Unsurprisingly, sex is full of contradictions. It is push and pull. It is ache and pleasure. It is stop and go, fast and slow. It is something you feel. It is all body and limbs, but at the same time, it is a place. It’s a world that two people create with their wanting. It has its own language and geography. I am sure this city we have made with need and urgency can only be traveled by Ezra and me. I could have sex with different men, but none of them would take me to the same place.
I dig my fingers into his toffee-colored flesh. Ezra keeps on kissing my throat, my shoulder, and then rearing up to reach different places inside of me. I think he might be saying my name or he might just be groaning. I don’t care. I hear his breathing start to quicken. I feel his body tense, and then he goes silent, as if he’s sucking the sound of his voice back inside, drawing it in so he can focus all his energy on climaxing. When he does, I actually feel it, which shocks me.
I’m amazed by the feeling. Not just about the fire that poured through me, but of my hands on Ezra. During, his entire body was forged steel, rippling and reforming, but always powerful and strong. And right before he came, it somehow got harder, and as much as anything, that’s what drove me over the edge. Now, though, it’s still hot—his skin, his breath, his place between my legs—but somehow it’s liquid. And if we had been close before—as close as two people could be—this is somehow even more intimate.
The . . . after.
We lie like that for a while, and I’m sure there’s nowhere—no Earth, no world—I’d rather be on than the one we’ve just created together. Eventually, though, Ezra moves so that he’s by my side. A minute ago it was like we were one person and now we are two again. It’s the strangest sensation, letting someone in and then letting them go.
I give him a quick kiss on the nose and then make my way to the bathroom because that’s another thing I didn’t know about sex: It requires some cleanup. When I come back, Ezra is still there, lazing. I get into the bed and curl up against him.
“So,” I say as I wrap my fingers around his.
“So,” he answers back in a swaggy kind of way that’s cheese ball enough to make me giggle.
“Can we do that again? Like right now?” I ask him earnestly.
“You’re not sore?”
“Well, yeah, but with the job and all, I’m kind of in a constant state of soreness and this is kind of a good sore?” I blush. “That didn’t come out right.”
Ezra smiles at me and brings my hand to his naked chest. “We can absolutely do it again, but maybe in a few minutes? I am young, but you do know it works different with guys . . .” Ezra tapers the sentence off.
“I’m aware. I just don’t know the actual mechanics of it.” I snuggle up even closer to him and put my face in the crook of his arm.
“Are you happy, Ryn?”
“Very.”
“We’re good, right? What we just did. You do know what that means?” Ezra’s tone takes on an unexpectedly serious tone.
“That I’m a woman now?” I say playfully. I trace my finger over his skin and he grabs my hand.
“It means that we’re together, together. Whatever happened before this, whatever happened between you and Levi, it’s forgotten. It’s done.”
What the actual fuck?
Immediately, I sit up, bringing the sheet up with me. “I thought we were together before. Hence the ‘jumping into the Multiverse and its many perils to find you to make sure that you were safe’ thing that I did.”
Now its Ezra’s turn to sit up. “As much as I love the whole emasculating ‘I rescued you’ routine, that’s not what I’m talking about. Once you have sex with someone, it makes the relationship more solid, more committed. Those are, like, the rules.” Ezra is explaining this like I’m a baby or an idiot. How did this turn so quickly? I don’t get it. We were just having sex.
I also don’t get where he’s coming up with these rules. “The rules according to who? Pilgrims?”
“No. To monogamy.”
I shake my head. “I’m not sure what you’re saying.”
Ezra closes and opens his eyes slowly. His frustration is palpable, and mine is starting to grow, too. “I’m saying that as much as it kills me to imagine, I can see why you would deprogram Levi. You felt like you had to do it in order to complete your mission. But you’ve completed your mission. You found me. And I forgive you, for whatever you did.”
