by Vremont, Ann
Right, I was about to blow my cover. Pleasure droids don't act self-conscious unless the client communicates the preference. I tilted my chin up to mirror the slight indifference of an automaton.
"How would you like me positioned, Master Vance?"
Swallowing hard, he pointed at the edge of the bed. "Face that wall. Hands and knees.”
I did as directed and stared at the blank paneled wall. I saw the shadow of his arm as he tapped one last time at the touch pad and then a screen slid down from the ceiling.
"You’re recording--" I choked down the rest of my question. A pleasure droid wouldn't care if it was being recorded. It certainly wouldn't sound half hysterical.
"Hey, yeah, let’s do that, too." Another tap and I winced at his enthusiasm. "I just wanted the screen on so I can still see your face.”
My face?
No, that wasn’t right. I didn’t need to worry about him seeing my face, just the one he’d programmed the mask to display. I looked at the screen, waiting for it to come into focus as he fiddled with the camera controls.
I wondered whom he pretended the pleasure droids were when he screwed them. Would I recognize her face? Was she a real girl or a construct?
Staring hard at the screen to find out, I felt the slow journey of his hand down my bottom. He hooked his thumb inside my cunt as his fingers slid along the spine of my clit. My eyes crossed with pleasure, the screen blurring further out of focus.
"Hmm… you’d think it was broken."
I looked over my shoulder at him, his teasing tone unmistakable. He wasn’t looking at the screen. Instead his gaze was fixed at the juncture of my thighs where he languorously stroked my pussy.
"Maybe if you used both hands?" I suggested, trying to uncross my eyes.
"Here?" He tapped the touch pad before tightening his grip on my cunt. "Or here?”
Squeezing my eyes shut, I shook my head. It was rude, his expecting me to express a coherent thought while he kept touching my like that, his whole hand possessing the various sectors of my cunt.
I opened my eyes in time to see Vance glance up at the screen and smile.
"Ah, problem solved.”
My gaze jerked forward, my heart stalling as I saw my own face. That was wrong. Was the mask malfunctioning, showing translucent when it shouldn’t?
I studied the image, looking for the visual clues that the mask was working and the face only looked a little like mine or …
Vance leaned over me and used his lips to push my hair off my shoulder. Supporting his weight with one arm, he eased his hand from my pussy and threaded it beneath and around my chest to grasp my opposite shoulder. Cinching me closer, he pushed into me, his cock rock hard as it filled my cunt.
His lips brushed along my neck. "Do you like the face I picked?"
The face on the vid mask looked too much like me. Even the muted pink eye shadow that I hadn't worn since… My stalled heart gave a shuddering thump as I realized that I had worn that shade during my last trip to Tina's office, which was also the last time I saw Vance.
This couldn't be! Did he know?
"You don't like it?" he teased, sucking at my ear lobe.
Did he know?
He picked the slower back beat of the music to move with, kissing and sucking along my neck to drive the question from my mind. With each kiss and stroke of his cock, I told myself that the face only looked like mine. He didn't know and he wasn't playing me because no one could be so great an actor that I felt like he was actually worshipping my body -- every last curve and roll of flesh.
Taking the lobe of my ear between his teeth, he gently tugged at it before stopping to whisper. "You remind me of a girl I know, love."
I froze -- unsure I'd heard him correctly. He froze with me, his gaze on the onscreen version of my face. He placed his lips against my ear again.
"Sensors acting up?”
I stared at the wall where Vance’s pixel-twin stared back. He had a smooth smile on his face, the expression a mix of muted curiosity and smoldering-hot need. My throat too tight to speak, I nodded at him.
He laughed.
"Don’t look so worried. I’m not about to ask for a refund." He offered a random thrust as collateral, his eyes slowly closing. "Not when you’re so tight and so very, very wet.”
"Right… I just…" I blinked and the mask’s video transmitters mimicked my stress, followed a second later by the camera’s feed of the same image. "I just didn’t hear what you said.”
Evading my question, Vance grabbed my hips and found the music’s rhythm once more. Filled with him, I dropped my head, moaning and letting his hard thrusts rock me back and forth. I had come and come again but he had continued to postpone his own climax. His cock slowly thickened with each thrust, taking me hard and deep as he continued to ignore my unspoken request.
He slowed. A single slide of his cock, from its tip down to its wide base, lasted long seconds. I fought his leisurely possession of my cunt with deep breaths, forcing myself to look at the screen and catch his gaze. "Tell me what you said. I just want to please you.”
"You are." Letting go of me for an instant, he turned the music up, drowning out anything else I might say beneath the thump-thump of a heavy bassline.
He mouthed something -- something that looked like come for me again -- and then he was thrusting and pulling, dizzying me up with the hard in and out. Swollen and heavy, my breasts hung low, the tips rubbing and catching against the bed with each bump of his hips against my ass.
Heat blistered my skin and I tightened around him. When I dropped my head a second time, he wrapped my hair around his hand and pulled my gaze back onto the screen where the whisper of need and pleasure shimmered across our faces.
