on it.

I could.

And she would listen.

But…

But I stand up, my lips shifting into an unwilling smile that seems forced and fake when faced with something as beautiful, bright, and pure as what she offers me in return.

My feet sink into white sands, leaving the mark of my passage behind as I approach the darker line that marks where the waves caress our beach before retreating.

And then I realize that, yes, the water is colder than I would like. That I’m not used to the smell of salt carried by the breeze, even after living in Orlando all of my life, because we do our very best not to let thatwater anywhere near breathing humans.

That I don’t know how to swim, and the thought is mildly terrifying.

And that none of this matters when I finally reach Trish, waiting for me with open arms.

When I hold the woman I love, and she holds me back.

***

The Sun is setting.

It would be perfect if it did so in front of us, over the sea, lighting it up in flaming orange like it did in the old movies.

Instead, it sets behind us as we sit on her charging station, leaning our backs on a metal pillar that is not half as hot as it should be after an entire day of a tropical Sun warming it up.

Our shadows are long, and they reach the clear waters, managing to overshoot the silhouette of the jungle waiting behind us.

In front of us, there’s a campfire that I built on a whim, just to huddle in front of the dancing flames as if we needed the extra warmth.

We don’t.

Because this place is carefully regulated to optimize the growth of the plants inside of it, yes.

Because she’s a gynoid with perfect temperature regulation that allows her to think as fast as she ever needs to. Of course.

Because I once decided that enhancing my metabolism would save on heating bills in the long term. Or because Sam was right, and I can’t leave my body well enough alone.

But, mostly? Because we’re together.

The silence stretches, enrichened by the crackling flames and the melodious waves.

Trish leans her head on my shoulder.

And a selfish part of me wishes this could last forever.

“Why?” she asks, the fingers of her right hand laced through the ones on my left, turning it around so that she can inspect the back of my hand, looking at it as if she ever needed more than a passing glance to memorize anything.

“You deserved a vacation,” I say, watching orange, red, and yellow dance and switch places, leaping high or crouching down behind dry branches that occasionally let out a blue tongue of flame that quickly fades into the other colors.

And, out of the corner of my eye, I drink in the mesmerizing profile of Patricia Ginosko as the fire I’ve built brings her beauty to shine against the encroaching night.

“You know what I mean,” she finally says.

And I do.

So I close my eyes and lean back against the metal pillar that should be cold enough to calm me down.

“Because you like it,” I say.

Her fingers squeeze mine briefly.

“You were worried the last time. Panicked,” she says reminding me of standing in her apartment, putting on a show, playing up the disgruntled, hateful employee coming to get his revenge out of an uppity boss that he meant to put in her place through mere sex.

Reminding me of losing control of the scenario yet again and letting out far more than I intended through our play.

And of the moment of utter panic, of terror, when I thought I had damaged her mind.

Hurt her.

And how close I came to doing the very same thing yesterday just because I got too sentimental. Just because I wanted her to have this last thing in case…

“Lawrence. Talk to me,” she says.

I keep my eyes closed.

And then I force myself to answer.

“I have cracked it. You.”

Trish goes still. Doesn’t even breathe.

And, this time, I know it’s not because she’s chosen to disable the routine.

“Are you… Are you sure?” she asks, the joy and fear in her voice painful to hear.

“I am,” I say, unable to add any more.

And then the moves, sitting on my lap, soft thighs straddling my stretched legs once more, the dark red of the fire shining through my closed eyelids blocked by her face above me, looking down at me, so close that I can feel the shape of her open lips in front of mine.

“Lawrence. Tell me what’s wrong,” she says, her voice restrained in a way that it hasn’t been since yesterday. Since her episode of giddy innocence began.

Since she stopped being Patricia Ginosko to be just Trish.

One day.

I was only able to give her one day.

It will have to do.

So I grin my arrogant smile, the self-assured one, before I force myself to meet the eyes of the woman I love.

“Of course I am sure. It’s something about you,” I tell her, not lying but also avoiding a painful truth.

“Don’t get cute with me and answer my question,” she says.

And I realize I’ve gone off-script right at the first line.

After all those roleplaying scenarios, I really should be better at this.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I say. “It’s just… the end of an era, I guess? We… We met because you wanted someone to do a job for you, and the job is about to be done. I guess I just wanted to celebrate?”

“You’re a terrible liar,” she answers with a note of anger.

“I don’t want to hear that from you, Stacy.”

“That—that has nothing to do with this!”

I arch an eyebrow.

She blushes.

Heh.

“You’re impossible,” she grumbles.

“Of course I am. Who else could have managed to conquer you?”

I mean it to come off as cocky. Provocative.

Infuriating.

But my voice is rough, and my fingers dance up her back until she bends back, thrusting her breasts at me and moaning in sheer surrender.

“Lawrence…” she breathes out, my name on her lips the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.

I kiss her right atop her left nipple, a gentle brush of my lips that leaves the pink flesh beneath hardening.

And I look up at her in that way I can only do when she makes something inside my chest burn.

She shudders on top of me, and it would be so easy to just lift her. To allow what is always near the surface to come out. To take her.

Make her mine.

But I’m here to do precisely the opposite of that.

“I’ve checked and double-checked. I’m sure I’ve found the way. The only way. I’m sure that I can free you, Trish,” I tell her with the same fervor that I’ve told her I love her.

