Glasshouse - Charles Stross [152]
He shrugs. “Just asking.” He begins to turn away.
I grab his shoulder. “Don’t do that.”
He turns back sharply, looking surprised. “What?”
“ ‘Last night I met upon the stair, a big fat man who wasn’t there; he wasn’t there again today: inside my head he’ll have to stay’ . . . I haven’t been myself lately, Sam, but I’m feeling a lot better today.” I frown at him, willing the words to sink in.
“Oh, you mean . . .”
“Shh!” I hold up a warning finger. “The walls have ears.”
Sam’s eyes widen, and he begins to pull away from me. I grab at his shoulder, hard, then step in close and wrap my arms around him. He tries to push back, but I lean my face against his shoulder. “We need to talk,” I whisper.
“About what?” he whispers back. But at least he stops pushing.
“What’s going on.” I lick his earlobe, and he jolts as if I’ve stuck a live wire in it.
“Don’t do that!” he hisses.
“Why not?” I ask, amused. “Afraid you might enjoy it?”
“But we, they—”
“I’m going to order food. While we’re eating, let’s keep things light, okay? Afterward we’ll go upstairs. I’ve got a trick or two to show you. For avoiding eavesdroppers.” I add in a whisper: “Smile, please.”
“Won’t it be obvious?” He’s lowered his arms and is holding me loosely around the waist. I shiver because I’ve been wanting him to do that so badly for the past week—no, let’s not go there.
“No it won’t be. They use low-level monitors to track normal behavior. They call in high-end monitors only if we act funny. So don’t act funny.”
“Oh.” I look up as he looks down for a startled instant, and I kiss him. He tastes of sweat and a faint, musty aroma of dust and paperwork. A moment passes, then he responds enthusiastically. “This is normal?” he asks.
“Whoa! Dinner first.” I laugh, pulling back.
“Dinner first.” He looks at me with a dark, serious expression.
I phone for a pizza and a couple of glass jars of wine, and while Sam heads for the living room, I try to catch my breath. Things are moving too fast for comfort, and I’m suddenly having to deal with a mass of conflicted emotions at a time when all I was wanting to do was recruit another dissatisfied inmate to the campaign. The thing is, Sam and I have too much history for anything between us to be simple—even though we haven’t actually done very much together. We haven’t had time, and Sam’s got big body-image issues, and then she/me nearly fucked everything between us completely while under the influence of the pernicious Dr. Hanta—oh, hindsight is a wonderful tool, isn’t it? Thinking about it, Sam’s dissatisfaction and passivity has been a running sore between us, and I half suspect it took my apparent co-option to kick him into doing something about it.
I feel guilty as I remember what I was thinking at the time. I can surrender . . . yes, and they’ll make my life a living hell, won’t they? Did I really want to hand complete control over my life to the likes of Fiore, Yourdon, and Hanta? I don’t think I explicitly intended to do that, but it amounted to the same thing. It feels like a moment of cowardice in my own past, a voluntary moment of cowardice, and I feel oddly dirty because of it. Because it’s not far out of my normal character to feel that way inclined—Hanta didn’t rebuild her/me, she just tweaked a few weightings in my mind map. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” in spades. And Sam got to see that side of me. Ick.
The closet bings for attention and I take the pizza tray and wine out of it. On my way through to the living room I kick my shoes off, strewing them in the hallway. “Sam?” He turns round. He’s nesting in the sofa again, the television turned to some sports channel. “Turn the volume up.”
He raises an eyebrow at me but does as I ask, and I sit down next to him. “Here. Garlic and tofu with deep-fried lemon chicken steak.” I open the box and pull out a slice, then hold it in front of his mouth. “Eat?”
“What is this?”
“I want to feed you.” I lean against him and hold the pizza in front