Ian and I rarely go into town, and our parcel of land is gated with electroshock fields to deter intruders.
I sense when Ian walks into the study, in spite of the darkness and his quiet tread, and my body reacts with a brief flash of fear despite the fact that I know it’s him. It’s the same fear that jolts you when you think you’ve seen a ghost, only to realize it was your own reflection in a darkened mirror.
I switch on my desk lamp and swivel in my seat.
“Yes?” My voice is curt. Looking at him makes me want to cry, but maybe not because I’m sad. I find it hard to believe that I once lectured the International Robotics Alliance on how to prevent emotional surges in artificial intelligence systems.
“Are you all right?” Ian asks as he crouches in front of me, the muscles of his lean body bunching beneath the unblemished stretch of smooth brown skin. He’s wearing nothing but the boxer briefs that he sleeps in, a habit he picked up after determining it was common in humans.
He reaches up and brushes his fingertips along my jawline. I didn’t teach him that—how touch could be comforting. I certainly never thought it was something he’d need to know. Ian’s creation had been both intensely personal, what I’d worked toward since I’d built my first drone as a child, and completely dispassionate. It had been my job, for fuck’s sake. I was helping to usher in the next great leap in robotics for mankind, not making a toy, let alone a partner. Ian was my greatest success. The pinnacle of artificial intelligence merged with the most up-to-date humanoid robotics. They’d wanted “something almost indistinguishable” and I had delivered, unaware of the consequences.
I’d had to introduce Ian to the world slowly, covertly immersing him in humanity to help him learn faster. Walks in the park, trips to museums. People watching from the safety of sidewalk café tables. Bingeing films and classic TV shows and discussing them afterward. Sharing my favorite books and music with him. It had all been work, even if at some point I’d started enjoying it. Then one day, after months of increasingly complex conversation, of banter and laughter, he’d looked at me, uncharacteristically hesitant, and asked, “Have I been programmed to love?”
“No,” I’d replied firmly, my hands beginning to shake. I’d thought I hadn’t been programmed to love either, to be quite honest.
“Then I believe I may be malfunctioning, Annika.”
I’d thought I’d known what I had created. I’d had no idea until he leaned down and kissed me. His mouth had been surprisingly warm, but I didn’t think of the success of my artificial circulatory system until much, much later.
“Annika?” Ian’s fingers stop moving, resting on my cheek and drawing me from my reverie.
“I’m fine,” I say.
He gives me a dubious grin; I still remember the first time he deployed the expression. It had taken me aback because I’d had no idea where he’d learned it. That was when it finally hit me that though I’d built him with my own two hands, he was his own person, learning and growing and evolving. Not a human—definitely not that. But a person.
I fixate on the only obvious sign of his inorganic origins: that strange pulse in his left eye. A subtle tic, the same as squinting, or twisting one’s hair.
I know each physical part of him, down to the schematics. That pulse means that he is taking in my posture, analyzing the emotions revealed by the twitch of my cheek muscle and the speed of my pulse, cross-referencing it with the unfathomable amount of data that his brain has access to. Complex algorithms that had once been employed to crack the secret of dark matter are being used to figure out why I’m sulking.
I can’t help but let out a harsh chuckle.
He tilts his head, his grin transforming into a nervous pull of his lips, and I wonder what apprehension feels like to him. Could he ever really be worried by my behavior?
Could I ever really make him suffer? And of course, the real, deep down question: could he ever make me? Would he?
I hope I never find out those answers. He’s no longer an experiment to be tested and put through its paces. He’s Ian, and he’s mine—and not because I created him.
“Just another attack of insomnia,” I finally reply, prickly even though it’s not him that I’m mad at.
I think of my ex, of all the men who had come before Ian. “Real” men, although they had databases of their own to plunder for information. The data they accessed had been input by mothers too cold or overly accommodating; fathers who abandoned them or who stuck around and expected too much; girlfriends who hadn’t stroked their egos enough; friends who had not met their needs. Their universal experience was distilled into a pattern that controlled their every movement, their every response to stimuli. How is Ian any different? I’ve asked myself this a million times, and the fact that I don’t have an answer should be all the answer I need.
