by Litte, Jane
Without looking down she joined her hands at the base of his shaft, startled by the softness of the hair there, so much softer than her experience had led her to expect. Only now she noticed that this man was mostly smooth, with only a bit of hair around his flat nipples and a small mapping beneath his belly button. The lush lock of straight midnight black hair on his head suggested something much different than his body revealed, and she wondered if he removed his body hair somehow, or if he was naturally smooth like this. She liked it, though, so much that she wanted more.
Moving awkwardly backward, she could not make him understand at first what she wanted; only when she started to tug at his leggings did he untie the lacings above his knees and strip them off while she kneeled above his legs, watching the muscles flex and ripple across his abdomen. There was no doubt that he was incredibly made, a temptation and a sin to be sure, but one she could—and would—no longer resist. His smooth thighs felt wonderfully warm and firm beneath her own, and as she moved her hands back to his shaft, she moaned at the way his clenching muscles inadvertently massaged her own intimate flesh.
Still, she was in control this time, and as she wrapped her fingers around the part of him that had so maddened her before, she looked right into his dark eyes, seeking a connection she was not yet ready to acknowledge could exist. She knew he wanted to touch her back, but her rough touch insisted that he keep his hands on the pallet, his arms shaking with the effort to let her set the pace. Good, she thought, see how you like being powerless. And as he had done to her, she took him into herself in one smooth motion, bringing her hands up at the same time and securing them around his neck. With the shock of her aggression clearly visible on his face, Hiro barely noticed when she wrapped her hands around his scalp lock, as he was so enraptured by the feeling of his cock inside her. But when she began to pull in rhythm to the short strokes she had set, he was torn between the bright pleasure and the sharp pain of their rough coupling.
It took everything in him not to reach up into her hair, swinging loose now across her luscious breasts, tripping across her small pink nipples. When she shoved his face into her chest, though, he opened his mouth over whatever soft, musky flesh he could reach as she pushed herself up and down, subtly changing her strokes to catch the best angle, grunting and moaning as she moved. One minute Hiro was afraid he would suffocate, the next he was sure his neck was going to snap under the frantic pressure of her hands clasped in his hair. But none of it mattered as long as she kept moving over his cock, her abundant wetness keeping the slide easy and fast, his only concern now that she would finish him before getting her own pleasure back.
When Myriam felt his fingers between her legs, searching through her wet folds, she wanted to slap his hands away. She wanted to push him down, tie him up, make him do exactly as she wished. The command was almost out of her mouth when started to feel that tingling, and then the rush that made her seize and clench in on herself, that electric pulse racing through her body, flashing in and out through every pore.
This time, the pleasure reached so deeply into her that she had no awareness beyond moving away and lowering herself to the pallet. Hiro was already attuned to the patterns of her breathing, so he knew she was asleep, but his own languor kept him still beside her. In a few moments he would rise and retrieve his knife, cutting the bindings on her wrists while she was still asleep, and then he would wait until she awoke and understood that she was free to go. First he would explain to her—in her language, much as he hated to use it—what she could expect among his people and what she would likely encounter if she tried to return to her settlement. He did not know what the chances were that she would stay with him, but he knew it must be her choice, and that already, he could not bear the thought of losing her to the savagery of her own people’s wars.
With a prayer to the spirits to look over both of them, he rose and moved away, while she slept on, beautiful, strong, and, for now, at least, safe.
Rebecca Lange writes in several different venues, not having been trained to do anything more practical. She doesn’t have any heroes, but she still has a few ideals left. Rebecca doesn’t sew or knit or craft, but she does pour a mean glass of wine, wishing only that she had more leisure time to enjoy it.
WETWIRE
SUNNY MORAINE
I was free-drifting the night Kim neuroburned me. I wasn’t looking for him, floating through seas of data without an angle or an object, so when he fingered me it was a surprise. I didn’t jump—you can’t really jump with no body to do the jumping—but I felt all my awareness jerk, and then I was arcing out toward him, skimming over the surface of him like a gull over a wave. I was glad to see him. And he always knew just how to touch me.
