Twice As Bright

Evening is the customary time for intercourse, David has helpfully informed her, but it makes no difference here. Nothing makes any difference.

She wonders momentarily if David knows other positions, as one of his hands is punishingly tight on her right breast and the other is firmly knotted in her hair to hold her there. Her hair has grown since they first fled together; she must look thoroughly abandoned, naked and bruised with a pink gash across her belly and David deep inside her, her hair falling in front of her eyes and sticking to her lips. David fucks her with a precision and a force that verges on brutality – every sob and every cry that comes out of her is hers, she is more violently abandoned to pleasure than ever before and it frightens her. She feels very small, and very frail. Ephemeral, in a universe that is cold and dark and hard. But for that moment where Elizabeth Shaw exists again, it is ecstasy.

What was this meant to be? Their coming together and coupling. An accident, a moral failing. She had needed some kind of touch, he provided it, and it felt very nearly real. Her fingernails catch at the skin of his abdomen as he thrusts into her, his mouth pressing against her cheek, and there is no telltale scarlet flush no matter how hard she scratches him. She turns her face to accept his sterile kisses and she shuts her eyes.

Does he do it for pleasure, or out of curiosity? Is it in his programming to handle her so forcefully – never cruelly, he’s never bent her over the console and taken her there, he’s never done any number of the casually callous things that men do outside of sex itself. Certainly never called her by the wrong name – he will hardly even call her Elizabeth, he speaks only to ask her if she is comfortable, if he is performing to her satisfaction. He loses himself in her – he doesn’t gasp and squirm the way she does, even when she sets out to determine what pleases him, but he is pleased in his dreamlike way. Her sweat makes him slick, her moisture is smeared on his thighs, her little pained sounds give him satisfaction.

There are marks on her upper arms, on belly from his hipbones (his bones themselves are a cadmium alloy) and ones to match on the soft parts of the other side of her, on the tops of her thighs. He can tell when she climaxes by the quickening of her heart rate, the fluttering little spasms in her secret places, and he tailors his own responses to match. That way they arrive at their destination together, at abrupt and unbearable pleasure.

In the aftermath he’s gentle again, she presses herself against him closely to soak up his carefully regulated warmth. Better than an electric blanket – even his extremities are warm, he traces along her right instep with the side of his foot in an idling motion that must be randomly selected from a library of dozens. The sound of his breathing must be purely for show, like the beat of his heart, but in her state of exhaustion it’s – soothing.

David brings his thumb down the slope of her breast, his palm resting somewhere in the vicinity of her heart. His head tilts, slightly, as he looks down over her shoulder – he is curious, or perhaps he is having difficulty processing what he sees.

“Bruising,” he says, and that is certainly puzzlement. “Have I harmed you?”

She covers his hand with her own.

“I rather like the marks.”