*
I found Wick next to his beloved swimming pool full of “disgusting” biotech, and I took him right there, on the floor—unexpected and with complete surprise, even stealth, and found him willing. After being outside, after having to be so alert, so in control, I was the opposite of those things—and fully recovered from the attack. I could move in all sorts of ways without pain.
I’d been outside and nothing bad had happened to me. Or, at least, nothing bad had had a chance to happen to me. And nothing bad was happening to me back inside, either.
“Not now,” he said, “I’m working!” As per our old rituals, our codes and procedures.
“Now,” I said.
“But I’m trying to work,” and the joy in him, to voice the old complaint that meant he’d like nothing better than to be taken from work. To be taken by me, as hadn’t happened for weeks.
So I took him and kept taking him until he had nothing left and we glistened with each other’s sweat. Our bodies still knew each other, and the Balcony Cliffs still knew that we belonged together. I could still feel those lines of power extending outward, my traps and his surprises intertwined, and here we were at the absolute center of our creation.
Even if we hadn’t spoken after, whispered those endearments so personal no one else would have known what they meant, it would have been good. It would have felt good, would have let me know that whatever had come between us that was wrong could be put right. But that led to me letting down my guard, perhaps because Wick in those moments after we had sex always seemed more playful than usual.
Wick got up, put on some ragged shorts and an old T-shirt, and went to the edge of the pool. He leaned on one knee, fishing something scaly and metal-gray out of the pool’s fetid depths while, around one pale, thin, but muscular haunch, he looked back at me with those magnetic eyes.
“You’re putting us both in danger, Rachel,” he said cheerily. Wick looked naked from that angle, exposed and rangy. There was an almost insect-like humming and buzzing to the way he moved. That’s when I knew for sure he’d taken something to make himself feel calm, or taken one of his own beetles and part of him was now far away from this place.
“With sex?”
Wick laughed, a higher-pitched sound than usual given the acoustics of that cavern, and padded around to the other side of the pool, some glint or glimmer driving him to use a stick to stir up the goop.
“Borne followed you out today,” Wick said. “Because of him, you came back early. Borne continues to grow at a ridiculous rate, Rachel.”
So there it was, said out loud. I opened my mouth to protest that he’d been spying on me, but what was the point? I’d snuck into his apartment and gone through his things.
“Shouldn’t you be more concerned about Mord—and the Magician?”
“Borne is not your friend, Rachel.”
“I never said that, Wick.” Although he was now.
“You stood right here and told me that, told me to accept it.”
I sidestepped that. “I never said that to you. Not that way.”
“You told me I had to accept Borne.”
One step more and all we’d be doing is denying, denying, denying. I never said that, I never did that, the way couples do.
“But why can’t you accept him?”
“Because you’re wrong. Because I can’t go against the facts. I can only work around them.” He was telling me that belief in Borne was like a religion. “Like the fact nothing ever comes out of Borne.”
That again, as if it meant anything.
“Him not shitting or pissing doesn’t seem to be dangerous. Him not shitting or pissing hardly seems a threat to our security.”
“Maybe he hides it somewhere.”
“Who cares if he hides his shit or not?” These were the conversations I loathed, the ones that made us sound dumb, distracted, petty.
“Because if not, then Borne is the most efficient creature I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s too late to break him down into parts, Wick. He’s more valuable to us alive.” There were some facts for him.
“Yes, it is too late, but not for that reason,” Wick said. “I should’ve been stronger in the beginning. I shouldn’t have listened to you.”
“If you hadn’t listened to me then, we might not be together now.”
Wick gave me a quick, darting look. “Are we together now? Are we really together or do we just share a roof?”
I didn’t answer right away. The ease with which I’d slipped into his bed now struck me as a problem. Not because I was returning to him but because he’d asked no questions first, hadn’t resisted, had saved them for the aftermath despite our difficulties. I knew it meant I had a power over him I’d only guessed at before. Although perhaps I’d known it ever since he’d let me keep Borne.
“Only if we have no secrets,” I said. Which wasn’t fair. But it was also true. Wick still kept secrets from me.
Wick stood, stared back at me, still holding the handle to the pole, at the end of which he’d attached a strainer to separate out the smallest inhabitants of the green-orange pool. The water popped and hissed as half-grown fetal things broke the surface and submerged again. In the greenish light, Wick looked a lot stranger than Borne.
“I know he talks,” Wick said. “Borne talks. I’ve heard him. I heard him once saying he might be a weapon.”
Anger gathered, and I tried to tamp it down. “You were listening. You were eavesdropping in my apartment.”
That feeling again, of this one issue rising up to destroy us. I hated the idea that someday we would be like some estranged couple forced to share the same apartment because neither could afford to move out and pay full rent.
Wick shook his head. “No, I wasn’t. I heard him talking in the corridor. He was talking to a couple of lizards he’d killed. Before he ate them. He didn’t see me.”
Of course Borne talked to himself a lot. He was alone a lot more now, or alone together with me. Somehow that burned more than anything else. The sense that I might not be enough.
“He’s not a weapon. You misheard. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Wick shrugged. “Maybe.”
I could see the hurt in Wick’s eyes, at the way I hadn’t even acknowledged the betrayal of him finding out Borne could talk that way.
And so I relented, in a kind of full surrender that covered his hurt with kisses, covered that hurt with sex. Because I still wanted him, but also so I wouldn’t have to talk. Talking was the problem. Talking was the enemy. No more talking.
*