Ezra’s declaration sinks in. It goes deep, into my veins. I had felt bad about what had happened between me and Levi, but that was before. There was so much I didn’t understand before I had sex. I opened myself up to love and realized that my capacity for holding it and giving it was boundless.
Ezra’s forgiveness isn’t coming from that place.
In fact, it feels petty and mean. He doesn’t understand. I mean, I don’t think I entirely understand, either, but at least I’m not pretending I do. At least I’m not pretending like this whole situation is normal and normal rules apply. His hypocrisy or stupidity (or both) gets my back up.
“Well, I’m so glad I have your forgiveness,” I throw at him. “And you know what? I forgive you. I forgive you for getting sucked into the Rift and then being so completely fucking inept that you were thrown back in it. I forgive you for all the crazy medical procedures they did on me and my skin melting off and, oh yeah, that time I was a slave.”
Ezra narrows his eyes at me. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he practically growls. “But the stuff I kinda know you’re talking about wasn’t my fault, so I don’t need your forgiveness.”
“Exactly!”
Ezra puts his face in his hands and then slowly slides his fingers down, changing the shape of his face. “I don’t know why we’re fighting. All I’m saying is that the past is the past. Let’s leave it there.” The thing is, though, there is no softness in his voice, no proof at all that he is capable of doing such a thing.
“So,” I tell him, not bothering to hide the disappointment in my voice. “You’re saying that I can’t finish deprogramming Levi.”
Ezra throws up his hands, leaving his lean torso completely exposed. “Yeah. Obviously. What are you going to do, Ryn? Are you going to have sex with me and then run to Levi and let him touch you? That’s not how couples work. You can’t be intimate with someone else. It’s one person or another. You have to choose. I get that you think you’re special and normal rules don’t apply to you, but in this one area they do. It’s me or Levi. You can’t have us both.”
At that, I leap off the bed. “There is nothing about this situation that is normal. Loungewear, present day,” I say to my cuff, and the sensuit flowers out of the bracelet and turns into a pair of gray sweats and a long-sleeved V-neck. “I have done so much for you, gone through so much, and so has Levi. What if another Citadel—a female Citadel—had been pushed into the Rift with you that day? What if you had to deprogram her? For safety? Would the idea of you two being intimate piss me off? Yeah it would. But I would find a way to understand that it was temporary and being done for the greater good. I would feel confident enough in you and me to know we’d get through it. And if I didn’t, I would ask for reassurance.”
Ezra furrows his brow, his mouth agape. “You cannot be serious. You can’t base an entire argument on something that didn’t even happen!” Ezra’s anger has shifted gears. It’s taken on an incredulous tone as if, somehow, he’s above all this speculating. I could almost laugh. I’m a soldier. I live and die by what-if scenarios.
“Sure I can. Unless, sorry, is that not allowed? Is that what’s written down in your mysterious Rule Book for Relationships?”
“This is not funny, Ryn.”
“I’m not laughing, and I’m definitely not trying to be funny, but I feel like you’re messing with me. You’ve got to be, because you know better than anyone that if I stop deprogramming Levi now, at this critical time in the process, it could ruin his chances to recover. If I abandon and hurt him when he’s made himself so
vulnerable to me, he might never get over the Blood Lust. He doesn’t deserve that. I can’t do that to him. How could you?”
Ezra gets up himself and throws on his own sweats. Speaking of vulnerability, I don’t think he wants to have this conversation stark naked. “Regardless of what Levi’s done—and make no mistake, he hasn’t helped me at all—it’s all been for you. Don’t kid yourself on that front. I really don’t give two fucks about Levi’s sex life and neither should you. That’s the point.”
Ezra’s words are like a slap in the face. “Okay,” I say softly, resolutely. “You want me to choose? All right. I choose me. I choose myself. Because you know, recently, it’s come to my attention that for the past few years I’ve been manipulated and controlled and abused and treated like a thing, like property. I don’t like that feeling. That feeling makes me cranky. Sometimes, it even makes me kill people.”
Ezra’s eyes widen as he freezes.
