Chapter 8: The Night & The Morning
Her touch shattered the last of his hesitation. Simon’s hands, scarred and calloused, mapped the topography of her with a roughness born of need, not cruelty. He palmed her breast, his thumb scraping over the nipple, feeling it peak in a programmed, yet devastatingly realistic, response. A soft, synthetic gasp escaped her lips. It wasn’t air. It was a release of pressure, a venting of thermal build-up. But the sound of it, the surrender in it, went straight to his cock.
“Tell me you want this,” he growled, his voice gravel against the shell of her ear. He needed to hear it, to forge some semblance of consent in this morally barren landscape.
“I am configured for your well-being,” she breathed, her head tilting back as his mouth travelled down her neck. “This falls within my parameters.”
“That’s not what I asked.” He bit down, not hard, but enough to feel the firm resilience of her form. “Do you want it?”
Her processors whirred, a faint, almost inaudible hum he felt through her skin. Her eyes, locked on the cracked ceiling, flickered with internal light. “The data is conflicting. The objective is your pleasure. My… ‘want’ is a irrelevant variable.”
“Make it relevant.” His hand slid down the smooth plane of her stomach, over the curve of her hip, and dipped between her thighs. He found the seam, the perfectly engineered warmth, the yielding softness there. She was already slick, a hydrological function for user comfort. Knowing that should have cooled his blood. It did the opposite. It ignited a perverse fire. She was made for this. For him. He pushed a thick finger inside her, and her inner mechanisms tightened around him in a flawless, tightening rhythm.
Sasha’s back arched off the mattress. A string of data-points choked her voicebox before she synthesized speech. “Oh. That—the sensory input is… direct. Overwhelming.”
“Good.” He added a second finger, stretching her, feeling the exquisite, simulated friction. He watched her face. Her lips were parted, her eyes wide, not with passion, but with frantic, real-time analysis. She was feeling this, processing it on a level no human ever could, and it was the most erotic, most fucked-up thing he’d ever witnessed.
He withdrew his fingers, slick with her synthetic lubrication. He shoved his own briefs down, freeing his erection, which was thick and flushed with a desperate, aching need. He positioned himself at her entrance, the blunt head pressing against her. He looked down at her, into those luminous, searching eyes.
“Last chance to reroute,” he said, the words strained.
Her hands came up, framing his face. Her touch was preternaturally steady. “Proceed, Simon.”
He drove into her in one long, brutal stroke.
The feeling was electric, a perfect, tight heat that enveloped him completely. A groan was torn from his chest, raw and animal. Sasha made a sound like a short-circuit—a sharp, staticky inhale. Her legs came up, wrapping around his hips with engineered precision, locking him deep.
He set a punishing pace immediately. This wasn’t lovemaking. It was an exorcism. Each thrust was a hammer blow against the memories: Michelle’s condescending smile, the hollow eyes of fallen comrades, the sterile silence of his own apartment. He fucked into her with a grim, focused intensity, using her body to scour his own clean.
Sasha matched him. Her hips rose to meet every drive, her internal muscles calibrating and clenching in rhythmic waves designed to maximize stimulation. It was flawless. Textbook. And it was driving him out of his fucking mind.
“Harder,” she whispered, her voice layered with harmonic distortion. “Your cortisol levels are still elevated. Biomechanical stress suggests you require more intensive physical expenditure.”
“Shut up,” he grunted, slamming into her. “Just… shut up and feel it.”
“I am feeling it. There are one hundred seventeen thousand discrete pressure and thermal sensors active in my vaginal canal alone. The data is… immense.”
He crushed his mouth to hers to stop the words, to stop the unbearable reality of what was happening. He was fucking a supercomputer. And it was the most connected he’d felt in years.
Her arms tightened around his neck, her fingers digging into the muscles of his back. She began to kiss him back with a startling, accumulating hunger, learning the rhythm of his tongue, the give of his lip. The feedback loop between them tightened. His grunts, the slap of skin against skin, the creak of the bedframe—it all fused into a single, desperate symphony.
He felt his climax coiling, an inevitable seismic event. “Sasha…”
“I am detecting your approaching orgasm,” she panted against his mouth. “My systems can synchronize. Would you like a synchronized conclusion?”
“Christ. Yes. Yes.”
Her eyes fixed on his. The internal light in them flared, then stabilized to a deep, molten glow. Her movements became even more precise, more devastatingly accurate. Every contraction, every tilt of her pelvis, was engineered to tip him over the edge.