He released my hair to run his fingers along my spine. His thrusts had lost the thread of the music’s beat. He gentled his pace to one that was slow and deep, squeezing at my thighs and hips and forcing my legs further apart until I was swaybacked and panting.
His gaze swung between my face on the screen and my cunt in a steady pendulum of want and calculation. With as many climaxes as he had wrung from me, he knew I was close once more -- he could read the quiver in my lip as it played across the screen and the tension that made my thighs shake.
Flipping me roughly onto my back, Vance swiftly reentered. He cradled the back of my skull with his hands, tilting my head to study my face. A building climax marched across my features. I lifted my brows, the motion lost behind the mask, and stretched my mouth in a trembling smile.
"You're so beautiful." He rubbed his cheek against mine, his voice just audible over the music. "Do you believe me?”
Was this it -- was this the moment he had been waiting for to unmask my fraud or did he really want to know?
He hugged me tighter, kissed hard against the edge of my jaw as he pushed deep inside me and held. "Believe me."
I couldn't. Why would he say it to me or a droid, especially a droid that looked like me? People drastically altered their appearance monthly, weekly if they were rich enough, to match current fashions. No one changed their face or body to look like Morgan Macy, the plump, bookish research assistant only a handful of people even know exists.
"Beautiful, desirable, so very, very fuckable." His strokes increased in force and speed, his own release closing in on him as his brows and mouth contorted. "Believe me."
Vance claimed my mouth, the pressure almost desperate as he drove home the last few, straining thrusts. His tongue swept against my palate, his muscles contracting to hold me tightly to him. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, clinging as he pushed my senses completely over the edge.
He broke the kiss and I squeezed at him -- legs and arms, hands and cunt. Holding, grinding and gasping, I begged him, "Please come with me this time.”
He kissed me, silencing my pleas. His hand found my breast, closed possessively around it to stroke and squeeze, the word "mine" falling from him in a whisper over and over as he kissed my throat.
His muscles seized and, trembling, he said it one last time.
Mine.
**********
I drifted out from the haze of my climax to Vance caressing my cheek with his thumb, his gaze locked on my face. Rolling onto his side, he pulled me to him.
"Come home with me.”
Swallowing my surprise, I shook my head. Every minute I spent with him increased my risk of exposure. I couldn’t laugh off what I had said or how I had said it. Nor could I forget what he had said when he thought he was talking to a pleasure droid.
I would be crushed when he fell mute after realizing my identity.
Trying to preserve that last little corner of my heart he didn't yet have the power to destroy, I dropped my voice to a bored monotone. "You are out of paper credits, Master."
"Ah, right, credits." He rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. "I could go get some… take me fifteen minutes max. You could wait--"
I caught the flick of his eyes in my direction, the strangely hopeful glance surprising me. I drew a deep breath, released it with what I hoped was my one-word pass out of the cube and away from him. "Protocol.”
He blinked, the motion so slow it seemed shocked, and then he went right on talking. "Right. Never wait."
Sitting up, he pulled his clothes on. He stood, found mine and handed me the dress. The panties he kept. He opened another panel in the wall, made a selection and a tightly wrapped package dropped into his hand. He passed the package to me.
The panties passed briefly below his nose, his eyes drifting shut for a second before he pocketed them.
I read the tight lettering on the package. New York Transit Fantasy Unit, sized Xtra Fun.
I stared at the package, numb with disbelief as he reopened the panel to the sanitation station.
"There are about ten minutes left on the cube." He punctuated the sentence with a grunt. "Time enough for you to clean up and get dressed before finding your next…customer.”
Now that he wasn’t touching me, reality sank in. Whatever had just happened, it was over. Still numb, I nodded and thanked him.
Vance shrugged and lifted his chipped wrist to the video dock, where he downloaded the recording of our session. I chewed at my lip, wondering what he would notice when he viewed the playback.
Or to whom he might show it.
The download took less than a minute and then he left. I used all the remaining nine minutes to clean up, hoping Vance would be gone and the platform empty by the time I emerged.
He was still there when I stepped onto the platform. He stood by the elevator and ignored its closing doors as he stared me. Suppressing the nervous need to wave, I shoved my hand into the dress pocket, my fingers curling around the comforting presence of my net card as the train pulled up and the doors slid open.
Thumbing the card, I realized something terrible.
I had issued an Endscape broadcast after arriving on the platform. Without that broadcast, only Tina knew I would be dressed up as a Fantasy Unit. Vance wasn't on my inner circle, but I couldn't have anyone asking him if he'd had a good laugh at Tina's party seeing me dressed like that.
Entering the train car, I activated the net card and logged onto my account. I had only broadcast to my inner circle, but the photo caption would be on my main page. Bringing my inner circle page up, I stared open mouthed at the card.
The last recorded broadcast showed as having been posted at noon.
I flipped to my main page and then back to my inner circle page.
Nothing. Not a damn thing.
Sinking lower into my seat, I called Tina.
"Where are you?" Tina shouted over the party’s noise.
"Did you get my broadcast?”
"Yeah, wh --"
"Did you show it to anyone?"
"Uhm…”
"God, you did, didn’t you? Who?" I leaned forward. Starting to feel faint, I let my head hang down between my knees.