Now that is disappointing.
“Seriously? I’m not going to kill you. I’m just trying to convey how much I hate the idea of someone thinking I belong to them. I hate it so much that I would kill thousands, hundreds of thousands, to ensure my freedom. So, I’m sure as fuck not gonna let you dictate to me—because of some ‘monogamy rule’ that seems ridiculous in our present circumstances—what I can or cannot do with Levi.”
“I should have known,” Ezra says. “I should have known that you could only see this in terms of some sort of battle. You want me to fight Levi for you? Is that it? I mean, it’s hardly a fair fight—only if we’re talking physical strength, of course.”
I grab my head with both hands. I want to scream, but I also partly want to throttle him. “Really? That’s what you got from my whole ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ speech? You think I want you to fight? That’s the last friggin’ thing I want.”
Ezra folds his arms together. He lifts his chin haughtily. “Then what do you want? Really? Because I’m starting to think that this whole deprogramming thing is a smoke screen, Ryn.”
I glare at Ezra straight on. Jealousy I can understand. It’s irrational, but that irrationality has a basis. But an accusation? Based on his own paranoia? Screw that. He’s hurt me. He’s practically gutted me. Maybe asking him to accept this was too much, I honestly don’t know. I do know that I had sex with him to feel close to him, to show him, without words, how deeply I cared for him. I think maybe he had sex with me to make a point, too. Except right now, the edge of that point feels like it’s stabbing me in the back.
“I want you to leave.”
“What?”
“Get. Out!”
Once again, Ezra opens his mouth to say something, but he slams it shut again and grits his teeth. His turquoise eyes shoot me a look that is equal parts despair and disgust. I take a step back, against the wall. He grabs his things and starts shoving them inside his pack with furious intensity. Neither one of us says anything else. The silence is visceral. It is a living thing, the third person in this room, or maybe it’s the fourth. Maybe Levi has been here all along. I didn’t ask for Levi’s presence. It was Ezra who kept bringing him up, but I have to admit that I never quite banished him, either.
Ezra collects his papers from the desk, crumpling them in a single hand and pushing them hastily inside the backpack. “Open,” he says to the door angrily. The lock clicks, and Ezra pushes the door open with considerable force before disappearing into the hallway.
I look at the bed. The sheets are crumpled, uneven. The top sheet is half off the mattress. I feel the sudden urge to make it, to put it back. I lift the sheet and shake it out. It flutters like a parachute, suspended in the air. I look at the spot where Ezra and I had just been together. I guess I’m looking for blood. How much blood does virginity spill? There isn’t anything but a stretch of white. Somewhere along the way, either through fighting, or God knows what else, ARC stole that from me, too, I guess.
I fold the sheet under the mattress, hospital corners. And I shake out the duvet so that it’s as smooth as glass. I run my hand over it, giving it tiny yanks to make it perfect. I replace the pillows and sit back down. I feel angry, but also really sad, and I find that these emotions cancel each other out. It’s as if they’ve pushed me out of the way and I’m just swirling them around, thinking about them but not actually feeling them. I am hollow.
Are Ezra and I still together? Was that just a fight? Or did I break up with him or did he just break up with me? I laugh out loud because I actually don’t know.
I’m at sixes and sevens. That’s what my grandmother would say. She would wring her hands and fly about the house when there was dinner on the stove and someone at the door and her book club still to get to. Sixes and sevens. I don’t really have the luxury to be all over the place, though, do I? I have a hostage to take and a language to learn. War is coming, one way or another. So really, should my relationship status even be a thing?
No. I don’t think so.
Chapter 23
I walk over to my pack, pull out my SenMach laptop, and put it on the Roone console.
“Download every pertinent file about the Roones, the altered Roones, and the Citadels. Make sure to include the decrypted files from Edo’s computer.” The luminescent tendrils squirm out of my machine and unfold across the desk. I’m going to know it all now, even the stuff Iathan might not necessarily want me to know, and he’ll have no idea. The SenMachs’ technology is far more advanced than the Roones’, and it will leave no trace. Alliances are well and good, but at the end of the day, the Roones are a species of spies and mad scientists. I want to know what they’ve got.
