“Um…”
“So you know this happens in every fandom, right?” he says. “Especially real-person shipping?”
“What?”
“Here, sit here.” He pulls me down next to him and kisses my cheek. “There’s always that fic where they find all the fic their fans wrote about them, and they pretend to be all shocked and horrified at first, and then they read it together—”
“In some fancy hotel room.”
“With cute matchy-matchy bathrobes. And then they get drunk on cheap champagne, and as their inhibitions melt away they end up—”
“—acting out their favorite scenes,” I sigh.
“Exactly.”
“Oh my God.”
He hits his bookmark tab and scrolls down to the bottom. “I think this one was kind of hot. The one where we do it in the bowling alley—”
“Abel!”
“It’s useful, Bran. Trust me! This way you just point to the stuff you want to try—oh. Except that.”
“What?” I hide my eyes.
“Right, I bookmarked this fic to laugh at it. Sorry.” He giggles. “This sorcha doo person needs an anatomy lesson. Did you read this one?”
“I skim the sex scenes.” I uncover one eye, see the word slick, and re-cover fast.
“Yeah, in that position, your first time, in a bathroom stall? I think dizzying heights of ecstasy are out.”
I cringe. “I figured.”
“And honestly—I hope you’re not disappointed when I say this.”
“What?”
“I don’t think I can unbutton your shirt with my teeth.”
“That’s okay.”
“Here, this one’s pretty good, though.” He clicks on retro robot’s “You Can Drive My RV” and scrolls down. “The part that starts Abel’s back hit the wall with a thud? Definite possibilities. Just look.”
“Yeah, I can’t.”
He leans over and nips one of the fingers that cover my eyes. I grin. He nips another one, and another one, until I smack him away and coax my eyes back on the screen.
I make myself read the words this time, instead of skipping to a safe part. The first few lines are like medieval torture, but then the shock wears off and it’s pretty okay, not much different from the Cadsim fanfic I used to sneak. It’s creative. Ridiculous. Funny. Sort of hot, if I ignore the fact that they’re straight-girl masturbatory fantasies about us. We spend the next half hour taking our time with it: laughing at the bad scenes, poring over the good ones. I go through my backlog of embarrassing sex questions, all of which Abel answers with casual directness, like a wet and sexy stranger giving directions to the post office.
“Okay.” Abel stretches and cracks his knuckles. “So definitely that bit from the steampunk AU except minus the brass goggles and mechanical claw, and then we mix in some ‘Three Little Words.’ And—what else?”
I scroll down shyly to “How to Repair a Mechanical Heart.”
“Chapter 18,” I say. “I’d like to start here.”
“Is this the one where we conjugate the verbs?”
“Yeah. But the scene right after.”
He skims it. “Nice. A little overheated, but whatever. Okay. We’ll keep these up for inspiration, but we’ll improvise too. Plan subject to modification at any time, depending on our mood and your comfort level. Sound good, Captain?”
I nod fast. “Yep.”
He tosses the condom on the nightstand. “When and if, okay? Don’t look at it; it’s like a little foil packet of intimidation.”
He reaches across me and snaps off the lamp, so the only light left in the room is a gleaming rectangle of laptop screen. He pushes that off to the side. Cold prickles tick across my neck. All my elevator bravado whooshes away.
No more jokes.
We’re doing this. For real.
Oh God.
“So first,” he murmurs. “I’m supposed to tenderly reveal your sculpted chest, as if unwrapping a gift.” He kisses me, whispers in cinnamon against my lips. “Lie back for this, okay?”
Okay. I sink into the cool white pillow. I can do this. Obey commands. I glance at hey_mamacita’s words on the laptop, blurred and unreadable from here. He tugs at the tie on my bathrobe and slides the terrycloth off my skin: chest first, then the rest of me. He unpeels my boxers, still damp from the shower, in one fluid move. Like I needed a reminder he’s done this before. Many times. And there’s no way I won’t disappoint him.
“How’s that?” His fingers trail down my chest and up again, lingering on—God I hate the word “nipple” so much, I can’t even. “Good?”
I swallow the rock in my throat. “Good.”
“I can’t see your eyes. Are you freaking?”
Status: Naked. On bed. With boy. Systems overheating. Sudden doubts multiplying. Meltdown imminent.
“No,” I lie.
“Now, that scene you like has you taking the reins pretty early on, remember? I mean, if you’re too nervous we could change that, but I have total faith in you.” He’s shrugging off his own robe, tossing it on the floor. It’s too dim to see much but I shut my eyes anyway. “What do you think?”
My throat creates some affirmative syllable.
He drops down on the pillow beside me and sweeps me on top of him. I go taut with the warm shock of skin to skin, the huge undeniable fact of his hardness insisting itself next to mine. I think I have to pee. I wish I could brush my teeth again. What if I do everything all wrong? What if I die of happiness and then go right to hell? A vague panicked stop stop stop wheels through my head and I’m gripped with the worst fear of alclass="underline" what if I run away?
“Your scene.” Abel brushes damp hair off my forehead. “You take over.”
“I don’t know what—”
“Yes you do.” He pecks two kisses inside my hand and presses it to his heart. I feel its warm steady knock against my palm. “You do, sweetheart. Relax.”
The word sends a thunder of calm rolling through me. My fingers twitch to life. hey_mamacita whispers in the sultry, cocksure voice I imagine for her: With bold nimble hands he bolted Abel’s wrists to the smooth white sheets and braved the distance between their lips. It was shorter than he’d imagined. Because now he was free.
I let her words fill my head, guiding my first moves.
And then, in the pale glow of the laptop, I start to write my own.
Chapter Nineteen
We lay together in the wrecked white bed, sprawled side by side like action figures someone just got done playing with. Except I’d never mistake myself for plastic, not now. It’s like Sim said in Episode 2-15, after he first got the chip: I was never fully aware of my body before. Now every part of me is alive. Electrified. Am I wrong to feel joyful, Captain? Is it foolish not to fear pain yet?
I feel Abel still awake, fiddling with the sheets beside me. We’re on the same page, I guess, trying to sidestep morning-after awkwardness by not sleeping at all. I wish he’d talk first. I don’t know how to break the seal. I have some sincerely stupid questions—like, I’m not sure what we did tonight actually counted as losing my virginity—but that’s kind of a question for Dan Savage and not really sexy afterglow talk, which I still have no clue about even after a hundred Cadsim and Abandon fics and really all I want to do is pull a guitar out of thin air and serenade him with “Here, There, and Everywhere,” like I do in Chapter 18 of “How to Repair a Mechanical Heart.”
Abel taps my cheek. “Hey…?”
I turn my head, smile. “Hey.”
His eyes flick down to the space between us. I look down and see what he’s done.
Plastic Sim and Plastic Cadmus: tucked snugly under the sheet together. Spooning.
I crack up laughing.
“So?” Abel says.
“So.”
He cringes cutely. “How…was it?”
I would write horrible fanfic. The mechanics blur; the last thing we did blasted my mind inside-out and left me clear and calm and goofy-dreamy.
“Great,” I tell him.
“Well…mostly great. Right?”