When their hands entwined, it was anticlimactic. Now what? The tentative physical contact beneath the waters had been magic, but they weren’t going to give each other hand jobs in the pool. Oh, Etcetera, that was a romantic gesture, but now what?
She got tired of wondering and disentangled her hand and went inside. She wasn’t often up this early, but when she was, she liked to come to the onsen because she had it to herself. It was empty. She stood by the hottest pool, chilled from the walk through the frosty air to the steaming door. The door behind her opened and Etcetera came in with a distracted smile. He dipped a bucketful of near-scalding water and soaked his small towel, then drew it out in a cloud of steam.
She smiled back, liking where this was going. She turned her back and looked over her shoulder, giving him a head-tilt invitation. It was enough. He rubbed the near-scalding towel on her back tentatively, and she rocked her weight towards him. He rubbed harder, soaked the towel. He knelt to do her butt and legs, and she turned around when he got to her ankles and he started to work his way back up. As he got back to his feet, she met him with her towel, steaming from the pail, rubbed his chest and arms. They held hands again and stepped into the hottest pool, water so hot that it obliterated all thought except for the hand squeezed in hers. They lowered themselves, hands so tight that their knuckles ground. Hand in hand, they went to the coldest pool, took towels in hand, and washed one another down.
Back and forth, his left hand in her right, washing one another down, clinging tight to one another, alone in the onsen and merging into one being of flesh, nerves, heat, and cold. When they were done, they sat at the showers and soaped each other, sprayed each other with the shower wands. They went into the changing room and put their robes on, separating briefly. When they did, she felt the ghost of his hand in hers. When they clasped again, it felt like something missing had returned.
Hand in hand, they walked through the dim corridors. They skirted the common room and the groggy voices they heard over the gurgle of coffium. They took the stairs slowly, gaits matched, feet rasping on the gritty laminate on the treads. On the first landing, and she used her free hand to ask a touchable surface about empty rooms, located one on the uppermost fourth floor, which had the smallest rooms—coffins, almost.
Wordless, breathing heavily, they ascended, hearing the building waking around them: a baby crying, someone peeing, a shower. One more floor, a few deft turns through the twisty little maze of the fourth floor, he put his hand on the doorplate and it rolled aside. The lights came on, revealing the bare cell whose loft-bed was neatly made up with fresh sheets. Beneath it was a desk and chair and some homey touches—a few books, a handful of sculptural prints of mathematical solids. Some part of Limpopo’s brain remembered putting them there, because this was one of the rooms she’d finished. She hadn’t been to it in more than a year, and she was pleased the B&B had kept it up. Either its tenants had been conscientious, or the B&B noticed the room getting moopy and had it on the chore list, and someone had taken care of it.
Now they were in the room, and the door was rolling shut behind them and clicking. He reached out to dim the lights, but she cranked them back to full. She found she liked looking at his face in full light. Staring straight at a relative stranger’s face in full light, without pretending to be looking at something else, while that stranger looked back at you—it was something she hardly ever got to do. It was as intimate, in its own way, as anything physical.
He had a confused smile. She liked the curve of his lip.
“Is this okay? I mean—”
“I just want to get a good look.” She was pleased at how quickly he grasped this, how thoroughly he reciprocated, pupils shiny as his eyes saccaded over her face, gaze roaming in a frank way that reminded her of their firm grip.
This was what she loved about being a walkaway. She’d seduced and been seduced in default, but there’d always been a sense of time slipping away. We’d better stop this romantic stuff, get fucking because there’s a meeting, a job, a protest, a meal to cook or a chore. Even at the B&B, it was hard to escape that feeling. But now she reveled in its absence, infinite time. She recalled Etcetera’s unwillingness to commit to a routine in the B&B, his inability to naturally fall into a role or job. It meant that he was hers for as long as they wanted.
She inserted her thumbs between his robe and flesh and ran them slowly down, pushing the robe open one agonizing millimeter at a time, marveling at how the skin that she had seen and touched in the onsen could be so private when partially clothed. He put his hands on her robe and pulled it apart and it slid over her breasts as they popped free, one and two. In default, she’d fussed about them, they weren’t the right size or shape. Her critical eye wanted more from her imperfect flesh. Walkaway had liberated her from inchoate anxiety, but more, the burn had ended it, fully occupying her self-consciousness.
Her robe parted over the burn. His hand grazed the scar. She jolted and he jerked his hand back. He said “sorry” as she took hold of his hand and put it on the scar. The scar didn’t hurt, exactly, but it pulled, and when she did yoga she felt her torso’s skin distorting around its gravity. For the longest time she hadn’t able to touch the alien thing where her skin had been—only washing it with a sponge. Her hand went to it in her sleep, and she’d wake with its snake-segments of collagen beneath her fingertips. She’d come to détente, no longer feeling it was alien.
