by Elin Peer
“Yes, once.”
“Was it related to seeing blood?”
Tristan gave a small nod and looked down. “I watched one of my younger sisters being born and I passed out.”
“That explains it.” The paramedic patted Tristan’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, you’re not the only one.” After doing a quick test to determine that there were no signs of a concussion, the paramedic closed his medical bag. “You’re good. As long as you don’t aim to become a warrior or work in the medical field, you’ll be fine.”
“I design drones,” Tristan said distractedly, still looking around to orient himself. His eyes fell on Storm and Marco before he spoke to me. “Why are they here and what happened to your dress?
“We’re here because Shelly called for my help. You’re lucky, because I was busy watching some good porn, I almost didn’t answer. Good thing I did, though, because sitting outside a crowded bar with drunken men wasn’t the best place for Shelly to flash.” Storm offered Tristan a hand to pull him up from the ground. “There was also the part about her fearing that you were dying that made us hurry down here.”
“Shit, I’m sorry, Shelly.” Tristan pointed down to the dress on the ground, now more red than yellow. “You ruined your dress.”
“I had to stop the bleeding.”
When Tristan looked like he was losing balance again, Storm was quick to grab his arm for support. “Don’t look at the dress. I’m taking you home. Where’s your drone?”
Tristan raised an arm and pointed to the right.
“You take Tristan, and I’ll take Shelly,” Marco instructed. Storm lifted a hand to signal he had understood.
“I think I should go with Tristan and make sure he’s safe,” I insisted.
“Storm has him. Come on!” Marco picked up the dress. “You want to keep this?”
“No.” I shook my head and picked up the rolled-up drawings that Tristan and I had been working on.
I was still shaking from the incident and followed Marco to his drone without a word.
“Are you okay?” he asked when the drone took off from the ground.
I nodded but felt anything but okay.
What if Tristan or I had been killed by a stray bullet?
What if Marco and Storm hadn’t come to my rescue?
The severity of the danger I’d been in was sinking in.
“Shelly, talk to me.”
“I’m sorry about your t-shirt,” I said because it seemed like the safest topic at the moment.
“Forget my t-shirt. I’m asking you if you’re okay.”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
He studied me with deep lines on his forehead. “Liar. You’re not fine, how could you be?”
Meeting his eyes, I admitted, “I was scared, that’s all.”
He didn’t say anything, just waited for me to continue.
“I was scared that Tristan wasn’t going to make it, and I was scared of that man sitting next to me, and the other men ogling me.”
“Good.” Marco gave a firm nod. “At least that shows you have some situational awareness.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, a bit offended.
“Come on, Shelly, you don’t want to open up the discussion about you having sex with me without my consent again, do you?”
“Just because I’m a Motlander doesn’t mean you get to pick a fight with me. I’m not like the others. I’ll fight back, you know.”
“I’m not picking a fight with you, I’m just stating the facts,” Marco muttered and looked straight ahead. “You practically raped me.”
The fear from earlier, combined with the shame I felt, made me release all my emotional garbage on him. “Take that back!”
“No. If you can’t see what you did was wrong, it’s because you’re lacking empathy.”
That hurt. It was time to bring out the facts and put him in his place. “You were there to have sex, and I have a form signed by you that states you were a willing participant to a sexual act.”
“Yes, but not with you.”
“What’s the difference? You asked for an old prototype because you were horny and wanted ‘release’.” I held up my fingers for quotation marks and spoke loud and fast.
“The difference is that I know you, Shelly.”
I scoffed. “You don't know me. You didn't even recognize me.”
“True, but that’s because I was expecting a robot. I didn’t ask to sleep with a human.”
“And now you’re scarred for life?” I flung the words at him with thick sarcasm. “Funny, since I remember you enjoying it.”
“I’m not denying that I enjoyed it. That’s not the point. The point is, Shelly, that you were this kid and I never...”
I swung my head to face him and interrupted. “I'm not a kid anymore. I'm a grown woman, a psychologist, biologist, engineer, and award-winning designer. I'm twenty-five years old. In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been a girl for a long time.”
Marco’s eyes stared at me. “I fucking noticed alright.”
It was like all the air went out of me, and I just sat there spent and tired.
“Better?” he asked me after a pause.
I frowned at him.
“I do it to my students sometimes when they’re scared. I anger them. It beats being afraid.”
“You provoked me on purpose?”
“Uh-huh.” He kept looking at me. “You’re welcome.”
“Oh, now I’m supposed to thank you for making me feel bad about myself?”
“You’re calmer now, aren’t you?”
I was too tired and miserable to care about politeness. “You accused me of raping you,” I said in a blaming tone.
Marco remained calm. “Yeah, I knew that detail would get to you. A little far-fetched, but it did the job, didn’t it?
“So now you’re saying that I didn’t rape you?”
He scoffed. “Of course, you didn’t rape me. I wanted to fuck you, for sure. It just got weird when I learned your real identity.”
My mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water.
