As we slid slowly upward I felt little butterfly flutterings that I knew were Amelia’s hands on me, back in the cubical, and as I became erect it was wetness that wasn’t the imaginary ocean around me, and then the ghostly clasp of her legs and a faint pulsing up and down.
It wasn’t like Carolyn, where I was her and she was me. It was more like a compelling sexual dream that possessed you while you were half awake.
The water above was like beaten silver, and three sharks scudded there as we floated up. There was a little shiver of fear, though I knew they were harmless, since the string wasn’t rated D or I; death or injury. I tried to project to Amelia not to be scared, but I didn’t feel any fear from her. She was preoccupied. Her physical presence grew stronger in me, and she wasn’t exactly swimming.
Her orgasm was faint but long, radiating and pulsating in that strange-but-familiar way that I hadn’t felt in the three years since I lost Carolyn. The ghosts of her arms and legs rocked me left and right as we rose up toward the sharks.
It was one large nurse shark and two dogfish, no danger. But as we passed them I felt myself go soft and slip out of her. It wasn’t going to work, not this time, not for both of us.
Her hands on me were like feathers, coaxing, pleasant but not enough. There was a sudden faint loss of something, dimensionality, that meant she had come unjacked, and then she was using her mouth, cool and then warm, but it still wouldn’t work. Most of me was still in the reef.
I felt for the cable and unjacked myself. The lights went on and I immediately started to respond to Amelia’s ministrations. I slipped my arms around her slipperiness and rested my head on her hip and didn’t think about Carolyn, and worked a couple of fingers between her legs from behind, and in a minute we both came at once.
We were allowed about five seconds’ rest, and then the lady was pounding on the cubicle door, saying we had to get out or pay rent; she had to clean it up for the next customers.
“The meter stops running when we both unjack, I guess,” Amelia said. She nuzzled me. “I could pay a dollar a minute for this, though. You want to tell her that?”
“Nah.” I reached for our clothes. “Let’s go home and do it for free.”
“Your place or mine?”
“Home,” I said. “Your place.”
* * *
julian and amelia spent the next day moving and cleaning house. Since it was Sunday, they couldn’t get any paperwork done, but they didn’t expect any problems. There was a waiting list for singles who qualified for Julian’s efficiency, and Amelia’s place was rated for two, or even two adults and a child.
(A child was something that was never going to happen. Twenty-four years before, after a miscarriage, Amelia had opted for voluntary sterilization, which gave her a monthly cash-and-coupon bonus until age fifty. And Julian’s view of the world was so sufficiently dark that he wasn’t eager to bring a new person into it.)
When they had everything boxed, and Julian’s apartment clean enough to satisfy the landlord, they called Reza for his car. He scolded Julian for not calling him earlier so he could have helped, and Julian said, honestly, that it hadn’t occurred to him.
Amelia listened to the conversation with interest, and a week later would point out that there had been a good reason for them to do it alone, a kind of sacramental labor—or something even more elemental, nest-building. But what she said when Julian hung up was, “It’ll take him ten minutes to get here,” and hurried him to the couch, one last quick time in this place.
It only took two trips to move all the boxes. On the second trip Reza and Julian were alone, and when Reza offered to help unpack, Julian said well, you know, maybe Blaze wants to go to bed.
In fact, she did. They collapsed exhausted and slept until dawn.
* * *
once or twice a year, they don’t bring the soldierboys in between shifts; they just immobilize us one by one and have the mechanic’s second move straight from barber chair to cage, a “hot transfer.” It usually meant something interesting was going on, since we don’t normally work the same AO as Scoville’s hunter/killer platoon.