Page 88 of Soft Erasure

“No.”

I waited. I had learned what that was worth from him.

“Don’t stop.”

I didn’t take him to the room behind the kitchen. That bed belonged to Cora. She had handed us the only ceiling in this city with nothing in it. There was a floor, and no lens in any direction, and it was enough.

I undressed him, and I did it slowly, because slow was a thing I controlled and he didn’t. He kept his eyes on me the whole time. I made him keep them there. Every other person in that building had spent a year looking at me while I was held still. Tonight I did the looking.

My hand closed around his cock, and he made a sound he didn’t choose to make, the first uncounted thing I had ever heard come out of him.

I catalogued it the way he had catalogued me for thirteen months. The weight of him in my hand. The breath that left him when I moved it. A pulse under my thumb that no band was reading, on him or on me.

Slow, because he never had, not once, not with me. His stomach went tight under my other hand. His breathing lost whatever count it had left.

When I put my mouth on him the whole careful construction of the man came loose one join at a time. His fingers landed in my hair and didn’t close. He had never taken one thing in his life without first deciding how much he was allowed. Tonight he could not do the arithmetic, and I didn’t help him.

Then his hand closed, once, hard, before he caught himself and opened it. For that half second the man who built the program I live inside was back in the room, the grip he gave nobody, on me because he could not stop it. I didn’t tell him it was the part I had missed.

I set the pace. All of it. I brought him down onto the floor and put him inside me on my count and not his. He said my name into my throat, wrecked, nothing clinical anywhere near it.

I moved how I wanted and watched what it did to him. His hands went to my hips and gripped and let go and gripped again, every touch he had ever rationed coming undone in one night, no measure left anywhere in it.

My eyes stayed open. I had spent thirteen months being read. There was a version of this man that had never had a witness. I wanted it in front of me, unfiled, while it lasted.

I watched his face do the things it was built never to do. I catalogued those too. I was keeping them.

He had a file on me a year deep. I was building one on him in a single night, in a room with nothing on the walls to help either of us. Every line of it was a thing he could not take back.

Nothing in him was careful anymore. He came apart harder than he had at my stomach, both hands full of me. This time I’d caused it on purpose, and I let him see that I knew.

I finished with both palms pressed to his chest and his name in my mouth, his heart going under my hand faster than any reading it had ever been allowed to give.

The count came up under it with nobody driving it. He had not counted since he came through that door. It arrived anyway, on schedule, six and then the seventh. I understood that taking his hand off it had not taken it off me.

After, the floor was cold and neither of us moved off it. He put his head on my chest instead of beside me. The stillness that always came for him didn’t come.

He shook once more, smaller, and I kept my hand in his hair until it stopped.

I checked my wrist once the shaking had settled toward sleep. The band was not cool, and had not been for the better part of an hour.

Adherence: 68 → 76.

Eight points. The largest gain the rate card had ever handed me, and it would not be enough to save either of us.

Every other reading that building had taken had a hallway to point to, a camera in a corner willing to vouch for it. This one had nothing on any log Charles Voss owned.

He would not need to know what had been said at this table to know something had. He would need the number and the missing hours. The system had both.

I didn’t wake him. I lay still under his weight with the one true thing I had left, which was that he had given me everything he had and I had given him a message from Edward and nothing else.

He would find that out. I had chosen it in a room where nothing was watching, which made it mine.

By Wednesday, the family would understand what sitting at this table had been.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Bay Tribune