“You don’t need the drugs,” she said, her voice an earnest whisper.
“But…”
“No.” She stepped toward him and reached out to touch his shoulder. “Don’t hide behind the pills. Face the world… the real world.”
“I don’t understand.”
She was looking directly at him, her lovely eyes troubled and yet almost happy. “You don’t need the drugs,” she repeated.
“I… I was sick.”
Nodding, she asked, “Would you like something to eat? Or do you want to rest?”
“No… no food. I think I’ll lie down for a while. I’m tired…”
He leaned on her shoulder and together they went into the bedroom. He lay down and she sat on the edge of the bed, next to him. He felt as if he was burning, his heart hammered. Yet he didn’t feel sick. Something in him was elated, wildly happy.
With trembling hands, he reached out for LUH. She leaned forward and they kissed. His hands slid over her body, then they slipped inside her blouse, feeling her skin warm and soft and incredibly lovely. He felt her soft soft breasts and the erect little nipples and their mouths melted together and she was lying beside him.
Something far, far back in his mind was warning him of danger but he ignored it. She was beside him, holding him, bodies pressed together, wanting him as badly as he wanted her. For a ludicrous moment he fumbled her blouse off. She had to help him with her pants.
“What about you?” she whispered as he stared at her nude body.
For an agonizingly self-conscious moment he didn’t know what to do. Then he sat up quickly and slipped off his clothes.
Her fingertips traced a design of pleasure across his chest. “You’re beautiful,” she said, smiling at him.
“You… no, you’re the beautiful one,” he replied. “You’re…” And then he couldn’t find the words he wanted so he pulled her against him and kissed her and felt the whole world disappear except for her. She was the whole world, all the warmth, all the beauty, all the incredible unbearable ferocious delight of it.
She was saying something to him, something urgent, her lips at his ear, but he couldn’t hear her. He was holding her, seizing his world, the world they made together, hearing nothing and seeing nothing but feeling, feeling it all explode in a frenzy of joy.
When they lay side by side again, touching yet apart, the warning voice came back to him: What you’ve done is wrong! Immoral! Illegal! He turned his head and looked at her, drowsing warmly next to him, her eyes closed, her lips parted in the smallest of smiles. And he thought: To hell with them. To hell with everything. She’s what I want. She makes me happy.
And then he added: Besides, how can they know? The chances that they’re observing this apartment at this moment are infinitesimal. They’ll never know.
He slept. When he awoke, she was in the kitchen. He padded in there, wearing only his pajama pants. She was fully dressed.
She turned from the cooker and said, “Hello,” as if it was the first time they had seen each other in years.
Grinning, he went to her and started opening her blouse.
She reached up and took his face in her hands.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“Yes.” He opened the blouse completely and circled her waist with his arms.
“For food?”
He laughed.
She reached over to the counter beside the cooker and took a squeeze tube of mock cheese and squirted it at him.
“Hey, no…” He flinched back. “Don’t… don’t… you’ll get it on the floor.”
LUH tossed a whole plastic pack of food pellets at him. He ducked instinctively, laughing. The pellets scattered all over the floor. Still laughing, he got down on his hands and knees and started picking them up. LUH dropped down too, and they met head to head beside the kitchen table. She was giggling at him.
With as much seriousness as he could muster, THX said, “I’ve never been under a table before.”
She was giggling like someone who’d taken too many stimalls. “Look,” she pointed to the underside of the gleaming white table. “Dirt.”
THX stared at the smudge under there. “That’s not dirt… can’t be dirt. Dirt’s a violation.”
“Looks like dirt.”
He thought a moment, then said, “I have something better.” He held out his fist. Her tiny hand touched it and he opened, palm up, revealing the pellets. “Look, food.”
She shook her head. “That’s not food… can’t be food.”
THX sat on the floor next to her. “Looks like food.” He put one of the pellets in his mouth. “Tastes like food.”
She smacked the underside of his hand and the pellets flew into the air. Laughing, she scooped up a handful and tossed them into the consumall. “Produced to be consumed!”
THX sat there on the floor, laughing at her. She opened a cabinet door and pulled out more pellet packs.
Ripping them open, she tossed them into the hissing consumall.
“Hey, wait a minute!” He scrambled to his feet. “Not all of them. I’m hungry!”
She threw some of the pellets at him. He ducked and grabbed for her. They both went down and his hands were on her breasts again.
“Ow… you’re hurting me!”
He let her go.
“Don’t stop,” she said.
“But…”
She took his hands in hers and put them back on her breasts. “Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop.”
Chapter 5
They were lying in bed together, neither of them asleep.
THX’s mind was telling him: You could lose everything. Everything.
“But I was unhappy before,” he muttered to himself, so low that he couldn’t hear it himself. “Everything was normal, but I was unhappy.”
Unhappy. Do you think you’re going to be happy now? If they find out, you’ll be destroyed. And her too. And it will be your fault.
He turned his head to look at her. She was watching him, her face troubled, aware.
“I thought you wanted a new roommate,” he said abruptly.
“What? Oh no. Who told you that?”
“SEN.”
“That’s not true,” she said. “He was lying. That’s not true… I need you so much!”
He slid his arm under her head and pulled her to him.
“I was so scared,” LUH said. “So alone. I needed to touch you so badly… to have you touch me. After I started cutting down on your sedatives I was frightened… of what kind of a person you’d turn out to be.”
“Turn out…?”
“Ohh… I’m sorry… I don’t know what I’ve done. I should have left you alone.”
Yes, his mind agreed. But he said, “No, don’t say that.”
The wake-up tone sounded.
THX started in surprise. “What time… what shift is it?”
“What… it’s three, I think.”
“Three! We’ll be late!”
He got up out of bed and headed for the sanitary. “Come on, we’ll be late.”
LUH called to him, “Don’t… don’t take anything.”
“What?” He was staring at his own face in the medicine cabinet mirror: puffy-eyed, tired- looking.
“Try not to take anything… please,” her voice came to him.
“I’ll try,” he answered softly. “I’ll try.” But his hands were already shaking.
The shift was a nightmare. He couldn’t concentrate. He kept thinking about LUH. Twice his supervisor had to warn him. THX knew that those warnings went into the permanent record for review by Control. Yet, despite the babble of voices in his earphones, despite the tension of the work, the exasperated looks of the supervisors, his own gut-turmoil and shaking hands, THX felt—not happy, certainly, but different. These things, these people around him, they didn’t touch him. And he realized that they never did. LUH was the one who counted. She was the only one that mattered to him.