Tam watched. Iceweasel watched, Gretyl’s breath hot on her collarbone, hair tickling her cheek. Iceweasel had conversed with a dead person who had returned from the grave and need not ever die again, who might copy herself millions of times, be able to think faster and broader than any human. She shivered. Gretyl squeezed tighter.
“I need to go.” She hadn’t planned to say it aloud, but did.
“Let’s go, then.” Gretyl’s hand was small and damp. The air crackled.
They kissed as soon as they were beyond the crowd. The kiss had built for a long time. Iceweasel had kissed many people. Some she’d loved, some she’d been indifferent to, some she’d actively disliked and had kissed them and more out of boredom, confusion, or self-destruction. She kissed Seth so many times she forgot how to feel his mouth as separate from her own, so that it became no more erotic than smacking her lips. She’d kissed Etcetera properly good-bye, with the crackle of a really good kiss more charged because she did it in sight of Limpopo, stared at her while she did it, and when she was done, Limpopo kissed her just as fiercely, but with ironic detachment: this is how adults do it.
Kissing Gretyl was something else. Partly it was that she was older than anyone Iceweasel had kissed. She was also different in her presence, her bulk and mass, the frank brilliance of her mind and her studied indifference to her body’s relationship to other bodies. How many times had Gretyl boldly watched Iceweasel undress, catching her eye, not looking away? How many times had Gretyl undressed before Iceweasel with equal boldness, arranging her huge breasts like she was moving around the pillows before settling into bed?
Their bodies pressed, Gretyl’s yielding, and Iceweasel couldn’t get her arms all the way around her. She clutched at Gretyl, and Gretyl’s strong, soft arms pulled her. Her thigh pressed between Gretyl’s legs at the hot softness like fresh bread. Gretyl’s hand twined in her hair, turned her face with irresistible strength. Her mouth worked at Gretyl’s, tongue dancing on her lips, her teeth, and Iceweasel let herself moan and surrender.
Gretyl’s other hand kneaded her ass and brought her closer still. Iceweasel felt so small, as if she was a plaything to be pushed and prodded into the places where Gretyl wanted her, and she welcomed it. In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek.
It was a thing that Billiam liked to say. Billiam and she had hooked up now and again, all that crew had, in an aggressively detached way that they weren’t supposed to take seriously, and all of them ended up being in perpetual heartbreak over. Billiam thought she was cold, a product of her foofiness, and knew the accusation drove her crazy with self-loathing. He’d never say it when she turned him down, oh no. Not a way to manipulate her into fucking him. No, he said it when she did fuck him, especially when she was attentive. “In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek,” in his ha-ha-only-serious tone as she let her tongue trail lazily around his nipple, the residue of his cum burning on her lips. She knew he meant she was the one who offered the cheek, that whatever her ministrations, it was about her, not him.
Billiam’s memory rose in her mind and wouldn’t go. The last time she’d seen him, in the blaring chaos of the Muji factory, head caved in and blood around him, Etcetera’s panic as he went through the motions of pointless first aid. Billiam, his little aphorisms and his ways of getting inside her head, but who cried after they fucked, who had done the craziest, bravest things of them all. He snuck over the border at a Quebec Mohawk reservation to meet upstate New York bio-cookers for starter cultures for their beer. He always made sure they had a getaway plan, counted heads whenever they ran out ahead of the law, once going back to help a kid with a twisted ankle. They barely knew the kid, it was her first action, and she’d been a pain, helpless on the sidelines watching other people do the work, then complaining no one told her what to do.
They’d all hated her, but Billiam went back and carried her even though she had fifteen centimeters and ten kilos on him. They were nearly caught, and she’d never thanked him or come back again. That was Billiam.
She’d left him bleeding on the floor. He’d died. Her dad told her that later. He knew about their relationship. He had dossiers on her friends, social graphs describing their relationships. He’d hinted that he knew which were rats, selling information to cops and corporates, which she’d assumed was head-fuckery, but was plausible enough that it was impossible to fully trust anyone in the group.
She’d left Billiam to die. If he’d lived just a few more years, he’d have gone walkaway. He could have been with her. He could have his head in the scanner. He could be immortal, as she would be, soon.
Salt tears and snot ran into her mouth. Gretyl gently put her hands on Iceweasel’s cheeks and stared into her eyes with her big, liquid brown eyes, like depths of melting chocolate.
“We could be dead in an hour. Or any minute. And that”—she jerked her head toward where the mercs were being deadheaded—“that’s something else. Then there’s this,” she said, and kissed her so softly it felt like she’d passed a paintbrush over her lips. “Death, sex, immortality, and immorality. Crying is okay.”
“There was a friend of mine,” Iceweasel said. “Dead.” She drew a shuddering breath, couldn’t let it out. It was trapped in her chest with her words.
“We’re all thinking about our dead. We left dead behind in the fire. That crowd in there has the fever. That Tam didn’t have a chance. No way they were going to slow down, certainly not because they might be remembered as monsters by default. When they think about how the future will remember them, they’re imagining being there in person to defend their honor.”
“It’s crazy,” Iceweasel said. “I can’t even think about it.”
“We’ve had longer to get used to it. We walked out of default because we were working on this and were terrified and excited by how the zottas treated it like the holy grail. It’s impossible to escape your environment. You can be a spocky lab-coat, but you can’t help but feel like whatever’s got zottas scared and excited is scary and exciting. Whatever they want has to be important.”