“I noticed. Well.” She runs a finger over my erect left nipple, her neat brows dipping as she watches it pucker further. “Most of you.”
They tell you so many lies when you’re younger. There’s this shiny, manipulative concept of The One: your soulmate, your everything, the only person you’ll ever truly love. Keep it in your pants for The One, girls—anything else is just a waste! Then they tell you sex is best when you’re in love, that anything else will hollow you out until you’re so numb that new love will just bounce off, and all that came before will rattle around in the dry ventricles of your tired heart. What they don’t tell you is that you can have satisfying, spark-spewing sex with someone you don’t even like a great deal. Or that you might still grow to love that person—you don’t fall, it’s not like that, you just feel—and they’re not The One, but it never matters. So confusing. Grey waters, bad for swimming in, but like a red rag to a desperate bull.
As if a bull could do anything but sink. I deserve to drown.
I didn’t know I wanted Rachel until she kissed me. I didn’t know I loved her until she showed me her scars, and though I tried not to feel anything, my tears pushed through regardless and all my words melted to a senseless mess of sympathy, the kind that claims you whether you throw yourself on the altar or not. Only when I left her arms did I realize it was the wrong kind of love; calm and restful, but not live-or-die. Not the kind she felt for me. I keep this to myself, of course. I don’t want to lose her, or the echoes of him I find inside.
There are nights when I wonder what kind of person this makes me. On the same nights, I wonder why they tell us all the lies.
“You know, I’m thinking of getting a mural on the ceiling,” Rachel declares as we lie there, side by side, gazing up at her glass chandelier. “Like the Sistine Chapel, but with unicorns—really rotund, sad-looking unicorns, twined around artsy foliage and clutching candles and works of great renaissance literature.”
I chuckle. “That would really piss him off.”
“I know, right?” She tips her head on to my shoulder. “You should spend some of yours on something ridiculous, Lee. It’s therapeutic.”
Therapeutic. Right. Which is why Rachel still sees her therapist twice a week, twelve years after Aeron assaulted her.
“I’m doing more than that,” I point out. “SilentWitn3ss is ready to go, more or less. Eventually, it’ll render his stupid news channels obsolete, and he’ll run out of all his blood money way before you spend yours. It’s like, lights, camera, fuck you.” I snort. “And unicorns.”
“You know people are just gonna use that camera thing to make porn,” she teases.
“Is that an invitation?” I stroke my elbow along her slender ribcage, teasing and slow. “You want to try out one while we’re...?”
“Making love?”
Fucking. We’re fucking.
“Yeah,” I mumble.
She bites her lip. “I could be persuaded.”
She might accidentally post the video on Facebook, however, and then I’d be fucked in quite a different manner altogether. Best to host it on my laptop alone.
“Hang on then.” I drop a kiss on her shoulder before slipping off to find my bag. It sits beside a globe cocktail cabinet—some other expensive, useless trinket bought simply because she can—and I drag out my laptop, along with the latest prototype in its battered plastic case. “I just need a second to sync it up, and then…” I peer back at her from the sofa, wiggling my ass a little. When you feel stupid naked, doing something that makes you look even stupider always helps, if you’ve noticed. “Then we can see how it works.”
She blows wisps of hair from her face. “Like you didn’t already do this in your trials.”
“Different subject matter. Far less interesting if you ask me, but we can’t put porn up at expos, apparently.”