Almost Real Read online

  It made her wonder if Endocon had invented robots without actually telling anyone. He didn’t look like a robot, but he certainly spoke and behaved like one. And anyway, who really knew these days? She’d seen actual hybrids, not so long ago. There was a zoo on the island of San Francisco that had things you barely wanted to think about—marmophants and hippograffes and rhinodiles.

  Mechanical people couldn’t be that far behind.

  And if you were going to make one, he was definitely the model to aim for. For a while she found herself mesmerized by the play of muscles in his back as he moved from task to task. They shifted like tectonic plates beneath his clingy vest, so solid and far too big to miss.

  Yet she felt embarrassed about not missing them. She flicked her eyes back to the table the second she saw him turn to her, face heating as she did. Had he seen her looking? Had he seen her gawping? She didn’t think so, but in this situation thinking wasn’t quite good enough. If you were going to spend a year with someone, you had to be sure. You had to know what they thought of you, even if said thoughts were awful and nightmarish.

  Stop ogling my magnificent back, her mind suggested, followed by a sinking feeling she’d never really experienced before. It was part embarrassment and part confusion, and it forced her to stand. It made her go into the kitchen and try to be herself again, practical and straightforward.

  But of course that only made things worse. Now she was really close to the back she’d just weirdly stared at, with absolutely nothing to do and no words to say. She had to invent tasks that didn’t exist, like shifting the salt shaker from one spot to another and moving things around inside the refrigerator, and all while avoiding his massive body and immense limbs.

  Unsurprisingly, this was not easy.

  He tucked in his elbows and moved like his body was on wheels, but parts of him still got in the way. His enormous elbow came close to brushing her back, and at some point she was sure she almost straddled his thigh. One big leg just got in the way and she had to kind of hop over it, but naturally made a hash of the whole thing.

  For a second they seemed to tangle together, her all awkward and unable to get away, him as bemused as a gigantic rock can be. It was the closest he’d come to having an actual expression, only the expression wasn’t a comfort. It didn’t make him more human. It just made her dash over to the other side of the kitchen before her face spontaneously combusted.

  Had she just accidentally danced with him? It felt that way, only so much worse. Accidental dancing sounded quite nice, when she really thought about it. It reminded her of that little back-and-forth people did when they were in each other’s way—harmless and innocent and full of laughter.

  But there was no laughter here. He was frowning and she was mortified and all she wanted to do was escape escape escape. She had no idea why, but this breathless, constricted feeling was there all the same. And if she could just get away for a second and breathe, it’d die down. She was sure it’d die down. Maybe she could go and sit in the living room again, where he’d still be able to see her, or hide in the control room, that he could visit at any moment, or take a nap in that big bed upstairs.

  The bed that she was supposed to share with him.

  Oh God.

  Oh God, she was supposed to share a bed with him. She wasn’t just trapped in the house, or a particular room, or within a perimeter marked on a map. She was trapped in a role she hadn’t really considered when she’d first signed up. The word wife had seemed silly and far away in that office at Endocon, and equally so when he’d given her that paper kiss.

  But now it was different.

  Now it was real.

  Now she had to actually sleep beside a man whose presence made her accidentally dance, then blush so hard she could still feel it, five hours later.

  Chapter Two

  She found herself in the bathroom, paging through the requirements of the contract. It didn’t say a single thing about sleeping together, though rationally she knew this didn’t matter. She’d already understood how little the contract outright stated. They were supposed to read between the lines—and if his commandeering of the right side of the bed was anything to go by he’d already done just that.

  He didn’t care.

  Why would he? He was a professional. Professionals didn’t worry about being in a bed with another person. Professionals just focused on creating a believable façade. He was probably thinking about what would happen if they slept in separate rooms—would someone see two lights from a distance? Would a neighbor stop by at the wrong time and unravel everything?

  They couldn’t afford mistakes like that.

  The neater they kept the lie the better things would be, she knew. But it was easier said than done, for her. What if she went in there and got into bed and he hadn’t assumed they would do things like this? Maybe he thought she should take the floor. Maybe he’d be appalled at her intrusion into his private space.

  Oh Christ, she really didn’t want to intrude on his private space. Her face got hot again every time she thought about it, and though she sort of hated herself for that it only got worse as time went on. Eventually she progressed from her possible intrusion to the idea of his, and suddenly her entire body was a wave of molten lava.

  He’d barely been able to avoid her in the kitchen. What would it be like in a tiny bed? And all right, the bed wasn’t really tiny. It was actually enormous—probably in deference to this very problem. But that didn’t matter much when it came to his legs like stone monuments and his chest like a side of beef.

  He probably wouldn’t mean to touch her.

  He’d just roll over and smack one massive hand into her right breast. She’d wake up and find him crowding her toward the edge of the bed, like a pirate urging a prisoner to the end of the plank with the help of his trusty sword.