“Do you want some warm milk?” Ian asks, resting his hands on my knees.
I give him a look that I’m sure reads: generalized annoyance, open to further suggestions.
“Or I can write out some complex equations for you to solve. That always relaxes you.”
I purse my lips.
“Or we can drink tequila and go howl at the moon,” he suggests, blasé. He shifts, his forearms pressing into my thighs, and a cluster of curls falls over his eyes.
I bite back a smile and brush the lock of hair away, tucking it behind the perfect shell of his ear.
“No.”
“Do you want to talk?” There is real concern in his voice, and god knows I didn’t program that tone. I’d never received it from anyone else.
“God no,” I reply. My petulance ebbs and I sigh deeply.
“Good,” he says in a tone that starts a tremor low in my body. “I don’t feel like talking either.”
He shifts from a crouch to a kneel, his knees pressing into the carpet beside my bare feet. His hands rest on my thighs, gripping them lightly before he caresses his way up over my robe, outlining the curve of my hips and then the swell of my breasts beneath his palms. His hands are on my skin again now, pausing as they brush up my neck—he can feel my pulse speeding up, feel my throat work as I swallow hard in anticipation—before continuing up to cup my face. He leans up and presses his mouth to mine, and there’s an urgency beneath the sweetness of his kiss.
I sigh into his mouth, and he grips me just a bit more tightly, rubs his lips against mine just a bit harder.
I nod so that he understands that he’s made the correct deduction—I don’t want him to hold back tonight.
He pulls his mouth from mine and runs his fingertips over my ear and down my neck, tracing my collarbone and following the path into the valley between my breasts. His touch is featherlight, just close enough to my skin to produce a whisper of friction and leave a trail of sensation tingling in its wake. I reach out, running my hand over the planes of his chest and up the slope of his shoulders. When I reach his face, he turns his head and presses a hard kiss into my palm. Desire and love rock through me in a tremble that I know he senses.
Ian hooks the index finger of one hand and tugs the satin lapel of my robe, exposing my breast to the cool air of my study. He drags the material back and forth over my nipple, watching as it stiffens to a hard, brown peak. He keeps the same steady pace, the smooth, cool material brushing relentlessly over my sensitive skin, and just when I’ve gotten used to it, he clamps his thumb and index finger around the peak and squeezes; a perfectly calibrated pinch that sends sweet pain chased by a searing pulse of desire arrowing to my clit.
“Ian.” I start to fidget, gripping his shoulders harder and pushing my chest up toward him, and his hand freezes—he’s in a teasing mood, it seems. I like all aspects of the person Ian has become, but teasing Ian—wearing a sly grin with a patient gaze that tells me he can do this all night, depending on how I react—is perhaps my favorite. I stop moving, and he begins the slow seduction again on my other breast.
Ian leans up again and I feel his lips drag against my ear, then
the tip of his nose—his mouth follows the trail of his pioneering fingertips, and his hands leave my breasts as he runs a palm over the soft curve of my belly. His mouth closes over my nipple and his hand cups my mound hard simultaneously. The dual tug of his lips and press of his strong fingers against my clit make my hips lift from the chair and my back arch. He’s only just begun to touch me and I’m already buzzing with sensation, my bad mood driven away by the all-consuming need Ian always manages to inspire in me.
“Please don’t stop.”
He’s rubbing with just the right amount of pressure and his tongue is flicking and circling my nipple at just the right speed—if he decides now would be a good time to tease me by stopping, he’ll get reintroduced to my animalistic side. He doesn’t, and my fingers grasp desperately at the armrests of my chair. Each circular press of his fingers against my clit creates a wave of light, delicious pleasure, rippling farther and farther through me until it’s lapping at my fingers and my toes like the ocean on a perfect beach day.
