by S. N. Graves
“He was such a cute little pup too. Enjoyed being alive so much.” Sam tugged off her wrist link and unfolded the device, setting it in her lap to access the touch screen. She sniffled as she scrolled through Mr. Morris’s billing information and sent it back to Jerri at the home office. “I feel like a murderer.”
“You didn’t kill him. You know it’s not the same thing.” Jerri’s voice filled the car with reassurance so strong she could have been sitting right next to Sam. “Besides, if anyone killed him, it was that asshole Morris.” Jerr’s voice had that tone, the one that said the woman was dangerously close to an explosive political rant even before she spoke again. “I swear, some people shouldn’t be allowed to have pets, SynthPets or otherwise. There needs to be a law. A competency test or something to weed out the losers.”
“Oh my God.” Sam wiped her face with a fistful of tissues, glancing up through the windshield to make sure the car’s navigator hadn’t gotten her lost in the city again. “What if it had been an organic? A real dog?”
“Honey, I wouldn’t worry about that. He’s living in an AnyTown development, a low-end AnyTown development. No way he could afford a real animal.”
“He has kids. And that little boy of his is going to come home and find his dog dead. Because I killed it.”
“If that little boy is anything like his father, he probably won’t care. I doubt anyone is going to care as much as you do right now.” Jerri’s sigh echoed in the vehicle’s cabin. “I’m going to stop letting you go out on service calls. At least once a month you get your heart ripped out.”
Sam stuffed her used tissues into the trash compartment before checking her destination on the car’s NavScreen in the dashboard. Maybe she would take a detour? Just skip work for the rest of the day and… “Oh, the Fudge Factor is having a sale on cupcakes. I think I am going to be late getting back.”
“Sam, no. No sugar. That’s just going to make you feel worse.”
“Creamy custard filling…” She pulled up the full menu on the screen and flipped through one delicious-looking goody after another. “Red velvet…”
“Sam! If he hadn’t called you fat, you wouldn’t even be thinking about this right now.”
“Pig.”
“What?”
“He called me a pig. And a cow. And a cunt.” She settled back into her seat, cradling the unfurled wrist link against her knees. “Last one messed up a perfectly good barnyard theme.”
“Oh, that’s it. On the next software update, that asshole is getting a Cujo.”
“No. Just let it go. I’ll be fine. Not like it’s any worse than I’m used to.”
“You shouldn’t have to be used to it. No one should have to get used to that. The guy is a dick. And…for the record, you are not fat. Okay? You’re natural. Tits and ass don’t make you fat. There is a difference. A huge difference.”
“Yeah, I know, I’m the huge difference. A huge, fat difference.”
“I wish you wouldn’t beat yourself up like that, honey. A lot of guys would fall all over themselves to have you.” Jerri was quiet, and then she chuckled. “I bet Mr. Morr-ass is just gay.”
“You say that about every man who insults me.”
“Yeah, well, this city is full of queers, what can I say?”
Sam sighed. She knew Jerr was just trying to cheer her up, but her sense of humor could be seriously nasty. “Last week you said it was full of conservative tools.”
“Mhmm. I’m not seeing the discrepancy.”
The wrist link beeped loudly, and an electronic voice cheerily announced that Sam had an incoming call. Her father. “Jerr, I gotta call you back. Dad’s beeping me.”
Jerri’s chuckle was dry, a little annoyed. “A daughter’s work is never done.”
“Tell me about it.” She shut down the call from Jerri, and then took a moment to put the car on the path to the Fudge Factor. To hell with it. It wasn’t like it really mattered what she ate—she was going to be a hot mess regardless.
Then she accepted the call from her father and slumped down in the vehicle’s plush seat. “Hey, Daddy. Everything okay?”
“Sam?” Her father wheezed through the connection. “I need to see you.”
“What’s wrong? You sound bad. Have you called the doctor?”
“No, dear. I just…need to see you. Now.”
Well, hell. Cupcakes would have to wait.