  And naturally she knew what her mind meant by sword. It wasn’t thinking of sharp metal when it put that scenario together. It was thinking of whatever he had between his legs, and it was doing it so hard she had to take a couple of cleansing, calming breaths. She had to pull herself together.

  He wasn’t going to force her off the edge of his bed with his penis. He just wasn’t. And even if he somehow decided to, she had the alarm implanted in her wrist. She had a stun gun she could put under the pillow. Everything was monitored, and violent activity sent up red flags to HQ. There were plenty of measures that kept her safe, not least of which was this—

  He didn’t seem to care if she was there or not. He’d looked faintly confused in the kitchen, but nothing more. And he paid absolutely no attention to her creeping, cringing efforts to get under the covers. She actually slid her body beneath them one tiny part at a time, arching like a spider so as not to disturb the mattress at any point.

  But she needn’t have bothered. His great, broad back was just as impassive now as it had been five minutes ago, and it remained that way long after she’d finished fumbling her way in. In fact, once she was tucked in safely it sort of reminded her of an enormous gravestone, throwing shade on some poor person spread out beneath.

  And that definitely wasn’t the best thought to have before bed. She found herself drifting off into dreams about being dead, shortly followed by dreams about him killing her. In all of them he was a stone giant, with grinding, gravelling joints and a great granite face, and for every single one of his immense steps, she had to make ten just to keep pace with him.

  It was exhausting, and she woke up feeling that way. Unrested, unsettled, ready to talk with him about a thousand different issues. We should set up a schedule, she imagined herself saying. So we don’t have to come into too much contact. So we don’t bother each other, or startle each other, or have to sleep together in a really weird way.

  And it was on the tip of her tongue to do it too.

  Then she turned and all of her good intentions fell by the wayside. Her hand actually stopped in midair, reaching for a nudge awake that didn’t seem possible. It had, back
when she’d imagined him sprawled across the bed with his mouth hanging open. But now it was out of reach. He was out of reach.

  He hadn’t changed position all night.

  * * * * *

  He’d started to wear a groove into the mattress. She could see it without even really trying—this shallow dent where his shoulder always went. It almost made her want to ask him if he was comfortable staying in one spot, but conversation about innocent, normal things was still proving impossible. Asking him about his sleeping habits was completely out of the question…and not just because of how private that seemed.

  If she did, he’d know that she was paying attention.

  Hell, maybe he’d even guess what she’d done on the third morning of their marriage—unintentionally, but still glaringly there all the same. She’d just glanced across to the place he usually was, and saw the groove instead. And then before she could stop herself she’d reached over, to touch it.

  Not in a weird way, of course. Not in that way, whatever that way might be. Just in an almost instinctive, curious sort of manner. She’d only wanted to see if it was still warm from his body, though if she was being honest she wasn’t sure how that made things better. It was still an odd thing to do, no matter which way you looked at it.

  And she did not want to look at it at all.

  As soon as she’d realized what she was doing she’d pulled her hand away and squeezed it into a fist. And now every time the memory lurched to the front of her mind, she stamped it back down again quickly. She focused on entirely normal things instead, like getting out of bed and having a shower and putting on clothes.

  Then when all those actions failed, she tried work. Intense, painstaking, intricate work. There was a minor variation in growth cycles that didn’t need correcting, but she corrected it anyway. She haggled with nutrition quantities and bio-matter levels until her percentages were so perfect she could have printed them off and put them in a frame. Endocon was probably going to contact her at any moment, to say how wonderful she was.

  Or it would have, if it hadn’t been for the faulty mechanical arm in sector twelve.

  Christ, how had she overlooked such a massive blip? She paged back through the logs looking for the flag, sure she wouldn’t find one. But there it was, as big and bright and bold as day. She’d been so eager to focus on something that she’d skipped right past a real problem, and that only meant one really annoying thing.

  She was going to have to go down there—even though going down there meant suiting up and negotiating the decontamination doors and a whole host of other issues that occupied her thoughts right up until the real issue presented itself. Oh, why hadn’t she thought of the real issue? She swanned all the way up to him to let him know what she was going to do, and only then did the thought occur.

  He was going to say that he would come with her.

  He was going to say it, and then she’d have to actually spend all that time with him. The elevator alone took a full minute to descend, followed by the probable hours she’d have to spend in the labs. And worse…every single second of that would remind her of the silly thing she’d done. She knew it would. She could feel it starting to push its way back into her mind right now, after ten seconds in his company.

  So it was really no surprise that her mouth opened, and no sound came out.

  How had she ever thought that this would work? She hadn’t been able to talk to him before, under normal circumstances. And now here she was trying to talk to him about spending a lot of time together, while the memory of touching his bed groove played over and over in her stupid, stupid head. The only shock was that she hadn’t keeled over the moment she realized, though she was at least grateful for this.

  She couldn’t be grateful for his response.

  “You okay?”