Tia, baby, he breathed into my netspace, words firing through me like synapse sparks, you need to disengage. He was always teasing me about that, about how much time I spent jacked in. Like he had any room to talk. He got me hooked in the first place, back in the final months of our senior year in high school, one night at a party, music too loud and too much bad shit in the air and in our bloodstream. He backed me up against a wall, stuck a thigh in between my legs, and ground up, lips against my ear: Let’s jet. I got something back at my place, blow your fucking mind. And half an hour later I was lying on his narrow bed, looking up at his ceiling, cracked and plastered with posters of bands I never heard of. I remember thinking hazily that they might be all that was holding up the roof. He wasn’t rich. But he got money for the console somehow, unless he stole it, and right then and there he jacked me in and fucked me while I watched the cracks in the ceiling widen and turn into oceanic trenches, seething with heat, boiling magma towers, clustering hungry life. I came, a steam vent exploded into raw binary. I watched it all happen from a strange, removed distance, floating through everything in my little submersible. Stranger in a strange fucking land.
You never forget your first time.
That was years ago. Years, a boyfriend, two girlfriends, three semesters of college, which ended in dismal failure, two cities, a string of shit jobs. After the third one, it occurred to me that I might be financing a habit. But at the end of my first year of college, back when I was still on the downward slide, I found him in there, floating in the datastream, and it was just like old times.
Kimber. Hey. He was tweaking me, tickling my nerves. He was the only one I ever let do that, because it was dangerous: wrong person gets in, tweaks you, you go into cardiac arrest and they find you a few weeks later when they’d probably just as soon not, with how you’re smelling. But I trust Kim. Kim is safe.
Well. “Safe” might be relative. But I do trust him.
Let’s meet, he said, slipping feelers deeper into me. I gasped because he was already getting me close, and because he’d never said that before. We hadn’t met, not since that last time after graduation. I didn’t know where he was. I didn’t go looking; he gave me every indication that he didn’t want me to; that our little net-trysts were all he cared to have from me. I get the inclination to not be found. It’s possible that I’m hiding, too; after all, one girl I know is head of cybersecurity at Apple, another guy went on to Harvard, and here I am in a messy twelve-by-twenty studio with wires in my goddamn head.
But he wanted to meet. I tried to fight the orgasm back. Somewhere a million miles away, my fingers froze halfway to my cunt. I needed to process. What?
You heard me. He slid lower, circling around me like a snake— then I felt the expanding pressure between my legs and I realized what he was doing. Oh, you bastard. I felt him laugh. I suddenly had a body—just a construct, but that was what made it so malleable. Net-clit and real clit, they were both wired to the same part of the brain. And he was in there, building on it, tricking my senses even further than the console was already tricking them. Growing me a dick. One of those failed attempts at a girlfriend—I don’t even remember which one anymore—used to like to do this with me, and I made the mistake of telling Kim about it. At first he did it j
ust to tease me. Then I guess he got to liking it, because he got better at it, more detail and subtler sensation. I felt it throbbing gently, twitching into the construct of his hand as he stroked me.
Now he was just being difficult. I twisted in his grasp, irritated as much as I was turned on. Asshole, cut it out. I want to talk about this.
Nothing to talk about. I want to meet. Kohl Cafe, downtown, 10. I’ll buy you a latte. His construct-hand was moving faster, jerking me with swift, expert precision. His control always was unreal. Feels good, right? I got something that can make this look like a tickle. Trust me.
And I did. I tried to tell him fine, okay, but I was already coming, thrusting up into his construct, neurons convulsing and splayed out all over the place in a way that would have been embarrassing if either of us cared.
