If she told him to stop, he would have to. He elected not to give her a chance.
“Fine,” she muttered, looking away. The deep flush on her cheeks could have been from embarrassment or the biting cold winter air. She rearranged the empty canvas tote on her right shoulder, fussing with the straps.
“Does Logan usually accompany you on these trips?” he asked conversationally.
She seemed nervous, and that went against his objective of bringing her pleasure. Distraction seemed to work well for her, so far.
Her gray eyes darted up at him in surprise before course correcting onto the path in front of her. “Um, no, actually. He works weekends a lot of the time, especially when there’s a crunch like right now. There’s some big demonstration of the next generation of models next month, rolling out for the holidays, I guess.”
She dared to meet his gaze again. “I guess that’s you, huh?”
“Perhaps that’s why he chose to bring me home for organic testing.”
She frowned, her dark brows furrowing. “Organic testing?” The flush on her face deepened, creeping down to her neck. “Oh…”
He smiled at her in a way he hoped was nonthreatening, but the way she quickly looked away suggested he missed the mark.
She was going to let him touch her. His sensitive olfactory sensors had detected her arousal in the kitchen. She’d been wet, her hips rocking toward him automatically, her body seeking what her mind was too restrained to ask for.
He was going to make it good for her. Better than anything she’d ever felt. A reward for being the first to help him fulfill his purpose. The first to share her pleasure with him.
“Oh, we’re here,” she exclaimed, as though she was surprised by how quickly they’d arrived.
He fell into step behind her as she ducked through the sliding glass doors into the small grocery store. Smells and sounds assailed him within, even more discordant than the chaos of humanity outside.
Carts rattled, registers beeped loudly, and a robotic voice droned over a shoddy speaker system about a spill in aisle thirteen. A shoddy, squat maintenance unit that looked like a metal bucket made a shrill sound when someone blocked its path as it headed toward the spill.
He didn’t understand how humans weren’t all driven to madness by the constant noise of their inventions, though their senses were far less attuned. He adjusted his settings, rolling back his sensitivity until everything outside of a few feet from him was a dull drone.
Ophelia opened one of her tote bags, and he took it from her before she could thread her arm through. She worried her bottom lip for a moment, clearly debating demanding it back, but instead she sighed, turning away from him. He followed her through the store, studying her as she selected the best ripened produce and checked the dates on packages of dairy. Whenever she selected an item, he held open the bag for her, and she’d tuck it inside with a shy look cast up at him.
She was far more intriguing than made sense to him, and he was curious about everything she did. The way she chewed her bottom lip when she was thinking hard. The way she brushed back the same silky tendril of hair that slid past her ear when she bent forward a hundred times instead of pinning it out of the way. The way she shuffled out of the way whenever someone coughed nearby, paling as though she could already feel disease creeping in under her skin.
She was struggling with a mental illness. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, maybe. A contamination phobia. He would research it further and determine how he might help alleviate the symptoms. Only to further his primary user’s goal, of course.
He helped her swipe the items at the self-service checkout, carefully piling them back into the canvas bag in an orderthat would keep anything from being damaged or bruised. She reached for it after she’d paid, but he lifted it onto his shoulder before she could grab it.
“I do not tire, Ophelia.”
She blinked at him and cleared her throat, nodding.
Beneath the overlapping smells of produce and human sweat and heavy perfume, he detected the faintest thread of her arousal.
As they stepped back out onto the sidewalk, Ophelia’s phone buzzed. She pulled it from her pocket, but her cold fingers fumbled the device, and it pitched down to the sidewalk. He knelt immediately, grabbed the phone, and turned it over in his hand as he inspected it for damage. When he held it out for her, she didn’t take it immediately, her dismayed eyes flicking from the dirty, gum-covered sidewalk to the phone and back again.
“It’s dirty,” he said. “Do you have a wipe?”
She wrung her hands together, stepping out of the way as a man in a business suit veered toward her, arguing with someone on his invisible headset. “I used them all earlier.”
“Come.” He used his free hand to guide her by the small of her back again, leading them to the nearest drug store, where he was able to find a travel-sized packet of antibacterial wipes.
She paid for them at the checkout and took them eagerly, standing out of the way as she wiped down her device. It lit up as she stroked the wipe over the glass screen, and she sucked in a breath.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s my mom.” She pressed the phone to her chest, squeezing it in her hand until her knuckles turned white. “She wants to see me.”
“This distresses you.”
