He sighed, lowering himself to his knees in front of her.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a pleading tone. “I got this wrong. I see that now. It’s just… You’ve always seemed okay with it when I brought it up. I didn’t realize you’d be so anxious.”
“You did not bring this up.” She looked at him incredulously. “You—you teased about it, treated it like some empty fantasy. That is not the same as asking me to have sex with someone else.”
He winced, and regret flickered in his eyes. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
She sniffled, wiping her cheek on her tights. “That was awful.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“I was scared,” she said in a small voice.
He scooted closer until he could drag her against him, into the cradle of his arms and legs. Clutching her close, he patted her back like she was a child, shushing her when she began to weep softly again. He peppered kisses on the top of her head.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he whispered. “But we need to talk about this. It’s… this is important to me.”
She stiffened in his arms. “What?”
“Just hear me out, please. We’re getting married in six months. That means for the rest of my life, the only person I’ll ever be with is you. And when I… when I think about spending the rest of my life having the same vanilla sex, never getting to explore the fantasies I’ve had for so long… it’s suffocating. You can understand that, can’t you?”
He looked pained by his own words. His throat bobbed, and he avoided her eyes.
No.
She couldn’t. That vanilla sex made her perfectly happy. It wasn’t about the physical action; it was the intimacy. Sharing something special, something secret. Feeling him move inside her as their breath mingled and knowing it was only for her—something precious between them.
Sex felt like love to her. She would have been perfectly happy having only the same boring, missionary sex for the rest of her life.
“Please, work with me here,” he said, clutching her tighter. “I don’t want to lose you but I… I can’t imagine that this is it, Eff. I need more. I just… Can’t you meet me halfway?”
“What is halfway?” she asked numbly. “Do you just want me to blow your coworkers instead of fuck them?”
He flinched at the question, then huffed, burying his face in her hair.
“I don’t know. Let me… Let me think about it, okay? I’m asking you to keep an open mind. We can talk about it again when you’re not so raw. I won’t spring anyone on you again.”
“Okay,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure anything would ever be okay again.
CHAPTER 3
The week passed in a blur.She woke up, brushed her teeth, and went to work, where she moved like one of Automata’s early androids, blank-faced and stiff-limbed as she went through the motions.
She piped her latest invention into a vase: a combination of glowing bacteria, nutrients for the symbiotic fungi already present in the plant, and a distillation of luciferin. It was a shotgun blast, and she wasn’t sure how it would scale up for the distribution the company had in mind, but if she could just get these damn flowers to glow for more than a few hours after being cut…
Carefully, she cut a few stems from her most mature test subject: a tightly budded lily that glowed faintly blue in the darkness. She arranged them, staring as though they could give her any clue about how long they were going to last.
The company was running out of patience for results. NeonAgro was a tiny company in the scheme of things, only a few years past its growing pains as a start-up. They couldn’t justify a single fruitless expense.
If they couldn’t figure this out soon, their branch of study wasn’t going to be renewed for funding. If that happened, thedozen people in this lab would wind up unemployed. Kind, hardworking people who had made Ophelia feel as though she truly belonged among them. She’d been to their baby showers, birthday dinners, and their loved ones’ funerals. It was impossible not to feel the ripple effect failure would have through their little community.
Work. She squinted at the flowers.Please work.
“Feeling hopeful?” a voice called from behind her.
She startled. “Oh, Brenda. It’s just you.”
“Just me.” Brenda leaned against the door jamb, and the metal beads on her locs clattered softly against the frame. Her long lashes were threaded through with tinsel that sparkled in the light of her augmented pink eyes. They’d been purple on Friday, and teal the week before. “You holding up okay?”
