Past Pleasures Read online

  She wanted to tell him, immediately, that she couldn’t help it. The word boobles practically begged for laughter—and especially if he was applying them to what she was sure he was applying them to. And he kept on with it!

  It was practically criminal not to laugh.

  “Are those boobles?”

  He pointed at her chest area, while asking. It would almost certainly be hilarious, if it wasn’t also grotesquely sad. Nothing could have been clearer—they had never seen a woman before.

  “You mean…uh…boobies. Or breasts. Or tits.” She put a hand to her forehead. “I’m not sure why I’m listing synonyms for my growths—sorry.”

  One whapped Two.

  “You’ve frightened it! It’s apologising!”

  Again, that odd warmth flooded over and through her. How open and sweet he was! So open and sweet his insides were probably made out of nougat. That was what this future was—nougat people. Even his dark intense friend couldn’t hide his chewy goodness.

  “Have I frightened you? Don’t be frightened.”

  “I’m not,” she replied, and meant it. She had never been less frightened of two big, attractive men in all her life.

  “Good,” One said, then put his palm up for her, again. “I’m Aley.”

  It sounded like Alex, to her, after the world had forgotten that it ended with an X. Aley without the X nudged Two, who offered his name with just the barest hint of reluctance.

  “Tem.”

  She ground her teeth together, to stop herself from telling him that he meant Tim. She had already corrected them once, on the breast thing. Twice and they might stuff her in the Flesheriser 3000.

  Though she doubted it. Why, she was starting to think that no such thing even existed.

  “Kate,” she offered, and stuck out her hand without thinking.

  Two sets of eyes flicked down to the offending gesture. Or at the very least, the gesture they did not in any way understand. Perhaps in the future, she mused, touching hands was how you made babies. Inside men.

  “Do you want us to touch your hand?” Tem asked, and Aley leant down, to whisper in his ear.

  “I touched i—her yesterday. She doesn’t mind.”

  Both remained unsure, however. They only ceased to be unsure when she decided that enough was enough, and reached up to take the hand that Tem still held, palm facing outward.

  To his credit, any startled jumps were held tightly in. Before he fell to simply watching, clearly fascinated, as she clasped his hand and shook it up and down.

  “That’s how we say hello, in my time. We shake hands.”

  When, after a long moment, his gaze met hers again, she felt a shiver of something unexpected work its way down her spine. Like longing, only not. Like the look in his eyes, that she couldn’t place. He had lovely eyes, really—not assessing, at all, but big and dark and…waiting.

  Then Aley said can it be my turn, now, and the whole thing passed. She couldn’t even remember what it had been. Something nice, and warm, to remember for later—that’s all.

  “And then what do you do?” Aley asked, and she found herself trying not to giggle again. God, the things she could tell them. And then we touch the soles of our feet together and eat the sacred cake.

  She felt like a saint, for resisting.

  “We don’t do anything. We say hello and then maybe we sit down, and have a cup of—a drink, of some sort.”

  “Can you drink water? We have water,” Aley said, that little frown back between his pale brows.

  “Thank fuck for that—I mean, yes. Yes, I can drink water.”

  While Aley disappeared into the probably-not-a-bathroom, Tem turned his full attention on her. Mainly in the form of questions—questions that she should have been asking him.

  “What else do you drink in this…past?”

  “Mainly Vimto. Some Irn-Bru.”

  Waites would berate her, for behaviour unbecoming a scientist. Even if she wasn’t, nor ever had considered herself, anything like. She was his guinea pig, nothing more—hired for her excellent reporting skills, that were currently somehow failing her. She wondered, briefly, if Tem was the future’s equivalent of a journalist.

  “I don’t believe that you’re a woman—so you know. But if you were a woman, where on your body would your genitalia be?”

  She was fairly certain that needing to laugh every five seconds was not behaviour befitting anyone at all. Still, she applauded herself for resisting the urge to point to her elbow. And his expression softened, somewhat, when she indicated the space between her legs.

  “Hmm.”

  “I could show you my boobles, if you like. Just for proof.”

  Of course, she had no real intention of doing so. Which made the suddenly startled/eager expression on his face something of a shock. Fortunately Aley chose that moment to return, from the…room.

  He carried a tray of ordinary glasses with him—no hover-cart, no floating blobs of water—but once they were all sat down—Aley and Tem on the bed, Kate in the tiny armchair—she found it hard to drink. Perhaps it wasn’t water, at all. Just because it smelt like it, and they were both drinking it, didn’t mean it was.

  She was appalled to find that nothing more than their wholesome, expectant faces made her go for it. I should be thankful, she thought, as she downed the entirely metallic tasting liquid. At least their faces aren’t expecting me to wee Vimto out of my female parts.

  “So…” she began, and almost laughed again when she realised how much that sounded like she was just about to make small-talk. “No women in the future, huh?”

  “Women became extinct, we believe, around 2450.”

  Tem sounded matter-of-fact, to her, but he tensed as he spoke. He seemed more tense than Aley, generally, but was still calm and still enough for it to be obvious, when a slight change in his temperament occurred.

  “How?”