See you. And just like that he was gone, and I couldn’t hang around there anymore. I snapped back into myself, naked and slumped down in my chair with my hand between my legs, still buzzing that post-orgasmic hum. I looked at the console, a little black box sitting under the TV, wire leads snaking across the floor to me. I pulled them loose, sat up, stretched. Everything was gray, the light coming in the windows thin and listless. I went to the window, pinched the shades, looked out at the sprawl. What the hell? I tasted myself on my fingers, still warm and salty-sweet. Yeah, I was going to meet him. He knew it. Dammit. And I always did steer clear of class reunions.
THE consoles were new, then. I guess they still are. It was strange tech when it first hit the markets, and it never got any less strange. They had been saying that something like it was coming for a while, but when it appeared, it was a thing looking for a reason, a little black box called into being for no immediately obvious purpose. Some people insisted that it was going to be revolutionary, finally removing the meat-wall between people and their machines. No more screens, no more hands and fingers; even touch-sensitive displays were going to look outdated. You’d go into the net, be part of it, control it with will alone.
But it was ahead of its time. There was no viable translation language, no way to turn all that data into something a person could fit into the coherent framework of their own experience. By now there are a few sites out there optimized for it, and even then, on the day I stepped out onto the rainy streets, my breathmask tight around my face, there were a few places to go if you knew where to look for them: dataspaces where you could emerge into a world that actually worked along rules you could recognize. You could understand it, move parts of it around.
Here’s what they didn’t realize: there were too many of us who didn’t want that. We were the first ones in the pool, sinking in the data-seas, surfing on waves of raw binary, slammed against the shores of our own perception and then straight back out for more. We loved it. It was like being there at the beginning of the universe, an explosion of unformed potentiality, the point of cosmic orgasm. I tossed out my name after I dropped out of college, and I called myself Tiamat because I floated in the watery chaos of that world like it was home. Once Kim gave me a taste I never wanted to come back. We were out there, Kim and me and all the rest of the net-jetsam, drifting through a paradise of incompatible coding, where anything could be and was and would be forever.
I know about things like this. I took some classes in college on the history and sociology of tech. There have always been cases where something arrives and no one is ready for it, and it takes a few years or even a few decades for the rest of the world to figure out how to make it fit. What they didn’t teach us about was ourselves, about people who make their own space in that lag time. What they didn’t teach us was where we go when the time runs out.
I didn’t bother with an umbrella. Most of my clothing was waterproof by then anyway—a necessary expense for anyone living in the lower-middle latitudes where eight months out of twelve is soaked with rain. I had moved for a job and then stayed after the job disappeared. Living so many hours a day on the net, it doesn’t matter as much where your meat sits.
I pulled the slicker closer around me and headed down the street toward the metro, people passing, faceless jostling here and there. On the steps of the metro, I tilted my head back and let the rain beat onto my breathmask. I thought about crashing waves of code, rhythmic and beautiful, hitting my brain like good sex. How do you define addiction? Whenever you’re not doing it, you’re thinking about doing it. That might work as well as anything.
I was twenty-three, then. I was too skinny, and my hair was getting too long, and my hips, my tits, my cunt, the arch of my back . . . they were getting abstract. They were coming unfocused. They were getting as hazy as the neon through the rain.
The Kohl Cafe was packed with people. I pulled off my breathmask. Sweat, the smell of coffee and burned sugar and wet dog, lazy, half-lidded eyes. Candles everywhere, tangles of Christmas lights. Screens showing nothing but fuzz and snow. Would I know Kim when I saw him? It had been years, and free-drifting had a way of changing you, burning you down to your essentials. But I knew his touch, and when it hit the small of my back I turned and there he was.
He hadn’t changed all that much after all. He was basically as I remembered him, except, like me, he was skinnier. Dark eyes, hair at once cropped and too shaggy, high cheekbones, thin mouth that always seemed a centimeter away from a smirk. He carefully touched my cheek, my lips, like a ritual greeting, but I knew what he was really doing. Dogs sniff each other. Free-drifters, we tell by touch. We know someone by the wiring of their nervous system, the pattern of firing synapses. Stimulus, response. I let go a delicate shiver and that hint-smirk became a full-on smile.
