The Mother Beforehand Read online

  “What? Go ahead and say what you’re thinking, Clive.”

  “Nothing. I just thought you might want to try it. These are cutting-edge nanobots, fully tested and one hundred percent safe. They play on nerves. They enhance our pleasure.”

  “I don’t want to try it, Clive. You thought wrong.”

  His head bobbed. “Because you’re scared.”

  “Because I don’t want to.”

  Clive looked confused, unsure of whether he should be begging, reasoning against her (in his mind) naive fear, or respecting her wishes. He was usually respectful of Nicole despite being one of the world’s most powerful people, but in the bedroom the rules were always different. It was as if Clive were a caveman, brain fleeing from skull-head to cock-head when riled, regressing from the genius who’d changed the world to his distant Neanderthal cousin. Getting off, when Clive’s engine revved, became the only thing that mattered. He only rarely pushed Nicole’s limits past their breaking point, but recently those times had been disturbing enough to feel like a psychosis in the making.

  “And you don’t want to,” Clive said in a way that sounded patient but struck her as patronizing, because you’re afraid.

  Nicole sighed. It was time to make a stand. If she didn’t say what was on her mind now, they were finished anyway.

  She sat on the bed, the comforter covered with his latest batch of next-gen perversions. Every one made her nervous. “Okay. Let’s say I am afraid.”

  “There’s no reason to be afraid, Nicole. Everything here is perfectly—”

  “Let’s say I am afraid,” she repeated, more forcefully.

  He stopped speaking, now standing in the middle of the room, tall above her as she sat. He was wearing a Voyos robe. It monitored body temperature and automatically adjusted, warmer or colder, to keep the wearer in optimum comfort. Compared to what Clive and his circle of friends had access to, even the robes’ new intelligent fabrics seemed decades obsolete.

  “If I am afraid, Clive — even if you think my fear is silly and pointless — do you care?”

  His voice softer now, he said, “They’re safe. Totally and completely s—”

  “The question isn’t whether they’re safe. The question isn’t if I should be afraid. If I am — despite what you think is justified or normal or reasonable — do you see it? Does what I feel matter to you at all?”

  “Well, of course. I’m just saying that—”

  “The truth — and I suppose I should have said something before now — is that I’ve been uncomfortable with a lot of what you’ve asked me to do lately,” Nicole said, feeling the weight of a long-repressed issue finally fleeing her shoulders. “And yes, some of these things—”

  She waved her arm across the bed, around the room at the toys she’d used at Clive’s insistence despite her own reservations.

  “—have scared me. I used them anyway. But I didn’t get over my fear. I used them despite the fear I very much had. To please you.”

  Clive reached for her hand. “Which is why you’re the best.”

  Nicole pulled away, refusing his touch. “But I have to ask, Clive: is that the way this whole thing is supposed to work? You bring me tasks and I do them for you like a slave, whether I want to or not?”

  Clive’s lips curled. A good escort was supposed to always, always feign satisfaction unless he or she was willing to flat-out refuse a client’s request and initiate a refund. It felt ugly, but she had to know. Their relationship had wandered into uncertain territory. But she had to know his answer. Even if he rejected her, it was better than living with her discomfort any longer.

  “You’re not happy.”

  “I’m usually happy. But when you push for things I’ve made it clear I don’t want, I wonder if it really matters to you how I feel.”

  Clive’s hesitation was obvious. Nicole knew him well enough to feel it: He was considering playing his card as the client and hers as the escort.

  Was she the crazy one?

  Should she remove emotion from the picture and either accept or refuse his perversions like a good little escort?

  Finally, Clive spoke. “It matters,” was all he said.

  But now he looked pouty, petulant. Clive Spooner wasn’t used to refusal. For over a decade, he’d asked the world to bend over, and it always had. Because he was Clive Fucking Spooner.

  “Well then, if it matters,” Nicole said, feeling the anger she’d apparently been repressing, “I’m telling you I’m uncomfortable right now.”

  She pointed at the nano-injector in his hand.

  “I’m uncomfortable with that, Clive. And I’m uncomfortable with all of these other prototype toys. If they’re not on the market yet and won’t be for years, I don’t have anything to judge them by. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s stupid of me to fear the unknown. You don’t get to say that I shouldn’t be uncomfortable. I’m uneasy whether you like it or not. I guess the question is: do you want to listen to my discomfort and respect it? Or do you want to keep telling me it doesn’t matter because you’re the client and I’m the whore?”

  Nicole knew she’d crossed a line but didn’t care. She felt the words linger in her mouth, bitter like ashes. That comment had been spectacularly unfair. But in the moment, with years of Clive’s failure to listen like an infection in a wound, fairness had ceased to matter. She wanted to hurt him. She wanted to bring this painful thing out into the open because she could no longer hold it inside.

  It was more than fear that ate at her. It was inadequacy, too.

  Was she a woman who had value to Clive in and of herself? Or was she just a blank and anonymous slate that required all his twisted gadgets to be worth fucking?

  But Clive didn’t react with anger. He shook his head. “Don’t say that, Nicole. Don’t ever call yourself that.”