His hands were on the scar now, its rises and depressions. His eyes were distant, his breath shallow. She panted, too; their breath was mingling in their mouths, they were that close. They hadn’t kissed yet. She pulled his robe off of his shoulders and forced his hands off her while she yanked it down. His hands went back to her. The movement brought them close enough he could reach around and touch her shoulder blades, her spine, the satellites of her burn, like the debris field of a meteor impact. He was close enough that his erection bobbed insistently at her thigh, warm elastic touch that made her smile. He smiled back, and she knew he knew what she was smiling about.
His palms reached her butt. She put her hands in the same place and reeled him in, his erection sandwiched between them, her breasts crushed against his chest. Her lips formed into a kiss and found his collarbone. She worried at the bone with her teeth, then nipped his skin. He gasped, crushed her harder. He rolled his head and bared his throat to her and she darted kisses on it, loving his stubble on her lips, that boy-skin feeling. Her lips rested on the artery in his throat, and she relished his pulse, and sucked insistently, daring him to push her off before she gave him a hickey, but he hissed and his trapped penis throbbed in time with his pulse against her stomach.
He ground his hips against her. She let his thigh slide between hers, nestle against her vulva. She ground against the muscle of his leg, hairs pulling, everything too dry at first, and then, moment by delicious moment, wetter. Her nostrils flared. She breathed the sex from their armpits and groins. She sucked at the vulnerable place where his jaw and throat and ear met.
They still hadn’t kissed.
He pulled her ass harder, his hands strong. She remembered the way his hand had squeezed hers. He lifted her to her tiptoes, crushing her pussy against his leg. She found his quadriceps and mashed her clit against them, let go and leaned back, feeling his quads jump out as he braced to support her. She bent until her hands reached the wall and she pushed back, and they played with muscle and gravity, and he hauled her back and staggered.
Back on her feet, she bulled him to the bedside, put one foot on the ladder and hoisted herself up. He leapt in behind her.
And still, they hadn’t kissed. She twisted, caught his ankle, popped his little toe in her mouth, biting down when he tried to pull away. She dug her fingernails into the arch of his foot and reached blindly and caught his erection, making a fist and squeezing just hard enough to feel that pulse again. His hips bucked and she held, then let go and reversed herself, sliding up his body and pinioning his torso beneath hers. Her hands
caught his and she used her hard-won construction muscles to yank his wrists over his head and push them into the mattress. His armpits smelled of clean sweat. His breath was on her face. Her breath was on his.
She made a kiss of her lips again and poised, pulling her face back when he tried to kiss. She wanted this to last. She let one lip brush his, then both. Then some tongue. His mouth parted. His face strained toward hers and she pulled back, started over. He got the message. He lay there, let her control him, choose how the kiss would unfold. She made it very slow.
It was wonderful.
It didn’t stop.
Mouths locked, he reached for her ass, and she pressed it into his hands, willing him to knead, incidentally mashing his cock into her scar, which had never happened before. She noted it absently and groaned into his mouth. He groaned back.
She ground on his leg again, crushed his cock between them. His fingers worked around her ass to where the hair was slick. He rhythmically kneaded the length of her groin, explored her opening. She moaned into his mouth. Shivers chased up her back and stomach. The explosive feeling built and she bucked, urging him to dig deeper, move faster, and he ground in return. She hadn’t been with a man in more than a year. This one stirred up nostalgic eroticism, calling to mind all the men before, every shiver, every screaming orgasm. These images played through her mind as she moved. The familiar flush spread up her neck.
He surprised her by coming from the friction. The sudden heat between them set her off into convulsions that culminated with the kinds of loud noises that had once embarrassed her.
She rolled half off him—making him oof as she inadvertently drove an arm into his solar plexus—grabbed his robe off the desk beneath them and used it to wipe up.
“Whew,” she said.
“More.”
She looked down, incredulous. “Already?”
He licked his lips.
He was a good lover. It shone through the heart-thumping roar of a long-frustrated fuck. She couldn’t put her finger on it—metaphorically, anyway—but as she came again, clamping her thighs around his ears, she realized it: the lack of hurry. Even after years of walkaway, she was used to slicing time into rice-paper slices thin enough for one discrete thing, before moving onto the next. Most of the time, she rushed to complete this current moment before the next thumped the door. Every adult she’d known matched that rhythm, the next thing almost upon them, the current one had best be taken care of in haste.
Etcetera sliced his time thick. He’d slide along her body to her breasts and rest his face on them for an unmeasured pause before nibbling. It went on longer than she expected. It was better than nice. Her own body-clock synchronized, metronome tick slowing to a languorous heartbeat that felt like there was all the time in the world. It was more decadent than the sticky juices on her fingers, livid hickey on her left breast, the turgid boy-nipple she was rolling between her fingers.
When they were done, she had no idea how late it was. It might be sunset, or later, though they’d come upstairs at daybreak. She wiped interface surface on the wall and brought up a clock, was surprised to see it was only midday. Not hurrying all the time had not meant not losing all the time. The difference between glorious languor and endless hustle was an hour or two. It felt like she’d just been given a day.