  “We don’t know. No-one knows. No-one even knows what they looked like—especially not if they looked like you!”

  Aley laughed, through his words—though Tem didn’t seem to think there was anything to laugh about.

  “What do you think women looked like?”

  Aley shrugged, but Tem had an answer.

  “Tiny. With hair like Aley’s.”

  “Blond hair, you mean?”

  He rolled his shoulders, clearly uncomfortable.

  “Yes. And with…bigger eyes. And lips.”

  Aley was staring at her, a wondering look on his face. But it didn’t make her uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen anyone be this fascinated by nothing at all.

  “Everything bigger,” he added, while Tem looked into his now empty glass. “Especially the boobles—the breasts. And the butt.”

  “You like them big in the future, huh?”

  “I suppose we do, if you’re normal.”

  It seemed a shame to spoil the illusion, and yet she couldn’t stop thinking about their shocked faces when she had explained where she was from. What she was.

  “I’m plenty big, where I come from.”

  “So there are women even smaller than you? Gosh!”

  “Shush, Aley. We still have no idea if she’s telling the truth or not.”

  Of course, Tem said so. But she noticed that he used the word she, not it.

  “I think you believe me,” she said, and his gaze flicked back to her, filled with a kind of longing she couldn’t fathom. Longing for a Yorkie bar or a nice holiday just didn’t measure up. Even longing for a kidney wasn’t really in the same ballpark.

  No women ever. No women anywhere, not ever.

  “I guess it must be pretty hard, huh? To live like this.” She winced at her own trite words, but winced harder when the next ones spilled out. “Unless you’re really, really into other dudes. In which case, you’re golden.”

  Nothing like a little bleak dystopian humour, to lighten the mood. She wondered if they had a future comedy club, somewhere about the place. Maybe they’d l
et her do stand-up twice a week, about all the heterosexual sex they could never have.

  They glanced at each other, then back at her.

  “What’s a dude?” Aley asked.

  “What’s into?”

  For the first time since getting here, she glanced at the timer. This was going to be interesting.

  “You know. When two men…like each other.”

  “We like each other.”

  “We’re companions,” Tem added.

  She took a sip of the water that was no longer there.

  “Uh, yeah. But I’m guessing you’re more than that, right?” She paused, ruffled. The room appeared to be getting small, and it was already pretty damned tiny to begin with. “How did we get talking about this again?”

  “You said that it must be pretty hard to live like this, and then you said—”

  “Okay, okay! I just…I don’t know. You’re both very attractive. And you’re sitting really close. And there aren’t any women. So I’m guessing you have fun together.” This was worse than the time she accidentally started talking to her Gran about vibrators. Why not food shortages, living conditions, who was President? Instead there was this—“And by fun I don’t mean Future Ball. I mean, you know. Sex.”

  She had never felt more like a 1950s housewife who’s just walked into a gay bar in all her life. It wasn’t just her cheeks that were flushing—her entire body was following suit.

  “What’s sex?” Aley said.

  It was lucky, really, that the timer chose that moment to go off and the world started to fade out. After all, it would have been hard to answer him while frozen to the spot.

  * * * *

  He knew that the possible-woman was starting to affect him. He knew, because Aley commented on the fact that he hadn’t shaved, and he’d had to not go to the renewal centre, and at the end of the day, when he laid next to Aley in their bed, he couldn’t do anything but stare up at the ceiling and remember what she had looked like.

  Aley was right to be excited. There was simply no way that she wasn’t a woman. It wasn’t just possibly. She had woman all over her, like a particular smell or something slightly wrong with bits of her that he couldn’t quite name.

  Of course, there were the boobles—which were obvious, and probably even more obvious underneath her clothes. That she’d offered to take off. While everything inside him froze and jumped around at the same time. And she had the long hair, but then, so did a lot of men.

  No. It was something intangible about her that convinced him. And though he said to Aley that he still wasn’t sure he really believed, he only did so to make Aley go to sleep and stop babbling about her. So that he could think, about her glow-y skin and the thing that shone out of her. The thing that said she was really a woman.

  Though Lord knew, he tried to poke holes in her story. Maybe Gery had set the whole thing up, to get them back for over-processing his favourite jumpsuit. Neither he nor Aley had intended it—sometimes these things just happened!—but the truth remained that they’d made his jumpsuit smell like reconstituted turnips, and no-one ever wanted that. Especially since turnips were really just reconstituted potatoes, now, and potatoes smelt even worse than turnips.

  He couldn’t remember what potatoes were now made out of. Probably something awful. Oh by the saints, what if she came back and all he had to give her were not-potatoes and jumpsuits made out of turnips?

  He fidgeted under the covers made out of soil, and Aley said something mad in his sleep. Something like—let me eat your boobles. Which was even worse than how disappointed she’d be, to discover that the future was not luxurious or even comfortable, and mostly what they had to eat was stuff made out of other stuff that wasn’t the stuff you thought it was in the first place.

  Of course, he understood that Aley wouldn’t really want to eat her boobles, but that was beside the point. The fact remained that she wouldn’t understand that, and so if Aley lurched towards her suddenly with his mouth open, there would be only one conclusion she could come to.