“Come on, Shelly, you have to admit that you were shaking with fear and now you’re not.”
I shook my head, too confused by his strange logic to know what to say. The drone had landed on a rooftop that I didn’t recognize, and because of our argument, I hadn’t questioned what we were doing here. Now I turned my head and looked around. “Where are we?”
“My place.”
“I thought you were taking me home.”
“That was the plan, but you seem too upset for me to feel comfortable leaving you alone. It’s better if I keep an eye on you.”
“No thanks.” I hugged myself and looked away.
“Come on, it’ll be fine. We got off on the wrong foot, but this could give us a chance to get to know each other again.”
I gave him a look of complete disbelief. “Why? All we ever do is argue.”
Marco shrugged and exited the drone. “Are you coming?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
I supposed I could have protested harder or refused to get out of the drone. But the prospect of going back to my office or to my room in the city didn’t excite me either. For better or worse, I was still curious about Marco.
“Okay, but I can’t stay long,” I muttered and got out. “It’s already late.”
“I know.” Marco waited for me to walk around the drone and get off the automatic parking lane before he pushed in a code on a key panel. I watched as the drone rolled to the parking area, allowing room for the next drone to land.
“I figured you’d be tired, which is why you’re sleeping at my house tonight.”
“I’m not sleeping here,” I exclaimed and stopped walking.
Marco kept going at an unhurried pace, as if he had no care in the world. “Yup, you are, and tomorrow we’ll talk.” Opening the door, he held it open with his foot, and turned to me. When I still di
dn’t move, he lowered his brows. “Shelly Summers, I’m done arguing with you for one day. You’re staying with me tonight, and that’s that!”
The stubborn part of my personality dug her heels in, refusing to be ordered around by him. And yet, my body moved forward, controlled by the curious, reckless, impulsive part of me that Marco had a talent for bringing out.
CHAPTER 10
Mutual Arrangement
Marco
Seeing Shelly vulnerable tonight had gotten to me.
Both her harsh rejection last week that she would never marry me, and my anger with her for tricking me by pretending to be a sex-bot, had evaporated the moment I understood she was in danger.
Shelly could have taken on any man at that bar and crushed him in an argument or an academic challenge, but it wouldn’t matter. I’d seen the look in their eyes. They couldn’t have cared less about her brains. To them she was tits, ass, and smooth skin. A live version of what they’d only seen in antique porn from the time men and females were equal in numbers.
“Sorry about the mess. It’s Storm; he’s annoying like that,” I said as we walked into my apartment.
“Storm lives here?”
“Yes, he’s my roommate. Helps pay the bills and all.” I waved for her to follow me down the hallway.
“It’s small, so you won’t get lost.” Pointing around, I said, “Kitchen, living room, bathroom, and down the hallway are the two bedrooms.”
“Do you mind if we check up on Tristan? Maybe you could call Storm. I just want to be sure Tristan is alright.”
I made a quick call to Storm, who told me he’d brought Tristan home and that they had just spoken to Tristan’s father, Finn.
“He wants Tristan to be with someone for the next twenty-four hours, in case there’s a concussion.”
“Why? The paramedic checked him over. There were no signs of a concussion,” I pointed out.
“I know, but Finn is a doctor and he said it wouldn’t be the first time some overworked paramedic made a wrong assumption. He made me promise that I’d stay with Tristan tonight.”
“Okay, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“Yeah. Did you get Shelly home safely?”
“She’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” I put on a t-shirt from my closet since Shelly was still wearing mine.
“What did you mean when you said it was a mess?” she asked when I was no longer speaking to Storm.
“Just the shoes lying around; didn’t you see it when we walked in?”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s your definition of messy? What are you, some cleaning freak?”
“I like it tidy, that’s all.”
“Since when? I don’t recall you being obsessed with tidiness at the school.”
“I’m not obsessed. It’s just that this place is small. Maybe if I could afford something bigger, I might be more relaxed about it.”
“Do you still teach?”
“Yes.”
“Then how come you don’t live at the school? Isn’t that the norm here in the Northlands?”
“Things have changed. I work at an integrated school where more than half of the children have families to go home to. The older ones came when their moms married an Nman while the younger ones have mixed parents. We call them Nomo children here.”
“So do we.” Shelly looked around my apartment. “The media came up with the term when Christina and Boulder had Indiana. He was the first mixed Northland and Motherland child to be born.”
“That’s not true. All of us Nmen are mixed.”
Shelly drew her eyebrows close and moved to the window. “True, but you Nmen were taken from your Motlander moms and sent here when you were three years old. Nomo children don’t suffer that trauma since they grow up with both their parents.”
“You make us sound broken. We’re not, you know.”
Shelly didn’t react to my comment but asked a question. “How many Nboys stay at your school?”
“Thirty-two. I have night shifts, but it’s only twice a week. That’s why I like to have my own apartment to go home to.” I smiled. “We also have three sisters attending school, which I’m excited about. They are real Ngirls.”
