He was a good lover. It shone through the heart-thumping roar of a long-frustrated fuck. She couldn’t put her finger on it—metaphorically, anyway—but as she came again, clamping her thighs around his ears, she realized it: the lack of hurry. Even after years of walkaway, she was used to slicing time into rice-paper slices thin enough for one discrete thing, before moving onto the next. Most of the time, she rushed to complete this current moment before the next thumped the door. Every adult she’d known matched that rhythm, the next thing almost upon them, the current one had best be taken care of in haste.
Etcetera sliced his time thick. He’d slide along her body to her breasts and rest his face on them for an unmeasured pause before nibbling. It went on longer than she expected. It was better than nice. Her own body-clock synchronized, metronome tick slowing to a languorous heartbeat that felt like there was all the time in the world. It was more decadent than the sticky juices on her fingers, livid hickey on her left breast, the turgid boy-nipple she was rolling between her fingers.
When they were done, she had no idea how late it was. It might be sunset, or later, though they’d come upstairs at daybreak. She wiped interface surface on the wall and brought up a clock, was surprised to see it was only midday. Not hurrying all the time had not meant not losing all the time. The difference between glorious languor and endless hustle was an hour or two. It felt like she’d just been given a day.
She kissed him at the junction of throat and earlobe and worked her way around to his lips. He embraced her in that unhurried way, enfolding her in the robe he’d donned.
“That was very nice,” she said.
“It was very nice over here, too.”
They twined fingers. She opened the linen hatch and they stripped the bed and put new sheets on, wiped the surfaces and turned on the air-scrubbers. A green checkmark glowed on the back of the door as the room acknowledged that it had been adequately reset. They left, hands twined and dirty linens in their free arms. These went down a laundry chute by the stairs, and they went to the stables to make some new clothes.
[v]
The fuck didn’t discombobulate their relationship, thank goodness. He hugged her and kissed her cheek instead of shaking her hand in the common room, and his two friends—who, she thought, were doing something along the same lines—shot her knowing looks. He wasn’t all over her every time they met, nor did he give her the studied ignorance treatment. A week later, they ran into each other in a corridor and stopped to chat. He leaned against the wall with his hand splayed against it. She laid hers alongside of it, and he took the hint, and they went back up to the fourth floor for another unhurried, easy play session.
“How are you liking it here?” she asked during one of their pauses.
He looked uncomfortable. “Honestly, I don’t think this is my thing. We left default because I wanted to be part of something where I was more than an inconvenient surplus labor unit. I know I can work here and there’s plenty to do, but it feels contrived. The other day, I totally fucked up some linen processing, ruined thirty sheets. The system just assigned someone else to make new ones and push the blown-out ones through the feedstock processor. The whole thing fails so safe that it doesn’t really matter what I do. If I worked my brains out or did nothing, it would be the same, as far as the system is concerned. I know it’s fucked up and egocentric, but I want to know that I, personally, am important to the world. If I left tomorrow, nothing around here would change.”
She chewed her lip. She’d wrestled with this herself for many years, but admitting it was in bad taste. Everyone talked about special snowflakes, and it was the kind of thing that was an insult from a stranger but not from a friend. You weren’t supposed to need to be a special snowflake, because the objective reality was that, important as you were to yourself and the people immediately around you, it was unlikely that anything you did was irreplaceable. As soon as you classed yourself as a special snowflake, you headed for the self-delusional belief that you should have more than everyone else, because your snowflakiness demanded it. If there was one thing that was utterly uncool in walkaway, it was that self-delusion.
“You know that this is the love that dare not speak its name around here? There have been one hundred billion humans on the planet over the years, and statistically, most of them didn’t make a difference. The anthropocene is about collective action, not individuals. That’s why climate change is such a clusterfuck. In default, they say that it’s down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can’t personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that’s something else, too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it’s you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.”
“But it’s hard to pretend that you’re not the protagonist in the movie of your life. Normally it doesn’t matter, but being around here rubs your nose in it.”
“Everything’s got contradictions. I sometimes wonder if someone is doing something that makes everything better because I wrote a specific line of code. To really thrive out here, you have to want to make a difference and know you’re totally replaceable.”
“Beats default. There you’re not supposed to make a difference and you’re totally surplus.”
This discussion killed her horniness. The thought that her sensations were the same ones innumerable people had felt before and during and after that moment made it feel like a cheap trick, a way of tickling her reward circuits for a drip of this and a sneeze of the other. Normally, sex made her feel like the universe revolved around her sensations. Now they felt like a meaningless flare of light in an uncaring void.
She sat up and pulled on clothes. Etcetera didn’t seem put out, which was a relief and kind of worrying.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “Just not in the mood so much.”
“Sorry about that.” He got into his underwear and pants, turned his shirt right-side-out. “Despite whatever orthodoxy I’m supposed to embrace and no matter how uncool this is, I want to say that I actually do think you’re special. Better than special. Glorious, actually. And beautiful. But mostly glorious.”
Her heart thudded. “Listen, dude—”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to go lovesick. But I’ve met dozens of people since I went walkaway and you are the first one who made me welcome, and not just because you fucked my brains out, though that did make me feel welcome. But because I can talk about this with you and you don’t roll your eyes like it’s the stupidest thing to ask about, and because you don’t go wide-eyed doctrinaire either. You’re like the only person around here who’s thinking about being a walkaway and doing walkaway. Without you, I would have moved on. This place is amazing, but it’s too finished, if you get what I mean.”
She pulled her dress on. It gave her a moment. When her head emerged, he was staring frankly at her. He had very nice eyes, a nice smile. A little tentative, but she liked that.
“I think you’re great, too.”