Glasshouse - Charles Stross [153]
“Gaah.” He leans forward and takes a bite at it—I try to pull my hand back, but I’m just too late and he gets a mouthful. I laugh and lean closer and find his arm is around my shoulders. Chewing: “You. Are. Intolerable.”
“Manipulative,” I suggest. “Annoying.”
“All of the above?”
“Yes, all of it by turns.” I feed him another mouthful, then change my mind about letting him have the whole slice and eat the rest of it myself.
“Every time I think I understand you, you change the rules,” he complains. “Give me another . . .”
“Not my fault. I don’t make the rules.”
“Who does?”
I point a finger at the ceiling, waggle it about. “Remember our chat in the library?” After I came out to Janis, last Tuesday, she phoned Sam and asked him to come visit. He was very surprised to see me-as-Fiore, almost as much as when we showed him the basement and the A-gate. “Remember my face?” He nods, looking dubious. “Janis and I sorted everything out. Settled the slight difference of opinions. I’m feeling a lot better now, and less inclined to give up on things.”
His arm tightens. Warm, comforting, presence. “But why?”
I take a deep breath and offer him another slice of pizza. Better keep it short. At this rate he’s going to eat it all. “You don’t want to live like this.”
“But I—” He stops.
“Do you?” I prod him.
He looks at me. “Watching you, this past week—” He shakes his head. “I’d love to be able to settle in like that.” He shakes his head again, underscoring the ironic tone in his voice. “What alternative is there?”
“We’re not supposed to talk about where we came from.” I pause to chew for a moment. “And we can’t go back.” I flick a warning glance his way. “But we can make ourselves more comfortable here if we rearrange our priorities.” Will he get it?
Sam sighs. “If only we could do that.” He glances down at his lap.
“I’ve got a new priority for you,” I say, my heart beating faster.
“Really?”
“Yes.” I put the pizza box down and plaster myself against him. “We can start right here by you picking me up and carrying me upstairs to the bathroom.”
“The bathroom?”
“Yep.” I kiss him again, and suddenly I’m not sure this is a good idea at all. “Where we’re going to get in the shower together, and wash each other, and talk. Can’t go to bed smelling of office work, can we?”
“Shower—” His monosyllables aren’t his most appealing attribute: I kiss him into silence, shivering with alarm at my own responses.
“Now.”
THINGS do not go according to plan.
The plan seemed simple enough. Get Sam on board again. Doing that, holding a proper conversation with him, was another matter with the ever-present risk of being overheard. But if you disguise your suspicious activities as something expected of you, while only the dumb listener bots are online, you’ve got a good chance of doing it undetected. The dumb listeners aren’t good for much more than keyword monitoring, and the cabal is sufficiently short on spare bodies that they can’t monitor everything we say all the time.
So call me naive, if you like. I figured that as a married couple, one of us pretending to seduce the other and then dragging them into a shower—lots of nice white noise to confuse audio tracking, sheets of water to make it hard to lip-read, and an excuse to stand really close together—would be a pretty good way of evading surveillance.
What I didn’t consider was that when I stand too close to Sam my skin tingles, and I feel warm and needy in intimate places. And what I especially didn’t consider is that Sam is horribly conflicted but has corresponding urges. He’s human, too, and we both have certain needs, which we’ve been trying to ignore for much too long.
Sam does as I ask him, and about halfway up the stairs I realize that I’m going to lose control if we do this. I nearly tell him to stop, but for some reason my mouth doesn’t want to open. He puts me down on the bathroom carpet and stands too close. “What now?” he asks, a quiet tension in his voice.
“We, um, undress.” Without realizing