“These expos must be very dull.”
“Most profitable things are.” I flick buttons, get the app up, connect to her WiFi. The app is the newest addition; Finn, a dorm mate of mine, wrote it in like three days. Then I flick the teeny switch on the underside of the SilentWitn3ss, which is a flesh-colored tube gently tapered to sit behind the ear. “Baby, come over here.”
Rachel huffs and rolls her eyes good-naturedly, scooting across the comforter on her knees. She crosses her legs to sit beside me, and I lean in, stroking her hair up into a makeshift ponytail until I’m so close that our noses bump. There, I find her small, dark eyes with mine; there, she keeps the briefest grey flash of the tattered thing she is, not broken but snapped and hacked and chopped right down the middle. Broken is the wrong word for Rachel. It implies her hurt was accidental, that she was just a vase knocked off a window ledge by a careless cat.
“Here—hold it up, like this.” I nudge her hand with my knee, nodding until she brings it up to fist her hair. “I need to fit the camera. It’s flexible, see…you’ll hear a couple cracks while I shape it to your ear.”
“Sexy.” A small smile plays at her lips. Our voices have taken on that quiet, other-world quality; no matter what we say, there’s always tension. The candied kind.
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it.” The tube crackles as I position it just so for the camera to peek up without obstruction.
“So nobody notices this? Really?” She rolls her shoulders, her eyes darting sideways as if she might be able to see. “Feels like it’s poking out.”
“Depends. You don’t have to wear it covertly, but I designed it so you could, if you wanted.”
“Does it have a mic?”
“Uhuh. A real powerful one.”
“Wow.” She drops her bunched hair, letting it cloud and cup her chin, and brings her fingers to stroke the protrusion at the back of her ear. “But I mean…cops and stuff, they already have this kinda thing.”
“It’s not for cops. It’s for everyone else.” With careful fingers, I re-arrange her hair so it’s tucked away from the lens. Then I glance back at the laptop, where the app beeps softly—everything’s synced. Ready to go. “Could come in useful, right?”
“Right,” she whispers, staring at me. “It won’t, like, come off if we get a little carried away?”
“Stays on for runs.”
“Interesting.” She runs the tip of her tongue across her teeth.
“No harm in pushing it a little. Just to make sure…”
Somehow, I’m in her lap with my arms around her neck, and then I’m toppling back on to the rug as she crawls over me, her mouth warm and playful. After everything she’s been through, you wouldn’t pin Rachel as the one wearing the trousers, would you? But in moments like this, she does. And I like it. I let her. I encourage her, and all the while, my little invention records each shiver of flesh and shudder of breath.
This is the thing about girls, see. Doesn’t matter that we only finished ten minutes ago. We can go again, and again, and again…