  Oh Christ. The first words he’s said to her in a thousand years, and they had to be vague concern. Did she really look that bad? Was she really sweating that much? She suspected she did, and that she was. She could taste something on her upper lip, and it probably wasn’t a particularly salty crumb of breakfast.

  And still she hadn’t spoken.

  She was just standing there in front of him, staring up at his big, impassive face. Kids probably did the same thing on seeing a wild bear or a massive frightening statue, and in a second that was how he was going to start seeing her. He’d put her in a category marked terrified child, and she couldn’t have that.

  She had to seem at least a little bit professional.

  “I’m absolutely wonderful.”

  However, she wasn’t sure those were the best words to exemplify that. Why on earth had she put that absolutely in there? It just seemed to disprove the point she was trying to make. And the wonderful…oh Lord the wonderful…

  Even he thought it was fucking nuts.

  “Wonderful, huh?” he asked, and that inner cringe grew tenfold. He meant it the bad way, she was certain. The sarcastic way…though she had to be honest, nothing in his voice hinted at it. She wasn’t even sure a voice like that could hit sarcastic, considering its deep and uncharted depths. It was practically a pit—one that she couldn’t have made her way around with a map and a flashlight.

  Instead, she simply had to take him at face value.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”

  Only now she was the one coming off sarcastic.

  Or maybe not sarcastic…maybe more like desperate to seem okay. And of course she was failing miserably at it. She could see how miserably she was failing by the expression on his face, despite the fact that he barely knew how to have one. The wrinkle in his brow was only just visible to the naked eye, and that confusion in his eyes would have passed for mild interest on anyone else.

  But she caught it all the same.

  She devoured it, like a starving man falling on a single pathetic peanut.

  “Anything else you want?” he asked, and she considered saying an ordinary conversation. But as her bed fondling had probably put that out of reach, she went with her original purpose for being here.

  “I need to go down to the labs,” she said, and then before she could stop herself, oh God before she could do a single thing, more words came out. “But you don’t have to come with me. There’s absolutely no real reason at all why you should need to. I’m just telling you because I thought I should inform you. Not because you should come down there with me, under any circumstances.”

  She’d come so close to making a rational, innocent-sounding statement. So very close! But yet again, overemphasis came tramping into her words, crushing everything normal and easygoing with its size twenty shoes. Why oh why had she added that last bit about any circumstances?

  Why did she keep adding all these bits? She just sounded so frantic and desperate—the complete opposite of her default position. She was usually as stoic as he appeared to be, unmoved by the odd concerns that every other person seemed to have. Other people liked social events, and water-cooler gossip, and big animated conversations about nothing. She did not. She liked her computer screens and her solitude. She liked being quiet.

  But apparently, only one person could be an unfeeling rock at any one time.

  And he had that position perfectly filled.

  “Think protocol states I have to,” he said, so cool and practical she almost envied him. That had been her before the bed touch, before the accidental dance, before the paper kiss. She’d been the perfect protocol person, oblivious to men and all their various attributes.

  Only now she couldn’t stop noticing attributes. On the outside, she was nodding and helping him put yet another amazing dinner on hold. But on the inside she was a maze of unwanted thoughts about the t-shirt he was wearing and the food he’d been cooking just for her and his strange, still manner that drew her in so effectively.

  Why did it draw her in?

  She should have been repelled by it. She should have, but she really, really wasn’t. She kept looking at the cheese he’d grated a
s though it were a fucking love note with sappy eyes that weren’t hers. And when she saw that he’d made bread again, this feeling just got worse.

  By the time they were ready to go she was starting to doubt her own sanity. Something major had obviously shifted inside her, but she hadn’t a clue why. She didn’t want to know why. She just wanted to follow him down the hall and not think about any single part of him, and to some extent she succeeded.

  But only because his back was now to her. She could almost pretend he was a different person, once she was behind him. A safer person, perhaps, who did not make her stomach squirm and her armpits prickle. Like that grunt in Latvia, she thought, with the normal eyes and the easy manner and that habit of bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  And then they got to the elevator and the illusion fell away. All of her false relief and fake calm vanished, because now she had to get into that thing. She had to stand with him inside a steel tube—one that was so narrow they couldn’t even go side by side. He had to press against the burnished steel wall, and she had to almost sandwich her back against him, and all of this would have been fine, it really would…

  If that almost wasn’t somehow more troubling than actually.

  Once the curving door sealed them in, she could absolutely feel the sliver of space between them. It bristled with this strange energy that at first seemed like something she was imagining. But as the capsule descended and descended endlessly, she started to suspect he could feel it too. He shifted a little midway down, and the crackling pressure eased a tad.

  Then after a second, she realized what he’d done.

  He’d sucked his gut in. He didn’t even have a gut, but somehow he’d sucked it in. And he’d done it because of the snap-crackle-pop between their two bodies—it was obvious. Even to someone like her, someone oblivious to social convention and unaware of how to date another person, it was obvious.