Oh, my god.
He turned himself into the printer.
“Simon? Is that you?”
The device buzzes and passes an empty piece of paper through the mechanism while the print head dashes back and forth across the rod.
“Tell me what you need!” My voice is slightly tense with excitement. He’s really done it. He’s turned himself into an inkjet. Science really is amazing.
I realize it has a digital screen on it. Maybe he can communicate with me that way? I lean over to see what it is saying.
“PC Load Letter,” I read slowly. “I don’t know what that means. Is there a letter somewhere you need? Tell me more.”
The print head does another impatient dash across the rod. A piece of paper loads up and into the mechanism. It starts to print something out. I stand in front of the desk, my hands clasped to my mouth as I try to work out how I am going to explain this to HR.
“Please!” I beg Printer Simon. “Just turn back. You’ve got to be able to come back!”
The paper starts to feed out of the machine. It’s printing a row of the alphabet, first in large capital letters, then in smaller ones. I wonder what it means.
“I think something is being lost in translation,” I say. “This is what happens when you meddle with nature. You turn into a consumer product. What happened? Did you drop some printer ink into your vial?” I tap at the buttons in the hope of getting some useful feedback, but nothing happens.
I wonder if I should unplug it, take it to Veronica, and tell her my suspicions.
“Whatareyou doing?”
I hear a deeply amused male voice behind me.
I let out a shocked scream and jump around, instantly embarrassed. Simon is standing behind me, in all his very human glory. I realize how unhinged I sounded in those moments before.
“Nothing.”
“Did you think I’d turned into the printer?”
“No,” I lie. I hate smart men. I used to think it would be fun to date one, but really all it means is that my tricks that usually befuddle them don’t work.
“You did think that,” he laughs.
He has a black eye, and his face is absolutely covered in scratches and bruises.
“Did you fight a bear?” I exclaim the question. “Or a bar?”
“I went for a hike, ended up a bit off the trail,” he says. “It’ll all heal up soon. It’s just scratches.”
As soon as those words leave his mouth I know he’s lying. I don’t know what about, but I get that faint nauseous feeling in my stomach that I always seem to get when someone is fucking with me somehow. Call it intuition. Because that’s what it is.
“Did you go into the woods and take some fucked-up potion and turn into something you don’t want anyone to know about, which is why you did it…”
I don’t get to finish the sentence, because he has crossed the room in three long strides and clamped his hand over my mouth.
“Don’t,” he growls in my ear. “Just don’t.”
I lick the inside of his hand. He yanks it away, probably more out of shock than real disgust because this man likes anal. He’s not likely to be put off by a bit of tongue action on his hand.
“It’s not going to be a secret for long,” I say. “It’s so obvious and easy to put together.”
He grips me by the back of my shirt, scruffing me like an unruly kitten, and half-walks, half-carries me to the back room.
“This is shielded,” he says. “For radiation and such, so they can’t hear us here. If you open your mouth about my extracurricular experiments again, I will gag you while you’re in the office.”