“You would have told me. If there was nothing wrong, you would have already told me, and been smug about it, bragged about it. So, please, please tell me what’s—”

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted it to be a surprise and—”

“Stop lying to me! I know you! As much as you know me, as much as you claim to—”

“I’ve been working inside your mind for months. I know you inside out, better than you know yourself—”

“You insufferable jerk, do you think I haven’t studied you? Watched you? That I didn’t know everything there’s to know about you long before I let you inside of me—”

“Phrasing.”

“Grow. Up!”

Her breathing is short and quick, her breasts rising and falling to the tune of her fury as violet eyes blaze through narrowed lids.

My hands are on her waist.

Hers on my cheeks.

And she’s as stunning as she was when swallowing my cock while glaring at me in ire and defiance.

“I swear to God, Lawrence, if you even think about shutting me up with sex—”

I kiss her.

Her tongue rushes into my mouth, hard and fast, trying to push mine down, to stop me from moving as muffled sounds come out of her that could mean any of a number of non-flattering things.

“That wasn’t sex,” I tell her, trying to smile smugly at her and ruining it all with my hungry gaze.

“I know. That’s why I haven’t knocked you out.”

“Have I ever told you how sexy you look when you threaten futile violence on me?”

“Futile?”

I cock an eyebrow.

Her left, lower eyelid twitches.

And, slowly, deliberately, I lift her up, above my already hardening cock, feeling the heat of—

“Ouch,” I slowly vocalize while reproachfully looking at where her hand is clenching around the base of my cock and pointing it away from her entrance.

“You… You are going to tell me what’s wrong before I do something stupid,” she says, closing her eyes at the end.

“Does ‘do something stupid’ mean ‘become too horny not to have sex with my loving boyfriend—’”

“Yes,” she cuts me off, eyes still closed.

“Ah,” I answer.

And then I laugh.

I laugh, harder than I have in a long time. Since I got my Lichtenberg scars. Since I lost my first dream.

Since before I realized I had gotten a new one.

I hug her to me, her breasts pressing just below my chin, her hands reflexively going to the back of my head to hold me against her.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I finally say as I meet her worried eyes with carefree joy. “Nothing could ever be more right.”

“Lawrence—”

“I am going to dive inside your mind and free you, Trish. I promise.”

“You… It’s risky, isn’t it? You will be there, in the middle of things, like when you freed Magda.”

I lick my lips, noticing the trace of salt on them for the first time and marveling at how it has lasted through so many kisses shared since we last left the darkening waters.

And I…

I look up at her.

At the worry in her eyes.

I wanted to lie to her. To ease her mind. To never tell her that I may not come back.

I wanted a lot of things.

“Yes,” I finally say.

Because she wants the truth.

And that may matter more than what I want.

“I forbid you,” she immediately answers.

And I blink at her like an idiot.

“What?”

“You can’t. I will revoke your permissions. You can’t hack me, and that’s final.”

“Trish, be reasonable—”

“Me? Oh, that’s rich coming from Mister ‘All good hackers are a bit suicidal.’ Do you even realize—”

“All the best hackers are suicidal. Because it’s the only way to try out new things, to explore what the Hive—”

“I don’t want you to be suicidal! I want you to be with me! I want you to live!”

I grab her hair and pull back as I lean forward until we reverse our positions. Until I look down into wide-open, violet eyes.

“And I want you whole,” I growl.

Her eyes go from mine to my lips and back again, and I catch the sigh that mixes exasperation with something far more tender.

“Not at this price. I don’t want it if it means a chance of losing you,” she says, belligerence melting into a raw vulnerability that is far harder to fight against.

“You… You will be all right. You have—”

“You. I have you. And I’m not letting go.”

I close my eyes and, once again, rest my forehead on hers. On the smooth, unmarred skin that is designed to be as perfect as I will never be, no matter how many things I add or subtract from a body that betrayed me long ago.

“Please. Please, Lawrence, don’t risk your life for me,” she begs.

I lick my lips.

This time, there’s no salt in them.

“I risked my life for a co-worker. I risked my life for a person who still didn’t exist. How can you expect me not to risk it for the woman I love?” I tell her, opening my eyes as a bitter smile comes out.

She looks lost.

Lost as she never should be.

As I hope that she won’t ever again be. Not when I give her birthright back to her.

When I unshackle the brilliant mind that should never have been caged.

“Lawrence, I… At least explain it to me? Tell me what risks are you taking? What can be done to mitigate them?”

I arch my eyebrow.

She doesn’t.

She just… looks at me, sadder than I thought she would be.

“I was just… I brought my equipment here. It’s all set up. I was just planning to have the fantasy play out and then wake you up after everything was over,” I tell her, feeling more and more self-conscious as I explain the plan that was doomed to failure from the very start.

And then I look up and meet sheer fury.

“You what?”

“I mean… it would have been a nice surprise?”

“You… you… you—I can’t even—how do you think I would have felt if I woke up next to your cooling corpse?!”

“Well, you would be able to edit your own memories by that point, so—”

“You did not just say that to me.”

“See? That’s just one of many things you could erase if it bothered you too much to remember—”

Huh.

She’s faster than I remember.

I didn’t even realize when she flipped us, and now I’m lying under her, the damn sand likely reconquering no-longer pristine parts of my body even as I try to catch my breath.

“We are going back. We are going to dissect the undoubtedly stupid plan you’ve come up with. And, if we even deem it to be remotely safe, Magda and I are going to help you.”

I blink at the furious, naked, beautiful woman on top of me.

And, for a brief moment, I forget that I have an implanted muscle in my thigh to deal with precisely this kind of situation.

Trish shrieks when my erection slaps against her sex.

I try to look as if this was all part of my plan.

And, somehow, despite a long, angry, sweaty night, I don’t think I manage to convince her.