“Monogamous,” Rowan corrected.
“Potato, tomato.” Ruben shrugged.
Milo was fairly certain that wasn’t the correct idiom.
“And who is it who is always ragging onmysex life?” Ruben pulled a vape pen from his pocket, which he sucked on for a hit.
“Only after it hit triple digits,” Rowan muttered.
Ruben appeared unaffected by the accusation and merely smirked. “How else am I gonna get to four?”
“Sir!” A young woman wearing a lanyard with a badge that said STAFF in bold letters rushed over to them, waving the air in front of her as she neared Ruben and his vape pen.
Milo had smelled the substance Ruben was vaping before his awakening, and while he did not have the same sense of smellor understanding of it as a human might, he knew from its chemical makeup how a human would interpret the scent.
Pungent.
Earthy—or more accurately described asdank.
And heavily reminiscent of skunk.
“You can’t vape or smoke near the art, sir. You also can’t use flash photography, holographic imagining technology, or—”
“Miss,” Ruben interrupted the museum worker’s explanation, which Milo had been greatly enjoying, as it reminded him of his own moments of important exposition. It was comforting experiencing a human acting similarly to him.
Ruben took another hit on his vape pen and exhaled it toward the first art piece—which appeared to be “AI Slop” of two eggplants dancing, both with slightly misshapen googly eyes, one hoping on one foot, the other with three, and they had a tangle of gangly arms between them reminiscent of spaghetti noodles.
The “Real Art” beside it was…
Oh.
That might be why the current exhibit was rated 18+.
“While I get that you are just doing your job,” Ruben continued, “I’m fucking the artist who painted that. If he doesn’t like me vaping around it, he can complain about it in bed tonight. Or more likelymoan.” Ruben sucked once more on his vape pen, held the expulsion in his mouth several beats longer than the puffs before, and slowly released it to billow up around his face.
Milo believed Ruben was acting in a manner that most people would call adick move.
“Please, sir,” the woman tried again, face contorting and brow pinched. “It’s only my second day.”
Ruben stared at her another beat or two, then slipped his vape pen back into his pocket.
“Thank you!”
After the woman had gratefully made her escape from the encounter, Rowan complained, “I thought you were currently sleeping your way through the string section of the orchestra?”
“Oh, he’s in that too. Multitalented, this one. Here he is now.”
The man that walked over to join them was difficult for Milo to explain. He was very beige in skin, hair, and eye color, yet his clothing was like a geometric rainbow, as if he considered himself another canvas. He was a clearly talented realism artist, given his painting of the erotically charged tangle of five—no, six?—male bodies with certain upright appendages clashing that werenoteggplants, much as a few might have resembled one. His art on his person was decidedly more abstract.
Although hewaswearing eggplant earrings.
“Whoa,” the artist said upon spotting Rowan, after which he proceeded to scan his body from head to groin at an unnecessarily slow pace.
A new twist of heat filled Milo’s insides. How could there be so many variations of something so fundamentally similar? Was there no end to it?
And why were most of thembad?
“Didn’t know you grew in pairs,” the artist finished.