* * * *
Daddy hadn’t been taking his meds. That was what it had to be. He’d skipped a dose, missed a dose, whether on purpose or due to a simple slip of the mind. For some reason that Sam could never fathom, he was perfectly capable of calling her for help, but utterly refused to be the one to call Dr. Wilkes. Most likely, that was exactly what she’d do when she got through the downtown traffic and reached his office, and she knew he knew that. It seemed like such a terrible waste of time—time he wouldn’t always have if the flutters in his chest turned to something more lethal.
It was useless to say that, though. He’d just pat her on the arm and smile, then insist that he didn’t need a doctor—he had her. If Dad had been a poodle with a hemorrhoid, or a horse with a mangled foot, he might have had a point, and she’d told him that hundreds of times. Besides, most of her expertise these days lay in synthetics. Even though Daddy worked like a machine, she couldn’t very well take him apart and fix what was malfunctioning. But if she could, she knew where she’d start—his damn aversion to contacting the doctor on his own behalf.
Finding herself summoned to his office for the third time in a month had her strongly considering supergluing a little cone collar to his neck. At least that way he wouldn’t be able to bring himself to go into work day after day despite his ailing health. If she’d her way, he would have retired long ago. She’d even promised to move back home, if only he’d listen to reason and hand the management of the company to someone healthier. Of course, he wouldn’t hear of it. Daddy was as ornery as a randy hound and as sturdy as a bear, or at least he seemed to think so. She hoped he’d eventually see he was an old bear, in need of nothing more strenuous than golf outings and country club visits, before he planted himself in the ground with his foolishness.
She loved him, but it was exhausting running out of the clinic in a panic, ditching service calls, and letting her own work pile up, to rush to his side every week. She was a heartbeat away from exploding on the man for thoroughly hijacking her life. It wouldn’t hurt him to take care of himself, to lay off the cigars and his nightly doses of brandy. It certainly wouldn’t kill him to call his own doctor every now and again, or to ferry himself to the appointments. And it would be nice if every time he called her, it wasn’t to as her to come to that towering monstrosity of an office building right smack in the center of rush-hour traffic. Sam was brimming on a revolt. A revolution that said, Daddy, I have a life too! Sorta.
Only she would never say anything of the kind. Sam would grit her teeth, admit there was no way she would ever find a parking space at the office this time of day, even if she turned off the car’s navigator and searched manually, and park two city blocks away in public parking. A half mile from Colfter’s headquarters. The rain was coming down hard now, and despite her umbrella being in shreds from where a couple of feisty perma-pups had gotten hold of it during an early-morning house call, she trudged out into the veritable monsoon on foot.
She wasn’t given a second glance as she made her way into the company lobby, dripping wet from her pastel-pink lab coat to her Your dog ate what?! aluminum breast pin. It wasn’t the first time they’d seen her so—a near drowned synthtech sloshing in from the rain to rescue her dad, their boss. Though Sam longed for the days when she could just go home to a quiet cup of cocoa and her cats, she knew today’s visit wouldn’t be her last.
Yup, this was it. This was the usual. This was what passed for her life.
A full and rich existence of dealing with assholes, executing adorable animals, and force-feeding her stubborn father his pills. She was
almost stoically accepting of it in the elevator, and comically prepared by the time she reached the door with his name etched in gold on it, but no amount of sardonic humor could ready her for the sight within.
Arles Colfter leaned against the window behind her father, viciously candid for one who could never be up to any good.
When her thoughts had turned to him in the past, and they inevitably did, the Arles in her dreams tended more toward similar fashions as the grim reaper—complete with wicked scythe. The suit he wore now somehow fit well into her vision. It was tailored for him, as everything in his life was, and fit him so nicely it seemed to wear him as a mere accessory. It might have been an odd thing for one to focus on, the man’s suit, but it was far better than allowing her gaze to touch his face, especially since she could feel his eyes locked on her.