He lifts his head and captures my mouth with his as he slides two fingers, slick with my own desire, inside of me. I thrust down hard again and again, and his knuckles press into my ass as he meets the demanding motion with equal force. His fingers are thick, stretching me, and he curls them as he works, beckoning me toward orgasm with the new angle. The friction is intense, pressure against sensitive tissue sparking a surging pleasure that needs more, more, of what only Ian can give me.
“Please,” I whisper against his mouth as I twist in my seat, my body caught in the throes of some undeniable force that even I have never been able to quantify. “Please, Ian.”
“What would you like me to do, Annika?” he asks, not because he needs orders, but because he cares enough to pose the question.
“Everything,” I say, and with that he’s slipping down my body, pressing hard kisses against my neck, shoulder, breast, belly, until he’s settled back in his crouch before me, this time with his head between my thighs.
Ian doesn’t ask any more questions. He pushes his mouth against my pussy and licks, strong and firm and relentless. His hands grip my thighs, spreading me wider for his questing tongue.
“Oh, god,” I moan, sliding my fingers into his curls and grinding up against his face. Each lash of his tongue drives another swell of passion, forcing the surges higher like the sea beneath a full moon. My body is in thrall to the focused, relentless licking, sucking, and nibbling on my clit, buffered by a riptide of pleasure so fierce that I don’t know up from down.
My legs are tensed and an ache is developing in my feet, arched unnaturally and toes splayed as eddies of tingling sensation course through my body, but Ian has no such physical limitations. He won’t stop until I give him what he wants—until I break for him.
“Ian, Ian, shit shit shit . . . ” I’m thrashing in my seat, a helpless marionette controlled by the desire he’s stoked in me. Ian matches the motion with his head, fastening his mouth more tightly to my mound and lashing more furiously with his tongue. I pry my eyes open to glance at him, and he’s looking up at me, gaze intense and cheeks glistening with my essence.
It’s too much.
“Fuck!” I shout, the cry dragging in my throat and leaving it raw as the orgasm hits me full force. My legs quake and my chair squeaks as I throw my head back and succumb to ecstasy.
I hear him laughing warmly as the haze clears from my mind.
“Success. I got you to curse,” he says, giving my thighs a final squeeze before moving backward to recline on the floor, his legs stretched out before him so that his toes brush mine. He shifts his arms behind him so that they’re propping him up, then tilts his head, watching me, the spot in his left eye pulsing. “The probability of our compatibility, of that of any two beings, is infinitesimal, you know.”
I slide down from my chair, the carpet soft and giving under my knees as I crawl toward him on trembling legs. I don’t stop until I’ve reached his lap and crouch there. I tug down his briefs and grip his cock, and his eyes flutter shut.
“If you’re running algorithms right now, you’re obviously in need of a better distraction,” I say as I position myself over him. I sink down onto his cock, the exquisite stretch of him still thrilling after all this time.
“Annika.” Ian breathes my name with a reverence that used to disturb me. “I was trying . . . ”
He groans and pumps up into me. I’m riding him now, my inner walls clamped around the rigid length of him, squeezing. I pause at the apex of my motion instead of dropping back down into his lap.
“Trying to what?” He’s not the only one who can tease.
He looks into my eyes. “I was trying to calculate the probability of any being ever loving another being as much as I love you.”
I don’t resume my pace, simply because I’m too shocked to move.
He leans up toward me with that grin on his face, and there’s no pulse in his gaze—he’s figured out whatever he was contemplating.
His arms band around me, holding me in place as he thrusts up into me.
“Conclusion. No one. No one ever has and no one ever will.”
I can’t stop the tears streaming down my cheeks. My heart suddenly seems too large for my chest, and my whole body is shivering from the pleasure of Ian’s thick cock driving into me again and again and again.
I grip his shoulders, holding on for dear life as each jangling shock of desire and love flowing through me gathers and coalesces into one aching, beautiful epicenter of devastating pleasure.