“It will take approximately thirteen minutes to download this information. Do you still wish to proceed, Ryn Whittaker?” I can’t help but jolt at the familiar voice coming from my wrist. It’s Doe. I put the cuff up to my ear. Is there a speaker in there?
“You can talk?” I ask, a little self-conscious, in the empty room.
“Yes.”
“Then why haven’t you ever talked before?”
“It has never been necessary. I am only addressing you now because the amount of data you are requesting to download is quite significant. It will take up nine point eight percent of what you would call my ‘memory storage.’ I wanted to make sure this operation was what you intended.”
Even though I just lost my virginity to a guy who may or may not still be my boyfriend, I can’t help but feel a little pumped about the idea of my own personal Jarvis.
“Can you manifest into a hologram?” I wonder aloud. Seeing Tim Riggins would go a long way toward making me feel better.
“I could rewrite some of the Roone code they use for visual interface in combination with our own holographic programming and do an approximation, if you wish. It will take another seven minutes to create this application.”
I think seriously about it and then decide it’s not really a priority. That said, I might want the Fortress of Solitude option at some later date, so I say, “Go ahead and create the program, but I don’t need to use it right now. What I would like is the Spiradael language files so that I can start to learn it. Please display them in an order which would most efficiently expedite that process.”
“Affirmative.” The files start popping up in front of me, projected by what looks like four outputs from the desk. Interesting. They know where I am in relation to the room and are adjusting accordingly.
“Great—and in the future, please just say ‘okay’ or ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Don’t speak ‘robot.’ It makes me feel like I’m in a movie where you’re about to take over the world.”
There is a slight pause.
“Okay,” I hear the computer say. I pinch my nose with my thumb and forefinger. I have to focus. I have to learn this. I mentally push everything back. I concentrate on the floating images above me. It’s time to go to work.
“Veen. Trak. Teesh. Sohn. Kowf. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.” An actual Spiradael voice is speaking from somewhere. I think it
’s my cuff, but it could be a speaker from somewhere in the room. All things considered, it hardly matters really.
“Just play more audio of them conversing. For now.” I close my eyes and listen to the spiky, guttural language of the Spiradael. I get a sense of it. I can almost feel it slide from my ears to my throat. “Stop,” I command. “Let’s start with basic phrases. Something that I will probably need.”
I lean back against the wall behind the bed, which is layered with pillows.
“How do you say ‘I am a Citadel’?”
A breakfast tray is delivered to my room. There is a plate full of something that looks like scrambled eggs but is the color of a neon pumpkin. There’s also a something that might be meat, possibly bacon, but it smells like feet. I decide to go with the SenMach cubes. I take another shower, because God only knows when I might get another chance to do so. I then make my way to the war room. When I get there, Levi is browsing a topographical map of an area around the Spiradael Rift. He stares at me, and then behind me, noticing that I’m alone. His green eyes get just a fraction smaller as he registers that I’m by myself and then he goes back to looking at the hovering maps. Before I can walk over to him, Ezra enters from an entirely different direction than I did and stands beside me. Levi notices that, too, and just for a moment, I see a flicker of a smile on his face. Cocky bastard.
“Hi,” I say to Ezra hesitantly. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here. I am sorry that things went down but not sorry enough to start acting deferential.
“Hi,” he responds coolly. Okay, then. An impasse. This is going to be awesome. At that moment, Iathan strides in with his lackeys behind him.
“Excellent, we’re all here. I hope the two of you were able to learn the language in the time you had?”
“Yeah,” and “Pretty much,” Levi and I answer respectively while looking at each other. Ten hours was more than enough, but it’s not like we’re going to admit that. Iathan will get information about us on a need-to-know basis only.
The Rift Frequency Page 28