She kissed him at the junction of throat and earlobe and worked her way around to his lips. He embraced her in that unhurried way, enfolding her in the robe he’d donned.
“That was very nice,” she said.
“It was very nice over here, too.”
They twined fingers. She opened the linen hatch and they stripped the bed and put new sheets on, wiped the surfaces and turned on the air-scrubbers. A green checkmark glowed on the back of the door as the room acknowledged that it had been adequately reset. They left, hands twined and dirty linens in their free arms. These went down a laundry chute by the stairs, and they went to the stables to make some new clothes.
[v]
The fuck didn’t discombobulate their relationship, thank goodness. He hugged her and kissed her cheek instead of shaking her hand in the common room, and his two friends—who, she thought, were doing something along the same lines—shot her knowing looks. He wasn’t all over her every time they met, nor did he give her the studied ignorance treatment. A week later, they ran into each other in a corridor and stopped to chat. He leaned against the wall with his hand splayed against it. She laid hers alongside of it, and he took the hint, and they went back up to the fourth floor for another unhurried, easy play session.
“How are you liking it here?” she asked during one of their pauses.
He looked uncomfortable. “Honestly, I don’t think this is my thing. We left default because I wanted to be part of something where I was more than an inconvenient surplus labor unit. I know I can work here and there’s plenty to do, but it feels contrived. The other day, I totally fucked up some linen processing, ruined thirty sheets. The system just assigned someone else to make new ones and push the blown-out ones through the feedstock processor. The whole thing fails so safe that it doesn’t really matter what I do. If I worked my brains out or did nothing, it would be the same, as far as the system is concerned. I know it’s fucked up and egocentric, but I want to know that I, personally, am important to the world. If I left tomorrow, nothing around here would change.”
She chewed her lip. She’d wrestled with this herself for many years, but admitting it was in bad taste. Everyone talked about special snowflakes, and it was the kind of thing that was an insult from a stranger but not from a friend. You weren’t supposed to need to be a special snowflake, because the objective reality was that, important as you were to yourself and the people immediately around you, it was unlikely that anything you did was irreplaceable. As soon as you classed yourself as a special snowflake, you headed for the self-delusional belief that you should have more than everyone else, because your snowflakiness demanded it. If there was one thing that was utterly uncool in walkaway, it was that self-delusion.
“You know that this is the love that dare not speak its name around here? There have been one hundred billion humans on the planet over the years, and statistically, most of them didn’t make a difference. The anthropocene is about collective action, not individuals. That’s why climate change is such a clusterfuck. In default, they say that it’s down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can’t personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that’s something else, too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it’s you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.”
“But it’s hard to pretend that you’re not the protagonist in the movie of your life. Normally it doesn’t matter, but being around here rubs your nose in it.”
“Everything’s got contradictions. I sometimes wonder if someone is doing something that makes everything better because I wrote a specific line of code. To really thrive out here, you have to want to make a difference and know you’re totally replaceable.”
“Beats default. There you’re not supposed to make a difference and you’re totally surplus.”
This discussion killed her horniness. The thought that her sensations were the same ones innumerable people had felt before and during and after that moment made it feel like a cheap trick, a way of tickling her reward circuits for a drip of this and a sneeze of the other. Normally, sex made her feel like the universe revolved around her sensations. Now they felt like a meaningless flare of light in an uncaring void.
She sat up and pulled on clothes. Etcetera didn’t seem put out, which was a relief and kind of worrying.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “Just not in the mood so much.”
“Sorry about that.” He got into his underwear and pants, turned his shirt right-side-out. “Despite what
ever orthodoxy I’m supposed to embrace and no matter how uncool this is, I want to say that I actually do think you’re special. Better than special. Glorious, actually. And beautiful. But mostly glorious.”
Her heart thudded. “Listen, dude—”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to go lovesick. But I’ve met dozens of people since I went walkaway and you are the first one who made me welcome, and not just because you fucked my brains out, though that did make me feel welcome. But because I can talk about this with you and you don’t roll your eyes like it’s the stupidest thing to ask about, and because you don’t go wide-eyed doctrinaire either. You’re like the only person around here who’s thinking about being a walkaway and doing walkaway. Without you, I would have moved on. This place is amazing, but it’s too finished, if you get what I mean.”
She pulled her dress on. It gave her a moment. When her head emerged, he was staring frankly at her. He had very nice eyes, a nice smile. A little tentative, but she liked that.
“I think you’re great, too.”
“We should go to the stables and print up some mutual admiration society membership badges.”
“You laugh, but I’m sure those exist as premades in walkaway thingiverse.”
“Well, that’s sweet,” he said. They laughed, and a distant alarmed part of herself told her this was a lovers’ laugh, and she was falling in love.
[vi]
Falling in love is wonderful. Once she gave in, she amused herself finding ways to be nice to Etcetera—making him a jacket in a color and cut that suited him better than anything he wore; waking him with a coffium and dragging him upstairs for a quickie while it burned through their veins; washing his back in sensuous strokes in the onsen.