“You’re close, Annika. The way your pussy is so tight around me feels good.”
If Ian likes it when I curse, I love it when he talks dirty.
The gathered pleasure contracts within me before expanding, reaching the limits of tolerable sensation, and then bursting into a million delicious pinpricks of bliss.
I collapse on top of him and he laughs, falling back onto the floor to cradle me. My ear is against his chest, but the only sounds are my heavy breathing, my speeding pulse, and the ebb and flow of cricket song outside the window.
A humanist once emailed to ask if it ever bothered me that Ian has no heartbeat. They asked whether I found it strange. I didn’t answer them, but nothing is strange, really, if you love someone enough, and I do.
“Ian.” I’m still a little out of breath. “I’m sorry to inform you of an error in your calculations.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
I fold my arms over his chest and rest my chin on my hands so I can look at him.
“There is at least one being in this universe who loves another more than you do.” I smile at him and he wraps his arms around me.
“Hm. This is perhaps the first time I’ve ever been wrong, but I can’t be too upset about it, given the circumstances.”
The sleep I’d been chasing so fruitlessly begins to tug at my eyelids, and I feel Ian stand and begin carrying me toward the bedroom. Our bedroom.
EIGHT SECONDS
Madeline Moore
Amy had just turned thirty-five when she participated in the Competitive Ladies’ Bull Riding event at the Calgary Stampede. Even a guy her age might think twice about getting on the back of a bull, but she was nowhere near calling it quits. The sport for women had finally started paying off, and she had her eye on the prize.
Amy greeted a few folks on her way to the arena and pointedly ignored a few others. Over the years she’d been in rodeo, the regulars had evolved into a sort of family—the sort that squabbles sometimes and gossips a lot and doesn’t mind battling for money. The sort where respect has to be earned.
Gregg (or “Greggoire,” his stage name) was already there. Amy was glad to see him—she wanted to get her flirt on before the competition and he was easy pickins. He’d been crazy about her since he’d first laid eyes on her, back when he was a rodeo clown. For quite some time, she’d ignored him. Clowns were for ranch girls, not bull riders. The kind of guy she was attracted to wouldn’t be caught dead in ba
ggy, vibrantly colored clothes, never mind makeup. Oddly enough, for someone so clearly attracted to Amy, Gregg’s gaudy dress-code remained unchanged. He still often sported a version of his clown face when, now considered a rodeo protection artist, he no longer had to.
“I’m a bull fighter,” he insisted.
Whatever—Amy preferred cowboys. They were out of her category and her arena. Bull riders who wanted to be “friends” had a very different idea of friendship than Amy did. Whether she put out or not, it didn’t take long for them to snub her. Amy was a professional and she wanted to be a champion. To do that, she needed to focus. The occasional cowboy suited her just fine. Otherwise, for the most part she kept to herself.
On this day, Gregg’s mouth and eyes were ringed with red and his cheeks were streaked with neon pink. His tall, muscular body was clothed in baggy green pants and a red shirt.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“How is it lookin’?”
“Suddenly, a whole lot better.”
His smile was sweet (he had a lovely mouth) and garish (because of the makeup). Still, she preened a little. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have some history. A number of years back they’d holed up in Jasper over the holidays, neither of them having had anything better to do.
The sex had been spectacular.
Every time they met up, before they could settle into their comfortable routine of mild flirtation, Amy’s perverse mind flashed back to a few scenes as vivid as his outfit.
Gregg was a great kisser. His naked lips were almost as red as the cherry color he outlined them with when he was on the job. He didn’t attack a woman’s mouth; he nibbled and flirted and tongue-teased his way between her lips.
Although when he did drag his mouth (minus that silly greasepaint) down her taut belly to vertically kiss her vagina, then he’d devoured her. He’d kissed and sucked her labia and fucked her deeply with his tongue. Nobody’d ever done that to her before, or after, for that matter.
Best Women's Erotica of the Year, Volume 4 Page 17