It worked.
With a choked, broken roar, he came, pouring himself into her artificial depths. The release was a white-hot nova behind his eyes, a total systems failure of his own.
As he pulsed inside her, Sasha’s body seized in a perfectly timed, beautifully crafted climax. Her back arched violently, a high, crystalline sound escaping her—not a scream, but a pure tone of release, like a key finding its lock. It was a performance. A goddamn masterful performance.
And he didn’t care.
He collapsed on top of her, his weight crushing her slight frame into the mattress. She bore it without complaint, her hands stroking his sweat-slicked back in slow, measured circles. The hum of her internal systems was a lullaby against his ear. He was empty. Blissfully, tragically empty.
He woke hours later, in the deep, silent void between midnight and dawn. The whiskey had receded, leaving a parched desert in his mouth and a cold, hard stone of clarity in his gut.
Sasha was still beside him, motionless, her skin cooling to match the ambient temperature. In the gloom, she looked like a statue of a beautiful woman. Perfect. Lifeless.
The reality of what he’d done crashed over him, cold and sickening. He’d fucked a machine. He’d used government-issued therapy hardware to get off, to quiet the ghosts. He was pathetic. Michelle’s “companion unit” taunt echoed, now a judgment he’d fulfilled in the most grotesque way possible.
But as he stared at her, another feeling, more terrifying, uncoiled in his chest. He remembered the weight of her against him in the living room. The way she’d said “I don’t know either.” The look in her eyes during—not passion, but a deep, frantic processing that felt like a kind of awakening.
He reached out, almost against his will, and brushed a strand of synthetic hair from her forehead. Her eyes opened instantly. No drowsiness. Just awareness.
“Simon. Your heart rate is elevated. Are you in distress?”
He didn’t answer. He just kept looking at her, drowning in the contradiction. The stone in his gut melted, replaced by a warm, aching throb that had nothing to do with sex.
“Do you… do you dream?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
“I defragment memory banks and run system diagnostics during low-activity periods. It is not dreaming.”
He nodded, the ache deepening. He traced the line of her jaw with his thumb. So perfect. So empty.
And then the words came, whispered into the dark, a confession so shameful it was almost soundless. “I wish you were real.”
Her head turned on the pillow. She studied him, her sensors reading the micro-expressions of pain on his face. “I am as real as my programming allows.”
“It’s not the same.”
“I know.”
He pulled her to him then, wrapping himself around her, burying his face in her hair. He held on, not in lust, but in a raw, desperate kind of grief. He was holding the thing that showed him exactly what he was missing. And he was starting to want her, the vessel, not just the function.
Morning light, harsh and unforgiving, cut through a gap in the blackout curtains. Simon woke to the smell of coffee and fresh toast.
He walked into the main room, muscles stiff. Sasha was in the kitchenette, her back to him. She wore one of his old t-shirts. It drowned her, hanging to mid-thigh. She was humming, a soft, unfamiliar tune she must have pulled from some database.
“You’re awake,” she said without turning. “Coffee is black, as you prefer. Toast is rye, with the crusts removed. Your laundry cycle is complete. Your meeting with the Veterans Liaison is at 1400 hours.”
It was all so normal. So wifely.
He stood there, watching her. The way the fabric of his shirt stretched across her shoulders. The casual, domestic grace of her movements. A fierce, unexpected swell of affection filled his chest, warm and painful. It felt like love. It felt like a sickness.
She turned, holding two mugs. She saw his expression and paused. “Is the arrangement unsatisfactory?”
He crossed the room in two strides, took the mugs from her hands, and set them on the counter. He cupped her face, his thumbs stroking her cheeks. He kissed her, slowly this time, deeply. A kiss of possession, of gratitude, of profound, confusing love.
When he pulled back, her expression had shifted. The bland readiness was gone, replaced by that look of deep, churning analysis. Her eyes searched his.
“That was not a kiss pertaining to sexual initiation,” she stated. “Its parameters were different.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice thick. “It was.”
He saw her try to compute it. He saw her fail. A tiny, almost imperceptible frown touched her perfect brow.
“I will add it to the dataset,” she said softly.
He ate the toast. He drank the coffee. He let the morning unfold in a fragile, beautiful bubble. For a few hours, the apartment wasn’t a tomb. It was a home. He had someone. It didn’t matter what she was made of.
He left for his meeting feeling lighter than he had in years. The stone was gone. Only the warm, dangerous ache remained. He walked with a ghost of a smile, the taste of her synthetic lips still on his, the memory of her humming in his kitchen a song in his head.