“Meaning both their parents are Northlanders?”
“Yes, their dad won their mom in a tournament and it’s funny because there’s less than a year between each of the three girls and they have a younger brother too. I guess some people are just lucky.”
Shelly widened her eyes and I got the impression she didn’t share my definition of luck.
“But of course, the sisters have their mother so they go home in the afternoons as well.”
“Don’t you feel sorry for the Nboys that don’t have families?”
“Not really.” I offered her something to drink. She settled on a glass of water. “In a way it was easier for my generation. We didn’t have anything to compare it to. If you ask me, the Nomo children are often caught in the middle with parents who disagree on how to raise them.”
Shelly swallowed a sip of her water. “Integration takes a lot of compromising.”
“True. And with Nomo children soon being the new normal, we’d better get used to it. The number of Nboys we receive from the Motherlands has decreased by ninety-four percent this year compared to ten years ago.”
“Ninety-four percent?”
“Yes. Around five hundred thousand women have moved here and we have a large growth in births. The Council in the Motherlands insists that newcomers of all ages will count instead of the Nboys we normally get. I suppose it’s their way of keeping our numbers in check, but it will only last for so long. With the influx of women moving here to marry and start a family, our number of inhabitants will be exploding in the future. I predict that soon all Nboys will grow up in families.”
“That’s inevitable,” Shelly agreed. “And good, right?”
“Maybe.” I sighed and plunked down on the couch. “It changes our culture for sure. Teaching the Nomo children is different than teaching the Nboys. Last week I had a mother come and tell me I was too hard on her son.”
“And were you?”
I snorted. “Her kid got punished because he deserved it. It wasn’t anything personal, but she said I was a sadist for making him do forty push-ups in front of the others.”
“Augh.”
“Yeah, some of the moms stress me out with the way they pamper their children. They are worse than Kya ever was, and I remember how Archer and I used to laugh at all her talk about inclusion and kindness. These moms take that shit to new extremes.”
“Give me an example.” Shelly sat down on the couch and curled her feet up under her, but I could still see some of her creamy skin, and it made it hard to focus so I looked away.
“Ahh, mostly it’s the way they are involved in everything we do as mentors. They have a lot of issues with the way we Northlanders teach and it’s fucking annoying that I have to defend the way we’ve been doing things for generations. One of the moms demanded her boy be excused from fight training because he could get hurt. I refused but because he’s a Motlander child, he’s protected by certain rules and the female Motlander teachers I work with allowed him to sit out. The next week the mom wanted to expand that to any type of physical exercise because apparently you can trip and fall while running. She also complained that we allow the children to climb in trees and play tag.” I shook my head. “Tell me, Shelly, why the fuck would a woman like that come up here to marry a large strong man? I mean, did she think her husband became that fit by watching others exercise?”
“What does he say about it?”
“Same as me, of course. What dad wouldn’t want his son to be strong and fit?” I shrugged. “That mom is just one example of how backward-thinking Motlander women can be. And then there’s the stop and think application that the kids have on their wristbands. It’s driving me fucking crazy.”
She chuckled. “I know the lady who invented that. She was one of my profe
ssors when I studied to be a psychologist.”
My face scrunched up in a grimace. “I would never hit a woman, but with her I might make an exception. Every time the children say something that the application deems rude or insensitive, a small hologram with an avatar pops up and gives a small lecture on how to stay balanced and create a peaceful environment for all. If I hear the word inappropriate one more time I will bang my head against the wall.
“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of drama at the school.”
“Sometimes. Not always. I just wish Motlanders would be more open to how we deal with things here in the Northlands.
Shelly smiled at me. “Do you still like teaching?”
“I used to love it and there are still good days, but honestly it’s not as much fun as it used to be. If I didn’t need to pay bills I’d become a writer instead.”
“A writer?”
“Yeah. I would love to write a book one day, but I don’t have the time. That’s why I need to win the million dollars in the tournament.”
Shelly nodded slowly. “Right. And when is the next one?”
“In three weeks.”
“Three weeks,” she repeated before quickly looking away. “That’s soon.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the bride… what’s her name?”
“Louisa.”
Shelly picked at my t-shirt that she was still wearing. “I don’t like tournaments.”
“Few Motlanders do.”
We were quiet for a few seconds, before Shelly spoke in a low voice. “At least now you know what to do on your wedding night.”
My lips lifted a little. “True, thanks to you.”
Shelly picked up her glass of water again and dried off water drops from the table with her hand. She must have taken my comments about being tidy a bit too seriously. I was just about to tell her to relax when she asked me a question that threw me off a bit.
“I wasn’t your first, was I? There was that time in the Motherlands when we visited the beach. As I recall it, you got a lot of attention from women.
“Are you asking me if I had sex with any of them?”
“It’s none of my business.” Shelly looked down at her right hand rubbing her wet thumb and index finger together. “I just figured that the girl you were kissing with out in the water… well, I don’t know, it looked very passionate, that’s all.”