  His crushed look should have cut her, but Nicole’s floodgates were open. She’d been repressing for months, refusing to speak up. Now that she’d started, she couldn’t control it … or her sudden anger.

  “Why not?” she spat. “It’s what I am: a whore. Sure, minds have started to turn. The ‘Wellness’ campaign and all that. They’re talking about legalizing prostitution, you know. But we both know a whore is still a whore. You give me money and I spread my legs for you. What I want is irrelevant, right?”

  “Nicole, that’s not fair.”

  “It’s how I feel, Clive!” She stood, started to pace. “Maybe I’m the one who’s off here. Maybe I’ve gotten all of this wrong. I should just do it, right? Shit, as long as you pay me enough, I guess I should do anything. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I accept your money. So yes. Come over here and inject me. Let me rock your cock. I am here to serve you.”

  Clive crossed his arms, now looking down at her. Without her heels, he was a full head taller than her.

  “You know that’s not how it is.”

  “Well, maybe it should be. Seriously, Clive. What is this? You pay me, don’t you?”

  “I pay the spa.”

  “You pay me too.”

  Inappropriately in the middle of a fight, he gave a ghost of his usual devilish smile. “Not as far as they know.”

  “I don’t know what I am, Clive. We go to the city and act like a couple. I meet other people like a fine upstanding gal, and most of those people don’t know what I do for a living — great considering that not everyone is enlightened about sex for hire. But at the same time, we’re always covering our tracks. Can’t let the spa know, officially, that we’re spending too much time together. And of course—”

  “Being me carries certain expectations of privacy, Nicole.”

  She ignored him. “And of course even though we sneak around and cover our tracks like Romeo and Juliet, we’re …”

  This time Nicole stopped without interruption. She blushed, then turned to stare out the window. She had put her foot right in a pile of shit.

  Even after three years, the most she’d ever been willing to say about
the two of them was that Clive liked her and thought she was sexy and funny, and that she liked his company and found him handsome and charming. Comparing them to two of literature’s most famous lovers — doomed lovers, who’d found death more acceptable than being apart — was a continent over the line.

  As unacceptable as the many times she’d told Clive how much she wished she was able to have a child and cried over her inability to do so.

  What had she been trying to do, telling a client all those things?

  Was she trying to trap him?

  Trick him into pitying her, deluding the man into misaligned affection?

  Suddenly Nicole felt stupid. This wasn’t as much about Clive as she’d thought. Amid all the jumbled emotions, many were her own inadequate fears.

  He stood behind her as she looked out across the beautiful Voyos gardens, and his large hands slid over her slight shoulders. They felt like reassuring weights, keeping her grounded.

  “Nic, I want to fix this. I’m sorry. Tell me. What would you like? Do you want me to put it all away?”

  His voice was almost tender. The wall she’d tried so hard to maintain in her mind and heart — the wall she knew it was essential to maintain, doing what she did — had started to crumble. If any freelance client other than Clive thought only of himself and never of her, she wouldn’t care. If any other client turned his back on her needs and desires, she’d think it made sense. And if anyone else brought her something he wanted to try, she’d do it, no matter how much it objectified her.

  It only bothered her because she’d let herself start to love him, and had been foolish enough to believe that behind his copious, regular payments, he’d started to love her, too.

  Which was absurd. And unfair.

  She was wrong, not him.

  She turned to face him.

  “I thought you enjoyed the play, Nic. It’s fine. I don’t need this stuff. Any of it.”

  Now that he’d offered, her mind had done a one-eighty.

  “But you like it.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know if I like it. And yes, I’d like to try.” He smiled again, this one both more genuine and more welcome. “But you matter far more than the toys, Nic.”

  She saw a dangerous edge and steered the conversation toward it.

  “Matter how?”

  “You’re sexy. Delicious. Better than any of these bits of Warp and Plasteel.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You’re also tight. Wet.” The grin became wider. “Flexible.”

  Nicole repressed a sigh. He was going in the wrong direction, touting her physical attributes instead of the more meaningful ones. But it was progress. Better than fighting, given all the grievances she’d aired and he’d allowed.

  Nicole tried to recalibrate her expectations on the fly. The wall she’d tried to tunnel through would need rebuilding. If Clive couldn’t take a hint about changing the nature of their relationship, he wasn’t ready to change it.

  And maybe he shouldn’t be ready. It Nicole hurt to think it (with the wall down and all), but maybe this was how it should be: the way it had always been with Clive. He didn’t want to use the ugly words, but maybe he’d never stopped paying her because this had never stopped being a transaction. He was the client. She was the freelance escort.

  Yes, there was affection between them, but it was mild attachment, not love. Services were always rendered. You don’t stop paying your favorite restaurant once you started liking the waiter.

  Nicole forced herself to put her hands on his waist. His were still on her shoulders. With music in the room — maybe something by Natasha Thomas — they could have been dancing an absurd performance among the dildos and sensitizers.

  “Tell me about these little robots,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “Tell me, Clive. I want to please you.”

  “Not if it makes you unhappy.”

  “I’m always happy if you are.” She tried a tiny smile. “I was just in one of my moods. I want to hear about it. Even if only out of curiosity, okay?”