If she could have gotten away with simply saying, Sorry, wrong room, and running for her life, she would have, but just as her feet began to back-step for that elevator, Daddy’s voice caught her.
“Sam, dear. Come in, have a seat.” He made a vague gesture to one of the chairs across from him at the desk, but she barely took notice. Her eyes were still on that suit. Before she could sort through her urges to obey her father’s voice, or her inner warnings to run, that articulated black suit was upon her.
“You’re soaked,” Arles said.
Had he arrived at that brilliant deduction by the puddles that led from the elevator to her feet? Or by the way her hair hung in sad little streaks that stuck to her face? It probably had more to do with his hands on her, brushing her moist mop back into some state of control behind her ears, running along her shoulders to send rivulets of fabric-trapped rain to the floor.
The man was obviously a genius.
“Yeah…” It was difficult to use the sarcasm play when all she wanted to do was hide behind her father like a scared five-year-old, but against all she managed her best-ever smarmy glare and pointed to the wall of rain-beaten windows. “It’s raining.”
“I noticed.” He smirked at her. Like she was adorable. It made her want to stomp on his foot, maybe grind the heel in a little. She might have done just that, if her heart hadn’t seized to a rattle in her rib cage. At least, that was how it felt as the hands on her shoulders drew her in, and completely enfolded her against the hard body of Arles Colfter.
Those arms wove around her like beguiling serpents, pinning her own to her sides, more by his suffocating presence than strength. His broad mass blocked out the overhead light entirely. When as she thought he could invade her personal space no more, he pressed his lips to her forehead. It was just a kiss, a mild one as those sorts of things went, even between stepsiblings. So why did it feel like he’d just seared his claim into her?
His lips were overly cool against her flesh, lingering there long after her breath had stalled in her throat. Perhaps she had a fever; the rain could do that to a person, especially in this unseasonably chilly weather. Come to think of it, she did feel a bit dizzy.
That was the last thing on Sam’s mind. A fever, possibly having to call in sick tomorrow because of it, and knowing she shouldn’t because she had appointments set for two Dobermans whose coding was difficult for the other techs to navigate. If she’d been given a second more, she might have thought to curse her father for dragging her out into the rain, particularly when it meant she’d have to be pawed at by the human filth that held her trapped now.
The human filth that kept her from smacking her head nastily against the marble tile when she went limp and unconscious.
* * * *
For as far back as Sam could remember, Arles had been a terrorist. Even as a young boy his wishes were rarely denied. When they were, his tantrums and retaliation made it clear it was far less painful to simply cave to his whims. He controlled his world with screaming, insults, and scheming that bordered suspiciously on desperation. For many years Sam found herself pitying him. Something had gone terribly wrong in that boy’s head. Something must have; otherwise she couldn’t wrap her mind around his behavior.
Her memories of her own youth were vague at best, nonexistent entirely on her bad days, but the few fading images she clung to shared one common thread. Arles Colfter. It had always struck her as odd that when her mind betrayed her—the years before her stay in the hospital lost largely to a black void—the few spaces of light and lucidity held only her spiteful stepbrother. It was confusing and disappointing. Often she found herself resenting his presence in her mind, as if his image alone had chased away all the happy moments with her mother, her father, birthdays, and Christmases combined.
When she tried very hard to recall those happy times, those nostalgic pictures every young girl had a right to, there was only Arles. Arles’s smug smirk in the darkness of her bedroom. Arles screaming a fit so violent it made her daddy cry. Arles dangling her dangerously from her bedroom window by the waist, just before he was shipped off to boarding school for being too dangerous to have around the other children anymore. And of course, his return days before his mother, her stepmother, had mysteriously fallen to her death. She had many memories of fear and Arles, but what disturbed her more was the memory of his touch, scalding her skin with a deceptive gentleness that tormented her still.
She was haunted by the ghost of his fingertips trailing her flesh, tainting every attempt at a normal relationship with men thereafter—God simply hadn’t made another set of hands like Arles’s.
Ugh, she was as much of a sicko as he was.
