"What about you?"
"This was about you."
"No." I pushed him onto his back, straddled his thigh. "Success is mutual pleasure. Success is sharing want."
I rocked against him, still sensitive but craving the connection. He groaned, hand wrapping around himself as he watched me move.
"You're going to kill me," he breathed.
"Success is living through it," I countered, finding a rhythm that worked for both of us. "Success is choosing the pain that leads to pleasure."
We moved together, eyes locked, breath syncing. When he got close, I did too, the sight of him losing control triggering something primal in me. We came within seconds of each other, marking each other with the evidence of shared want.
After, lying tangled and sated, I thought about numbers again. But differently this time. Not failures measured in self-destruction. Instead, I counted successes. One: surviving. Two:trusting. Three: choosing. Four: healing. Five: learning to want without performing want.
"Thank you," I whispered into the darkness.
"For what?"
"For rewriting the metrics. For making success mean something other than dying properly."
His arms tightened around me. "You were never supposed to die, Bunny. You were supposed to live. Just took a while to figure out how."
"I'm still figuring it out."
"Yeah, well. Success is a process, not a destination."
I smiled against his chest, feeling something settle in me. Tomorrow I'd go back to those files. Tomorrow I'd bear witness to all those women who'd been marked successful in their destruction. But tonight, I was S-047: Failed experiment. Successful human.
17
Processing
The evidence lived in my head now, taking up residence like unwanted houseguests who rearranged all the furniture. Three days since finding those files, and I still couldn't make the numbers match my memories.
S-047: Failed experiment.
I sat cross-legged on Nathan's bed at 3 AM, laptop open to the digitized copies we'd made. Each entry told a truncated story. Purchase price. Training duration. Separation date. Termination date. The successful ones all followed the same pattern—dead within six months of being discarded.
But the memories in my head sang a different song. Gabriel's voice, warm honey over broken glass: "You're special, little bunny. My greatest success."
Success. The word tasted different now, bitter where it had once been sweet. If I was supposed to be a success, why was Imarked as failure? If I failed by surviving, what did that make me now?
"You're doing it again," Nathan murmured from beside me, voice rough with sleep.
"Doing what?"
"Trying to solve yourself like an equation. Some things don't have clean answers."
I closed the laptop harder than necessary. "Everything has an answer. I just have to find the right formula."
"Bunny—"
"Did you know S-132 lasted eight months? Longest one before me. The notes say she showed 'exceptional resistance to protocol.' I wonder if Gabriel was proud or annoyed." I traced patterns on the sheets, unable to be still. "Maybe she got special attention for lasting so long. Maybe he—"
"Stop." Nathan sat up, hand covering mine. "You're spiraling."
"I'm analyzing."