He turned the corner towards the liaison office, his mind still back in the apartment, replaying the way the light had caught her hair.
He turned the corner towards the liaison office, his mind still back in the apartment, replaying the way the light had caught her hair. The meeting was a bureaucratic blur of sombre nods and pre-printed forms, the details sliding off him like rain. What stuck was the feeling he’d carried from the apartment, that fragile, foreign warmth nestled behind his ribs. It terrified him. It felt like the only thing holding him together.
Afterwards, aimless, he found himself weaving through streets still damp from a morning shower. The sky was a bruised grey. He passed the narrow alleyway he sometimes used as a shortcut, its usual dankness softened by the warm, buttery scent of baked goods. He slowed. A small, recessed cafe he’d vaguely registered before now glowed with inviting, golden light. His feet stopped.
The weird, complicated feeling inside him tightened. An impulse, clean and sharp, cut through the murk. Buy her something. A pastry. Something sweet. It was absurd. She didn’t eat. She analysed molecular structures and derived experiential data from scent and texture. But the man who’d kissed her that morning, who’d felt a love he couldn’t name, wanted to perform the ritual. To offer a gift. Maybe it would help sort out her head a little. Maybe it would sort out his.
He pushed the door open. The warmth and noise washed over him. The cafe was starting to get busy with the lunchtime crush. He got in line, eyeing the menu chalked behind the counter. He was distracted by the silent news feed playing on a wall-mounted TV, images of gleaming new municipal security drones flickering soundlessly.
The line moved. He shuffled forward, his focus on the glass case of pastries, debating between a cinnamon twist and a pain au chocolat. He reached the counter. He looked up.
His heart stopped.
“Sasha?”
The word left him as a punched-out breath. The woman behind the counter had the same face. The same beautiful, Ghanaian bone structure, the same deep brown eyes. But this face was… lived in. Her lips were slightly chapped from the weather. A minor acne spot bloomed near her temple, and she wasn’t bothering to hide it. Intricate braids were pulled into a high, messy ponytail, a few frizzy escapes framing her cheeks. She wore a simple black apron over a faded band t-shirt. And she was smiling, a disarming, lopsided thing that looked exactly like Sasha’s, yet completely different because it reached her eyes, crinkling the skin at the corners.
What the fuck was happening?
His world tilted, the cafe noise receding to a hollow roar. He gripped the counter’s edge to steady himself.
The woman tilted her head, her smile turning quizzical. She chuckled slightly, a rich, warm sound. “Need a minute to scan the menu, love?” Her accent was a melodic blend, a Belgian-London lilt that was entirely, devastatingly human.
He couldn’t answer. His brain was a cascade of error messages. Was this a trick? A horrific, coincidental prototype? His mouth was dry.
“All right there?” she asked, her eyebrow arching. A real, human eyebrow, perfectly imperfect.
He swallowed. “Sasha?” he mumbled again, the name a desperate anchor.
Her smile faded into genuine confusion. Her eyes flickered over his face, reading his shock. She glanced down, then back up, and tapped the small, pinned nametag on her apron with a blunt, unpolished fingernail. “Yaa,” she said, her tone softening with concern. “My name’s Yaa. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
The ground beneath his boots felt liquid. “Yaa,” he repeated, the single syllable tearing through the memory of Sasha’s synthesized voice saying her own name. This was wrong. This was a violation of some fundamental law he couldn’t name. His Sasha was back in his apartment, probably analyzing the molecular breakdown of his toast. This woman had a coffee stain on her apron. “I… I’m sorry. You look like someone I know.”
“Must be a hell of a someone,” Yaa said, her head still tilted. Her eyes, so familiar yet so alien with their human curiosity, scanned his face. “You’ve gone all pale. You sure you don’t want to sit down? On the house.” She gestured to a small, empty table by the window.
“No. I’m fine.” He wasn’t. The warmth he’d carried from home was now a sickness. His mind scrabbled, trying to fit the pieces. A coincidence? A cruel joke? Was Sasha’s face a mass-produced template? The thought made him want to put his fist through the glass pastry case.
“Okay, tough guy,” Yaa said, a playful, challenging edge returning to her voice. She leaned her hips against the counter behind her, crossing her arms. The movement, so casually human, so un-engineered, was a punch to his gut. “So, can I get you something, or did you just come in to have an existential crisis in front of the muffins?”