  They were cannibals. The future was filled with insane cannibals. He wouldn’t get the chance to tell her that all the insane cannibals had been shipped to the moon back in the year 2456. Why should she listen, when her beautiful boobles were on the line?

  The ones that he kind of wanted to put into his mouth, too—though not in a cannibal sort of way. Oh no no no. No cannibalism! Just…maybe…in a testing them out sort of way. Did they taste nice, like Aley’s skin sometimes did, after a powder shower? Were they soft, too, and sumptuous—they had looked soft and sumptuous. All of her had looked soft sumptuous.

  Especially in the mouth area.

  He wondered if, in the past, kissing had gone on the way it did here. It had looked like that maybe wasn’t the case, because she’d wanted to do that hand touching thing first instead of mouth kissing or cheek kissing, but how could he be sure?

  The ceiling was simply no help in this matter.

  Fortunately, the ceiling at least gave him the idea of giving her a cracker. He felt pretty sure she’d like that, even though he also felt pretty sure that crackers existed in the past. And they probably had things on them, too, like vegetables that didn’t exist anymore and…what was that other thing they’d eaten a lot of, back then?

  The stuff that came out of animals. Animals that no longer existed. Of course there were the spliced animals and the creatures made out of genetically manipulated human limbs, and things like that, but he doubted they’d be anything like the things she was used to.

  The simple truth of it was—the future had nothing to offer her. Particularly in the area of men, and how much they could or could not meet her needs. Of course, he was under no illusion that he could get her to stay for any length of time—including the length of time labelled hopefully forever right in the back of his mind, in a place he didn’t visit often—but he at least hoped for an hour or two. Maybe a day.

  And why would she want to stay for a day if he didn’t live up to her expectations?

  He suspected that Aley, at least, might conform to a standard that she may or may not hold. But would his long, long body and his nice blond hair and all of the rest of the things about him make her happy? For the life in him he couldn’t recall if the men of the past were mainly big, or small, or smooth, or…not smooth. Because he was definitely not smooth—in fact, he was hairy all over in a way that wasn’t even that typical for the here and now, and definitely not something that men aspired to and desired—and if she hated that, then…

  Then what? She wouldn’t like him and let him kiss her cheek or see her undoubtedly fascinating and splendid naked body? He rolled his eyes at himself. As though she’d want to spend her highly scientific and important mission, doing things like touching and satisfying his probably morbid futuristic curiosity.

  He’d heard that the past had been full of feelings and people doing things that were really outrageous and extreme all the time, so to her he most likely looked like an aloof weirdo who wanted to probe her with things.

  Next time. Next time she came—oh, if she did, if she did—he would be enthusiastic and animated. And shake her hand. And give her a cracker.

  Everything would definitely work out for the best, then.

  Chapter Two

  Kate stared up at the ceiling, instead of sleeping. Sleep didn’t want to come anywhere near her. She had future cooties, and everyone knew they were catching. Future cooties made her think about weird future men and their intense dark eyes, constantly.

  Future men made her tell lies to the person who allowed her to visit said future. They made her write down lists of things she needed to find out, when really all she wanted to do was answer their questions. Fill them up with her answers.

  She wanted to fill Tem up with her answers.

  She had no idea how a society had gotten into the strange state of affairs theirs was in. Everything ordered and clean and peaceful, no women, no sex. However, she had an idea they wouldn’t be a
ble to tell her, even if she asked.

  But she could certainly tell them. She could show them.

  And she would, as soon as she managed to persuade Waites to let her go for longer. There was nothing to be afraid of, after all. What were they going to do? Ask her more difficult questions? It was her duty to answer them. Hugely hot men simply could not go on living like this.

  Even if it meant suggesting her Grandmother order from a sex toy shop.

  Unfortunately, when she got to the lab—coffee down her front courtesy of some guy who just couldn’t wait, sleep deprived and too full of itching to get there—she could see Waites was not in the mood for suggestions. He didn’t look in the mood for anything, apart from screaming at his laptop.

  Soon, he would deliver his presentation to the board. After she had verified the machine’s safety, of course, and he had tested it himself. Once those things were done, he could let the world know what he, Professor Charles Waites, had done.

  And naturally, the plaudits and world fame and all the rest of it would then come to him. They would come, as long as he could word his presentation right, and get the graphs and charts and algorithms in order. And if she would just give him useful observational data.

  Like the observational date she had given him yesterday, about the mole-people.

  “Everything okay, Waites?”

  “Just…shut up. And get ready.”

  Today, she thought, I will tell him that robots have taken over the earth.

  Why he had ever trusted her with such a task, she couldn’t say. Though the word expendable often flashed up behind her eyes, when such questions occurred. After all, the mole-people had almost forced her to eat nuclear soil, the last time she travelled in his wondrous contraption.

  “You know, I could help you with that. It’s what I do—write interesting stuff, I mean.”

  It wasn’t exactly true—she spent most of her time writing letters to various disgruntled employers for the company’s head, instead of the press releases and articles she had been hired to write. But what did it matter? He wasn’t listening, anyway. Most people in the company found the time to never listen to her.