  Clive seemed unsure, but she knew he wanted to tell her. If he could do so without setting off another shit storm, he’d leap at the chance.

  Nicole smiled a bit more, encouraging him. Telling herself what their relationship truly was and deciding to enjoy rather than resist it.

  “Please?” she purred.

  Another small hesitation. “Well, they enhance pleasure, like I said. They travel in the bloodstream, pooling where blood normally pools. That much is, I think, straightforward.”

  “So naturally and without much effort, they all go to your dick.”

  “To whatever engorges.” Clive glanced at Nicole. He might be considering whether to point out those potential areas on her — boobs, pussy, etcetera — but was playing this safe. Making his descriptions clinical rather than seductive.

  “Then what?”

  “One partner injects a set of bots and the other injects a different set. When you bring body parts containing nanos near one another, the bots can tell. They basically link their little microscopic hands and shake.”

  “If I took them and you already have them inside you,” Nicole said, carefully trying to meet Clive’s words where he stood and repair the damage, “when we had sex, it’d be like a built-in vibrator.”

  Clive nodded. “A bit more than that, but yes. They affect the nerves themselves. In addition to providing stimulation that provokes natural sensation, they enhance what’s possible at a nerve level. In effect, you end up able to feel more.”

  Nicole wrapped a hand around Clive. “Feeling more. That’s … interesting.”

  “But that’s just the tip of it,” Clive told her, gaining confidence from her simple acceptance. “Xenia has been building simple repair nanos for years, but these are Quark bots.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “You’ve heard me talk about Noah’s obsession with true AI. What separates bogus artificial intelligence from real artificial intelligence is the ability to make decisions based on emotion or the facsimile of emotion.” He picked up the injector. “But these? They’re intuitive.”

  “How?” Nicole asked. Contrasting her earlier anger, she was now curious.

  “They’re truly adaptive. They get inside you and learn your patterns. They figure out what you want most then tweak what’s inside to give it to you.”

  “I don’t really understand, Clive.”

  “Neither do I, fully. They’re highly, highly advanced and in pre-alpha testing. Verified safe in a thousand ways — and with an expiration date inside the body just in case — but definitely pre-alpha. Testers so far have come back clamoring for more and more, saying they’re having the best sex they’ve ever dreamed of. Literally, because it induces a dreamlike state in some people.”

  “Like fucking on drugs?”

  “Depends on the user. All anyone will say for sure is that they ‘give you what you desire most.’ For some, that’s a transcendent experience. For some, it’s easier, more fully immersive fantasies. For some, it’s hormone release that removes inhibition. When two people use them together, apparently the bots in both bodies talk to one another. That’s why I was eager to try it. We’ll be the perfect fit, each experiencing what we want most … and becoming that for the other.”

  Clive stopped, perhaps wondering if he’d crossed the same line all over again. He’d spoken as if Nicole had agreed to inject the bots. What’s more — if Nicole truly wanted to be offended — the idea of “becoming what the other wants most” could be taken as an accusation that she wasn’t already what he wanted.

  But she was feeling better now. The simple decision to let this be escort/client instead of lover/lover was already allowing her to relax into what it was rather than what part of her would always want it to be. And that was turning her on. Because what did an escort and her client do most reliably, after all?

  Hot sex, of course.

  She said no
thing, moving closer.

  Then she leaned back, looking up. He was sweet, in his disturbing way.

  “Maybe we could try it. Just once.”

  Clive looked wary, now overcompensating in the opposite direction. “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do. I respect your wishes, Nic. Always.”

  “Do they stay inside you? They don’t, do they? You said they had an ‘expiration date.’”

  Clive nodded, perhaps eager at the way she hadn’t leaped at his obligatory out.

  “They’re too fragile to last long. The body expels them naturally. You’d see it if I gave you a bunch of boring data. But yes, they’re short-lived. Days at most. It’s basically impossible, physically speaking, for them to last more than a week or so. If you want more, you have to keep injecting them.”

  “How do you know they’re not just hiding inside?”

  “We could analyze your waste if you’d like, although I have to say, that’s not my fetish at all.”

  Nicole looked at the vial. He was the client. She was the girl for hire. And in the end, pleasing him really did make her happy. Her body’s heat was changing with her shift in mindset. And yes, she did think she might enjoy it. She’d always been adventurous. How much would it really hurt to jump in just one more time?

  It might bond them.

  It might take them both further.

  And in the end, Clive would still be with her, wanting Nicole for Nicole.

  And, apparently, her magical vibrating hole.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  October 17, 2038 — Voyos Island

  Nicole stood in the resort room doorway, one hand on her hip, hair slick wet, eyes circled with dark eyeliner, lashes painted and long. She was wearing black lingerie — a delicate, cleavage-enhancing bra, black panties with a deep scoop below her flat belly in the front and a thong in the back — and nothing else except tall black leather boots with a stiletto heel.

  Clive was on the bed, eyeing his tablet. The room was dim, and he was reading by the front-lit mesh light on its surface. Despite the way the light was supposed to work, shining downward, the tablet lit his face.