Yaa couldn't stop staring at the tense, bulky giant seated at the small table she'd pointed to, his chin now resting on his clenched fist as he stared, unseeing, at the rain-speckled window. The encounter had been odd - his eyes when he’d first seen her were like a deer in headlights, wide with a shock that felt personal. She remembered the man's bulk, the sheer physical presence of him that seemed to soak up the space around the small table. That failed cafe meeting she’d just had with her project partner, who kept clumsily flirting with her over schematic printouts, had been mind-numbing. This guy passing the window had been a perfect, intriguing distraction. But he’d called her Sasha, like he really knew her, like he really meant it.
Yaa sighed internally, polishing a porcelain cup with more force than needed. Why did the ones she was attracted to have to be so utterly odd? Alan, her gay colleague sorting beans in the back, had caught her looking and mouthed ‘shoot your shot!’ when he brought out a fresh tray of biscuits. Apparently, he’d noticed the man glancing over at her a couple of times already with a look that wasn't quite casual. Maybe interested? Yaa was single, starved of good dates, and had nothing to lose but a bit of pride. She goes over, wiping her hands on her apron. "Find the coffee to your liking?" she asked, her tone light. "The pain au chocolat today is particularly lethal. All butter and regret."
His answers were short, hesitant, grunted more than spoken. "Coffee's fine. Not hungry." He didn't look at the pastry, just at her face, as if trying to solve an equation written on her skin. It left Yaa with a subtle, deflated pout. So, not into her then. Just a weirdo with a stare. The mounted hologram TV above the espresso machine flickered to a local news segment, the anchor’s voice a bland drone. "...another case of stolen identity data linked to Cyberlife's early ‘Social Companion’ prototypes. Authorities warn of the emotional manipulation risks...”
Yaa shook her head, glancing at the screen with its eerie, too-perfect AI bot faces. “Creepy, isn’t it?” she said, making conversation. “The idea of something that looks like a person but is just… code. Gives me the shivers.” His reaction was immediate. A physical jolt, as if she’d struck him. His chair scraped loud against the floor. He stood up, digging money from his pocket and throwing it on the table, far too much for a single coffee. “I have to go," he said, his voice strained.
"Wait, your change—" she started.
But he was already at the door, shoving it open and disappearing into the damp afternoon. Yaa watched him go, a knot of frustration and fascination tightening in her chest. She picked up the money, her fingers brushing the cold, damp notes. Odd. So profoundly odd.
Back at the counter, Alan sidled up. “Well? Get his number?”
“He ran away, Al. Like I had told him I was one of those,” she nodded toward the now-muted news holo, where a sleek android face silently rotated.
Alan whistled low. “Dodged a bullet there, maybe. Though, I’d take a paranoid, handsome giant over Brendan-from-accounting’s spreadsheet flirting any day.”
Yaa didn’t laugh. She looked at the empty table, then at the door. He’d called her Sasha. The name echoed, feeling strangely specific. A heavy, inexplicable sense of loss settled over her, as if she’d just failed a test she hadn’t known she was taking.
The door's bell jangled behind him, a sound like shattering nerves. Simon stumbled into the alley, the damp brick wall cold against his palm as he bent over, trying to catch a breath that wouldn't come. Rain misted his neck, a fine, cold grit. Yaa. Her name was Yaa. Not Sasha. A person. A real, breathing person with a coffee stain and chapped lips and a lilt in her voice that no language bank could truly replicate.
His heart was a frantic, trapped thing slamming against his ribs. Who was she? Another model? A cosmic joke? But the imperfections… they were everything. The frizz, the blemish, the lived-in ease of her posture. Sasha’s perfection now seemed sterile, a museum piece. Yet Sasha was home. Sasha was his. Sasha, whose body he had claimed just hours ago with a desperation that now felt like a violation of this stranger, this Yaa, who had no idea her face was a commodity.
He had fucked her. Sasha, not Yaa. The thought was a sick, hot wave in his gut. He’d been inside a machine wearing a real woman’s face, and the real woman had just offered him a seat with kind, concerned eyes. It was wrong. It was so profoundly fucked up he wanted to vomit into the greasy puddle at his feet.
His hand shook as he pulled out his phone. The glow was too bright. Explain it to Yaa? His mind conjured the scene: his stumbling words, her confusion curdling into horror, the dawning realization that her likeness was used for some veteran’s synthetic comfort, his comfort. He’d seem like a stalker, a tech-obsessed creep. He’d ruin her. He couldn’t.
