I'm a very poor cook, but I manage to puzzle my way through the instructions on the cartons, and I'm just laying out the cutlery on the dining table in the dayroom when I hear the door rattle.
"Sam?" I call. "I'm home!"
"Reeve?" He calls back.
I step into the hall, and he does a double take. "Reeve?" He gapes at me: It's a priceless moment.
"I had a little accident at the cosmetics counter," I say. "Like it?"
He goes cross-eyed for a moment, then manages to nod. In addition to the makeover I'm wearing the sexiest, most revealing dress I could find. I'll take my praise where I find it. Sam's never been a great one for expressing his emotions, and this is going pretty far for him. Come to think of it, he looks tired, sagging inside his suit jacket.
"Hard day?" I ask.
He nods again. "I, uh"he draws breath"I thought you were ill."
"I am." I'm more tired than I want to admit in front of him. "But I'm glad to be home, and Dr. Hanta's given me the next week off work, so I figured I'd lay on a little surprise for you. Are you hungry yet?"
"I missed lunch. Didn't feel much like eating back then." He looks thoughtful. "That wasn't such a good idea, was it?"
"Come with me." I lead him into the dayroom and sit him down, then go back to the kitchen and switch on the microwave, then pick up the two glasses of wine I'd poured and take them back to the table. He doesn't say anything, but he's agog, eyes tracking me like an incoming missile. "Here. A toastto our future?"
"Our... future?" He looks puzzled for a moment, then something seems to clear in his mind, and he raises his glass and finally smiles at me, surrendering some inner doubt. "Yes."
I hurry back to sort out our supper, and we eat. I don't taste much of the food because, to tell the truth, I'm watching Sam. I came so close to losing him that every moment feels delicate, like glass. A huge and complex tenderness is crystallizing in me. "Tell me about your day," I ask, to draw him out, and he mumbles through an incoherent story about missing papers for a deed of attainder or something, watching my face all the time. I have to prompt him to eat. When he's done, I walk round the table to fetch his plate, and I can feel the heat of his gaze on me. "We need to talk," I say.
"We need." His voice is congested with emotion. "Reeve."
"Come with me," I say.
He stands up. "Where? What is this about?"
"Come on." I reach out and take his necktie and gently tug. He follows me into the hallway. "This way." I take the steps slowly, going up, listening to his hoarse breathing deepen. He doesn't try to pull away until I reach the bedroom door.
"We shouldn't be doing this," he says hoarsely. "I don't know why you're doing this, but we mustn't."
"Come on." I give him a little tug and he follows me into the bedroom and I finally let go and turn to face him. I feel a looseness in my innards as I look up at his face, a warmth at my crotch. "Kay. Sam. Whoever you are. I love you."
I freeze, my eyes wide as I see his pupils dilate and he looks puzzled: I realize he didn't hear me! "The magic phrase, Sam." And I realize that I mean it. This isn't the stinger-ampoule side effect of Jen's malice, it's something more profound. "What you said to me the other day, I'm saying it right back to you." His expression clears. "Come here."
He looks confused, now. "But if we"
"No buts." I reach over to him and tug at the knot on his necktie. It unclips from his collar, and I fumble at the top button. He chews his upper lip, and I can feel him trembling under my fingers, warm and immensely solid and reassuring. I take a step closer until I'm leaning up against him, and I feel through his clothes that he's as excited as I am. "I want you, Sam, Kay. I don't want to have any barriers between us, it hurts too much. I've nearly lost you twice now, I'm not going to lose you again."
His hands on my shoulders, huge and powerful. His breath on my cheek. "I'm afraid this isn't going to work, Reeve."
"Life's frightening." I get another button undone, then I look up to see his face above me, and I stop. I was about to stretch up to kiss him, but something about his expression isn't right. "What is it?"
"What's wrong with you?" he hisses. "This isn't like you, Reeve, what's happening?"
"I'm doing what I should have done last week." I wrap my arms around him and lean my forehead against his shoulder. But he's started a train of thought going, running on rails right through my lust simple: "I've had a bad experience. It put a lot of things into a new perspective, Sam. You ever had one of those? Done something stupid and crazy and maybe a bit evil and only realized afterward that you'd jeopardized everything you ever cared about? Been there, done thatmore than oncemost recently the day before yesterday, and I don't want to be defined by my mistakes. So I'm walking away from them. I want us to work, I don't want to"
"Reeve, stop it. Stop this. You're scaring me."
Huh? I pull back and stare at him, offended. It's like a bucket of ice water in the face.
"This isn't you speaking, is it?" he asks. He sounds certain.
"Yes it is!" I insist.
"Really?" He looks skeptical. "You wouldn't have thrown yourself at me like this last week."
"Yes I would! In a moment, if I wasn't so conflicted." Then what he's trying to tell me without actually saying it in so many words sinks in, and I jam one hand across my mouth to keep from screaming in frustration.
"So you're not conflicted now," he says, gently leading me over toward the bed and pushing me down on the edge of it, sitting next to me so we're shoulder to shoulder. "But you were conflicted when you went into the hospital, Reeve. You've been conflicted as long as I've known you. So you'll pardon my momentary suspicion when, the moment you get home, you throw yourself at me? After swearing off sex entirely just a week ago."
It's there in front of me, a yawning abyss of my own making, no longer avoidable since Dr. Hanta applied her fixative. I am stuck with the me that I have become, unable to restore that which is missing. "I'm not who I was a week ago," I say tightly. "She fixed the memory leakage, for one thing. And I've acquired a restored sense of my own mortality from somewhere I don't want to talk about, except it's not anything that they did to me. I think." But a cynical corner of my mind says, You said "I love you," didn't you? Last time you did that, your CY-hack was triggered. Someone's tweaked your netlink, haven't they?
The cold horror that steals over you when you wake up unsure whether you died in the night has just stroked its bony hand along my spine. Somewhere between the cooling puddle of blood in the library basement and Dr. Hanta's sly consent, I seem to have lost something. Sam's right, old-me wouldn't be doing this. Old-me would be scared of different things, and rightly soand I'm still scared of Fiore and Yourdon, and I still want out of their perverse managed society, but we're on board a MASucker, and I know what that means.