"No, the screen refreshed and then it was gone.”
Not slowing down to explain, I hung up and called the next person on my list. I kept going through the list, getting no answer or finding out that the picture was gone before they could access it.
Straightening up, I leaned my head against the metro car’s plastic window and let out a shaky breath. The system had glitched, never making it onto my general page and vanishing before anyone but Tina had seen it.
Karma might be a bitch but apparently she isn't a total cunt.
I called up the text screen again and started a message to Tina. Before I could ask her not to mention my choice of costumes, a new message screen popped up. Vance's name filled the from field. I hit read, my heart skipping as the first line appeared on screen.
Sweet dreams, Morgan.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking and it took me an extra second to scroll to the next line.
See you next Halloween, love.
I closed my eyes, heat flaming across my cheeks before engulfing my body. My chest tightened and the flush settled between my thighs, where it grew hotter. Questions filled my mind, the next one popping in almost before the preceding one finished.
When had he known? Before he asked me to spend the night? Before or after he input my face into the screen? Hell, why did Vance Gemini even have my face in his preference set?
I looked at the screen and read the prompt.
Dismiss or Reply?
The question was cosmically wrong -- it should have read Confirm or Deny.
Thumb hovering over the two choices, I heard the pressurized pop of the door between the metro cars opening, followed by the outside pulsing of electricity as the train was propelled along the magnetized tracks. I kept staring at the screen, trying to decide whether to answer or run and hide in my apartment.
"You have to think about it?”
Vance.
I looked up at him then quickly looked away.
Stubbornly nudging at me, he coaxed me into giving up half my bench seat. Tilting my chin up, he pinched each of the mask’s particle clamps between his index finger and thumb until the mask was unsecured and in my lap.
"An experienced hand, I--"
He kissed me into a stunned silence then ran a fingertip across my lips. "Yes, and it’s still carrying the scent of your pleasure. Don’t forget that, Morgan.”
Averting my gaze, I chewed at my bottom lip. "When did you know?"
He didn't answer immediately. When I started to pull away, he cinched me tighter.
"I have an alert set on your Endscape page." He cleared his throat, the sound surprisingly self-conscious. "I caught it right after you posted, recognized the station sign and zipped down to see if you were still on the platform."
So he knew from the beginning.
My brow furrowed with another concern. "The post disappeared."
His lips brushed against my ear as he whispered the password to my Endscape account.
JaneEyre.
Right -- the password could be an easy guess for someone who had spent several hours talking books with me. The surprising thing was that he had recognized the novel's importance to me and had retained that little detail. He had listened with a far greater interest than I could have imagined.
Processing the information, I drew a shaky breath in. Five seconds later, I shook my head. I still couldn't comprehend his interest or why he had sought me out and pretended to think I was a Fantasy Unit so he could…
Fuck me silly.
Make me come half a dozen times or more.
Invite me home.
Call me love.
Vance curled an arm around my shoulder. His other hand reached across my lap to secure my hip. With his cheek resting against the top of my head, he squeezed my hip. "You’re not mad, but...”
I tilted my face down, angling it toward his chest so he couldn’t possibly see my expression. "It is…uh…complicated.”
It was his own excuse used against him and Vance chuckled. "Believe me, I onl
y want real. You, Morgan Macy, are real. The women I work around -- not real."
When my only response was to burrow closer against his chest, he pulled back a little. Robbing me of my hiding place, he gently tugged at the length of hair falling down my back until I looked at him.
"So tell me what is so complicated." He rubbed his nose along mine.
"You like me. And I…" He blinked, holding the next word at the edge of his mouth until he swallowed it down and started over. "I like you, Morgan.”
Like.
The word echoed through my thoughts. Was it really like that he had started to choke on? I met his gaze, held it only briefly before I had to look away. His lips brushed my cheek, loosening one of the tears I was trying to hold back.
He cupped my face, thumbed the tear away. "Don’t cry, love."
Ah, love. That was the word I had wanted to hear. But no one loved anymore, did they? Love was obsolete. Pleasure machines and video AI provided constant companionship. Mutual, long-term security was no longer a pact between individuals, but between employer and employee. People passed their twilight years in clean rooms and halls filled with the quiet, efficient hum of care droids.
Love had been thoroughly phased out before my parents’ generation.
"Morgan, shhh." Vance dabbed at my cheeks with his shirtsleeve, alternating between trying to shush me and kissing my closed eyelids.
"You should go," I whispered.
"No." He stopped trying to staunch my tears and grabbed my face with both hands. "Look at me, Morgan.”
I opened my eyes and saw only the blur of his face. I shook my head. "Really, just go. We can forget--"
"Maybe you can, but I can’t." Vance grabbed my hand, pulled it up to his wet cheek. He whipped a ragged breath in then drew my fingertips into his mouth, sucking his tears from them as he closed his eyes and another salty pearl escaped down his face.
I leaned forward, removing my fingers and kissing him. My heart thumped wildly in my chest. Vance liked me. I liked him -- far more than I would have allowed myself to admit before that night.
He dragged me onto his lap and I could feel the tension in his body, as if he was restraining some physical imperative to do more than just hold me.