“Hi, Tia.”
“Hi, Kim.” I nudged the bridge of his forehead with my nose. “How about that latte?”
So we talked. I don’t know how long. Kim leaned closer to me, and I could smell him over everything else, that familiar scent of chewing gum and metal. Hot metal. Lines of solder like crystallized cocaine. He was excited, talking fast, but I was finding it hard to focus. There wasn’t any catching up; he didn’t seem even slightly interested in either of our lives before the present and everything that could stretch forward from that. “I got something,” he said. “New tech. I think it could make the whole free-drift experience something. . . .” He grinned. His teeth looked silver in the uneven light, chrome-plated tombstones. “Something really special.”
I asked how. He shrugged. He was being mysterious, trying to get me prying at him. Sometimes I found that endearing, and sometimes it really fucking pissed me off. I finished the latte, looked around at the faces lit by strobes, a series of still images, flashes of frozen conversing mouths.
“So why tell me, Kimber?”
He answered me by touching me again. One finger on the point of my chin and sliding down between my collarbones, just to where my skin dipped between my tits. It stopped there, hovering, so that with every breath his fingertip stroked the fine hairs on my skin into gentle erection.
Then he pressed. Sudden, hard. His fingernail jabbed into my flesh, and I yelped and swatted away his hand, staring at him with more shock than I wanted to ever show anyone. You never want to let people know they can surprise you. They’ll keep trying to.
“That’s why,” he said, leaning forward with his chin on his hands. “Did it hurt?”
“Yeah, it hurt, you asshole. This is bullshit, I’m outta here.” I was turning to push myself out of the chair, hand on my breathmask, but he caught my arm with more strength in his grip than any weak meat free-drifter ought to have had.
“Tia, I want to test it out on you. Trust me, I think you’ll like it. And you respond better than anyone else I know.”
“Bullshit,” I said again, but I wasn’t leaving. “Ask Aggie. Jack. You know a lot of people.”
“I know a lot of burnouts.” His hand was sliding up under the sleeve of my slicker, fingers moving like little nibbling fish. I was thinking about the bodies surging around us, about how when you were packed in this close, fucking was just a s
hort step sideways. Meat could be so slippery like that. “People with their nerves fried six ways to Sunday. You’re fresh, Tia. You’re sharp. You always have been. You know that.”
He was turning on the charm. He knew where the ego was; he could find it like crackers sniffed out holes in hash algorithms. I was proud of the fact that I had been drifting so long without burning out. Now he wanted it. He wanted to use me for something. Some people hate that, being used. But how else to do you know what you’re worth?
So I didn’t push away his hand and I didn’t walk out. And I said yes.
PEOPLE talk about time being cyclical, but I don’t think most of them really know what that means, how absolutely fucking weird it is to feel like your whole life is doubling back on itself, and you wonder what the last decade or so was all for, if it was just going to get you right back here again. There were things about this that were different, of course; we weren’t in high school anymore, we weren’t lit up with drugs and booze and the simple glow that comes with just being a horny teenager. But he pulled me up the grimy steps of his building, hulking in darkness spattered with halogen and neon, backed me into a corner of the entryway, and stuck that knee between my thighs, lips against my ear, and I thought about all those years ago. Let’s jet. I got something back at my place, blow your fucking mind.
And now I was here, and that night was why.
He didn’t say anything, just nipped at my earlobe and laughed when I shoved him away. Up the stairs, three flights and down a short, dim hallway. He keyed open the door and waved me inside. It was a messy, single-room deal like mine, a tiny bathroom off to one end, futon piled with clothes and junk, old kitchenette, and those posters again, plastered over the cracks on the ceiling and on the walls. At one end of the room was a workstation, a long desk and slim towers that hummed like purring cats, monitors, touchpads, parts, hardware. A workstation like I dreamed about sometimes, but didn’t expect to ever be able to afford.