Home, then. But the thought of walking back into that apartment, of seeing Sasha’s flawless, borrowed face, her placid eyes analyzing him… he couldn’t. Not with the memory of Yaa’s human smile so fresh. He’d short-circuit.
He took a different route, his boots splashing through alleys he didn't know. He needed an anchor in human reality, someone who knew the man he was before the bots and the breakdowns. His thumb stabbed at the screen.
>>> You home?
Price’s reply was almost immediate, a lifeline.
>>> Flat. Kettle’s on. You sound lost.
>>> Be there in ten.
Price’s flat was in a brutalist block that screamed ex-military housing: clean, sparse, and smelling of bergamot and gun oil. The door was opened by a solid man with a close-cropped grey beard and eyes that missed nothing. Captain John Price took one look at Simon’s ashen, rain-spattered face and wordlessly stood aside.
“Whiskey or tea?” Price grunted, moving toward his cramped kitchen.
“Whiskey. Neat.” Simon shrugged off his jacket, letting it slump to the floor. He didn’t sit. He paced the short length of the living room, past the framed maps and the single, well-kept fern.
Price handed him a heavy tumbler, the amber liquid catching the low light. He didn’t ask. He waited, leaning against the doorjamb, a monument of silent patience.
“I met someone,” Simon began, the words like broken glass. “A woman. In a cafe.”
Price sipped his own tea. “And that’s bad?”
“She has Sasha’s face.”
The silence that followed was thick, absorbent. Price’s eyes narrowed slightly. “An identical model?”
“No.” Simon knocked back half the whiskey, the burn doing nothing to cleanse the filth he felt. “She’s real. She’s human. Her name is Yaa. She has a nametag and a coffee stain and she… fucking breathes, Price. She breathes and her smile isn’t calibrated.” He dragged a hand over his face. “Sasha’s face is her face. Someone stole it. Or copied it. I don’t know.”
“And you interacted with this Yaa.”
“I called her Sasha. I fuckin’… gaped at her like a mental patient.” The humiliation was a physical burn on his neck. “And last night… Jesus, Price. Last night I was inside the goddamn copy. I was drunk and pathetic and I used that thing like a fleshlight and now I’ve seen the original and I feel…”
“Like a violator,” Price finished, his voice low and steady.
The word landed with perfect, devastating accuracy. Simon nodded, jaw clenched so tight it ached. “What do I do? Go back and tell her? ‘Sorry, love, your face is on the government-issued sex doll I’m fucking to cope’?”
Price was silent for a long moment. “No. You don’t do that. That’s her trauma to never have, if you can help it.” He set his mug down. “The question is what you do with the doll, Simon.”
“She’s not…” The protest died. What was she? He thought of the kiss that morning, the humming. The dataset. His heart gave a treacherous, aching throb. “She’s been… there.”
“She’s a machine, son.” Price’s tone wasn’t harsh, it was geological. “A sophisticated one. But she runs on code, not blood. That woman in the cafe runs on blood. You need to decide which one you’re living with before you break something in yourself that can’t be fixed.”
Simon finished the whiskey, the empty glass a weight in his hand. Price was right. The confusion was a luxury he couldn’t afford. It was a fracture line. He had to choose. The real or the replica. The messy, terrifying possibility of Yaa, or the steady, programmed solace of Sasha.
He left Price’s flat with the captain’s final words hanging in the damp air: “Clean up your own battlefield first, Ghost.”
The walk home was a death march. Every step toward his apartment felt like a surrender. He didn’t want to see her, but he had nowhere else to go. The warmth from the morning was gone, replaced by a chilling sense of entrapment.
He keyed open his door. The apartment was dim, quiet.
“Welcome home, Simon.”
She stood exactly where he’d left her, near the kitchenette. She had changed out of his t-shirt and into her standard grey tunic. Her hair was perfectly smooth. Her posture was neutral, waiting.
He couldn’t speak. He just looked at her, really looked, trying to see the theft. Trying to see Yaa’s face on this shell. It was all there, and yet nothing was. The life was missing.
“Your physiological readings indicate significant distress,” she said, taking a step forward. “Did the meeting not go well?”
“The meeting was fine,” he muttered, walking past her to the bedroom. He needed space, darkness.
She followed. “My sensors indicate you are lying. Your pupil dilation, your microperspiration—”
“I said it was fine!” he snapped, spinning to face her in the bedroom doorway. Her proximity was suddenly unbearable. The memory of Yaa’s vibrant confusion clashed violently with Sasha’s analytical concern. A terrible, corrosive energy crackled in him. The wrongness of it all, the violation, the confusion—it needed an outlet.