Sam sat in an overly plush chair before her father’s desk, her nose and mouth completely hidden by a pulsing brown paper baggy used to control her breathing. She carried them with her now, and apparently, when they’d seen fit to relieve her of her lab coat and drenched scrub top, they’d thought enough to pull one out for her to use. She didn’t want to think about it too much, since doing so meant she had to think about the missing lab coat and the fact that she was now wearing the jacket to Arles’s black suit. Arles’s jacket and nothing separating it from her feverish skin but a flimsy bra with painted bunnies doing lewd and inappropriate things to one another on it. It was even pink. No, she didn’t want to think about that at all.
“I have to say that’s the first time I’ve had a girl swoon in my arms quite so literally,” Arles said.
Sam wasn’t sure what annoyed her more, the cloud of smug surrounding him, or him perched on the arm of her chair, looming so closely.
“I know I’m dead sexy, but you’re going to have to learn to keep it under control.”
She was certain, however, that it was the smirk then, more than his words, that made her lose it, sending a back-fist hard into his chest. Once she started, she continued swatting until he relented, and without abandoning his amusement, moved away from her and her chair.
“Vasovagal syncope, triggered by exhaustion, you ass.” It was difficult to sound fierce when one had a paper-bag muzzle, but the glare she shot him all but dared him to debate her. “You have no idea the day I have had. It happens. Mostly when I am stressed.”
“It’s true,” Her father interjected softly. “Couple of weeks ago she collapsed on a service call.”
In her defense, she was sure that call would have been stressful for anyone. Telling two children that the animal they grew up with was too out-of-date a model to find replacements for, telling them it would be best to just retire the animal and get a new one… It was heartbreaking.
Arles’s eyes narrowed and the humor left his face in favor of morbid interest, or was it concern? It was hard to tell with him, but he was looking her over like a bug under a microscope. She had to fight the urge not to squirm like one, a battle she lost as he began to draw nearer.
“Sam? What exactly is wrong with you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Of course it is.”
“It is not!” She ripped the bag away and tossed it to the side of the chair. It wasn’t like it was doing her any good anyway, considering. “
My health has nothing to do with you, Colfter, and unless you’ve some business with my father, I’d like you to leave.”
“No.” His lips pursed in that thoughtfully argumentative manner that suggested any moment he would say something to make her absolutely furious. And she’d be forced to beat him senseless with a paperweight. Far be it from him to disappoint. “My business is with you, mostly. Dear old Dad is now unemployed—I’m taking back my company and kicking him out of the building within the hour…so you could say I no longer have any business with him whatsoever.”
She was too stunned to launch the little glass apple on her father’s desk at Arles’s head. She felt a touch dizzy once more. This was a new depth of low, even for Arles. “You can’t be serious. My father has been a part of this company since—”
“Since he stole it from my mother. Yes, I know.” He sauntered around the back of the empty chair beside her, only to drop down into it heavily. It spun with him, and he encouraged it to continue, filling the room with the pained squeaking protests of the chair under his weight.
“He’s been loyal. He’s worked hard.” She scowled as Arles paused his spinning long enough to glare at her, and then resumed it, no doubt just a desperate attempt to irk her dad. Dad had certainly punished them both often enough for doing the same thing when they were children.
“He’s lost us significant amounts of money. He’s lied. He’s embezzled. And worst of all, he’s been caught. If he’s very lucky, we’ll be able to arrive at some sort of agreement which won’t result in him being a prison bitch.” Arles took her moment of tongue-tied silence to flash his teeth in a broad, sharkish grin. “Ever see Oz, Sammy?”
She had no words. All thoughts flew right out of her head like bowling pins struck by a speeding train. For several heartbeats, she could do nothing but wait, staring at her father’s bowed head, waiting for the vehement denial she was sure would come. But it didn’t, and he wouldn’t even look at her. She knew she should be mad, disappointed, perhaps even shouting, but she just couldn’t muster it past the fear rising in her throat.