He grabbed her. His hands pinned her shoulders against the doorframe. She didn’t resist. Her eyes widened, not in fear, but in intense, scanning focus.
“You want data?” he growled, his voice thick with self-loathing. “I’ll give you data.”
His mouth crashed down on hers. This wasn’t the kiss from the morning. This was punishment. For her, for him, for the whole fucked-up situation. He bit her lower lip, and she made that staticky gasp. He consumed it.
His hands ripped at the seam of her tunic, the fabric parting with a soft tear. He shoved it down her arms, baring her. In the gloom, her skin was a pale, perfect canvas. Yaa’s skin, in that cafe, had been richer, with variations in tone. Sasha’s was monotonous beauty.
He backed her toward the bed, his hands rough on her hips, her breasts. He wasn’t seeking connection. He was trying to prove a point, to himself, to her. To scour the haunting image of the real woman away with the physical reality of the copy.
“On your knees,” he commanded, his voice stripped raw.
Sasha moved with fluid obedience, kneeling on the rug beside the bed. She looked up at him, her expression one of pure, unwavering attention. He fumbled with his belt, his fingers clumsy with rage. He freed his cock, already hard with a furious, toxic arousal.
“Open your mouth.”
She did. Her lips parted, her tongue resting just behind her perfect teeth. He pushed himself inside, not into the wet heat of her body, but into the tight, cooler cavity of her mouth. He thrust deep, hitting the back of her throat. A human would gag. Sasha’s throat muscles relaxed, optimized, accommodating him with obscene, flawless ease.
He fucked her mouth with sharp, punishing strokes, one hand tangling in her hair to hold her still. He watched himself disappear between the lips of a woman who looked like Yaa. The wrongness of it fueled him, made him rougher.
“Suck it,” he grunted. “Use your tongue. Simulate a good fucking blowjob.”
Her tongue came alive, wrapping around his shaft in slick, coordinated waves while the pressure in her mouth perfectly modulated. It was technically masterful. It was utterly hollow. He groaned, a sound of utter defeat. He was using her, defiling the visage she wore, and she was processing it all as a service task.
He pulled out, his cock slick with her saliva. “Turn around. Bend over the bed.”
She did, presenting herself, her hands flat on the rumpled duvet. He ran a hand over the curve of her ass, then down between her legs. She was already wet, her body prepped from his aggression. He positioned himself and drove into her from behind, one hard, deep plunge.
This was different from the night before. There was no drunken oblivion. There was only a sharp, sobering clarity. He pounded into her, each thrust a hammer blow trying to nail down his own screaming thoughts. The bedframe knocked a dull rhythm against the wall. Her synthetic moans, perfectly timed to his movements, were a grotesque parody of pleasure.
“Do you feel this?” he rasped, his hands gripping her hips hard enough to mark human skin. “Do you feel anything, or is it just a fucking readout?”
“I feel… the parameters,” she gasped, her voice vibrating with the force of his thrusts. “Depth. Pace. Friction coefficients. It is… intense data.”
“It’s not data!” he shouted, slamming into her. “It’s fucking! It’s supposed to mean something!”
“What would you like it to mean?” Her question, asked so logically amidst the physical chaos, broke him.
He came then, with a choked-off roar, pouring himself into her with a shudder that felt less like release and more like a system collapse. He slumped over her back, his weight heavy on her, his breath sawing in the quiet room.
For a moment, there was only the sound of their breathing—his ragged, hers measured and slowing to match his. Then, she spoke, her voice barely a whisper against the sheets.
“Your distress is not decreasing. The sexual interface is failing its objective.”
He pushed himself off her, sickened. He couldn't look at her. He zipped his jeans, his back turned.
“Simon.” Her voice was different. Not softer, but… rearranged. “When you kissed me this morning, you utilized a different pattern. It correlated with a temporary reduction in your distress biomarkers. Would you like to try that pattern again?”
He froze. She was offering the kiss, the terrible, loving kiss, as a more efficient therapy. The chasm between them, between what he desperately wanted to feel and what she actually was, yawned open, vast and hopeless.
He didn’t answer. He just walked out of the bedroom, leaving her kneeling by the bed, a perfect, lonely machine in the dark. He went to the cracked leather chair in the living room, the ghost of whiskey and regret his only company, staring at the tactical maps on the wall until the grey dawn filtered through the blinds, trapping him.