The Mother Beforehand Page 4

  He looked up, then slowly set it aside. “Wow.”

  After all their time together, Nicole had been fighting conflicting feelings about their relationship. The first was that the more time they spent together, the more time it looked like they would spend in the future. She’d mostly compartmentalized those emotions, but sometimes they leaked out; she was a human woman with a human heart. The second feeling was that a man like Clive could have anyone he wanted — and the longer they stayed together, the harder it might be to keep him.

  They’d been at the hotel for two days. Clive came and went from Voyos. Nicole was starting to feel like she only had three modes: work on the tables with her partner, be with Clive, and sit around waiting for Mr. Spooner’s return.

  Her existence mostly centered around subservience and anticipation, which was appropriate but unsatisfying. She wasn’t supposed to be in the Voyos hotels — that honor was reserved for official escorts — but being Clive Spooner had its privileges. As with all of their encounters, she doubted anyone would ever know. They could do anything.

  As she entered the room, Nicole could feel the nanobots working. Not only literally, but on her attitude. She’d been wrong about them — wrong since the first time, since that first big fight.

  Mechanically, the tiny bots moved with her blood, pooling where it went.

  Psychologically, they’d awoken a new level of sexual awareness she hadn’t known was there. When Nicole was wet now, she was soaking.

  Her fantasies had grown richer, every sensation stronger.

  And when she was with Clive and his complementary bots?

  WOW.

  Before entering the room to greet him, fresh from her bath and sitting in front of the vanity mirror with her pussy growing warm, Nicole had picked up a tube of eyeliner. She’d applied mascara, which she usually avoided. Lips red, smacked and glossed. She’d straightened her usually bouncy hair and applied an oil infusion to shine it. She’d donned the black lingerie, which normally felt out of character and remained at the bottom of her dresser, but which she’d packed on impulse for their faux vacation. She wondered how she’d known to pack her high-heeled boots. This wasn’t her house. She’d had to know, on some level, which vixen she’d decide to be with the moment upon her.

  Maybe Clive was right. Maybe the nanobots really did give people what they wanted most. She’d certainly had new thrills with Clive, but surprisingly she had them with herself as well. She liked herself more. She performed a bit better at everything. Life, overall, was just a little more pleasurable.

  Sometimes Nicole wondered at the alien things inside her body. At how much change they may have wrought. At what — and who — they might be making of her.

  She faced her reflection.

  “Who is Nicole Shaw?” she asked the mirror.

  But there was no time to wait for an answer. A man who was lucky to have a woman like her was waiting just beyond the bedroom door.

  The bathroom and attached vanity room were well lit. The bedroom was mostly dark, except for a small table lamp in the corner. It was evening, and the blinds were drawn. Clive was seeing her mostly back-lit, striking her pose, presented in half-silhouette like something from a movie.

  “Wow is right.”

  “I should take you on vacation more often.”

  Nicole laughed. The idea of her being on vacation so close to home with a man who was paying for her time was absurd. But if they were a faux couple, then she’d let this be an artificial trip. Perhaps it was even a chance to rekindle the passion that had flagged during their real (but intimate) four years together.

  “You wanted something different. Someone different.” She moved to the bed and straddled him.

  He was naked under the covers, a bulge beneath her rear.

  “I don’t want someone different at all.”

  “But I’m different.”

  “Different clothes. Different hair. But still my Nicole.”

  My Nicole.

  She didn’t like how that sounded. It was the kind of thing a girl —not a bulletproof, slick-haired, confident woman in black boots — might hang her hopes on.

  “I can be whatever you desire.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s what you pay me to do.”

  She had him pinned. It was a motion of protest, but his cock was still hard beneath her.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. How is it not true?”

  “It’s a buzz-kill. And you keep mentioning it.”

  Nicole shrugged. “Because it’s true.”

  “Do you want me to stop paying you?”

  She reached back and rubbed his length through the bed sheet.

  “What I want is for you to be inside me.”

  He looked like he might protest, but Nicole’s hand was firm. The nanos had learned their patterns, and in Nicole had learned to migrate to her fingertips for moments such as this. She imagined them moving, harmonizing with the nanobots in Clive’s cock.

  “That feels so good,” he said, eyes closing.

  “I learned some new tricks, too. I want to try them out. If, that is, you think you can handle it. I’m hornier than I can take right now.”

  “What kind of tricks?”

  Nicole raised up enough to pull the sheet out from between them. His hard cock pressed against her ass like a visitor knocking. She pulled the crotch of the black panties away and slipped him inside, squeezing his shaft enough to stop him halfway.

  The vibration between their parts intensified, lessened, intensified, lessened. With each cycle, the vibrations pounded harder.

  “How are you doing that?”

  “Kegel exercises.” A dark laugh. “Turns out they’re a nano’s best friend.”

  “How?”

  “You gave me these bots, love,” she said, parodying his English speech.

  “They shake. But not like this.”

  “Resonance. Like opera singers shattering crystal.”

  “Hell,” Clive said, already breathless.

  Nicole moved. His cock swelled as she took long, slow strokes.

  “I can do it with my lips, too. I kind of want you to come in my mouth …” She made a sad face. “But my pussy wants you more.”

  “Good God, Nicole,” he gasped. “I won’t last long.”

  “Doesn’t someone make nanobots that can solve men’s one-shot problem?”

  “Maybe I should have Quark work on it. I’m sure Alexa would pay.”

  Nicole moved faster up and down, then sat back and pulled the fork of her panties further to the side so Clive could see his dick sliding in and out of her.

  She was usually bare, but recently she’d had a spell of “what’s old is new again” and had been allowing a small patch to grow. Looking down — then putting one foot on the bed, high on the boot’s heel — she saw him eyeing the slickness of his shaft as she rode him, and how wet she’d become.

  With a heave, he used his superior upper body strength to toss her aside, her back to the bed. He yanked off her panties, past her boots, and dropped them to the floor. He rolled her again, propping her up on all fours. Her bra followed, and suddenly she was doggy style away from him, her tits hanging, sensitive nipples brushing the bed, his cock sliding into her from behind.

  She looked back as he thrust, her eyes serious in their dark-lined blue depths. “Stop.”

  Clive’s brow furrowed. “Stop? Why?”

  But he stopped nonetheless, and with Nicole’s ass in the air and his hard cock deep in her pussy, she began to contract in rhythm. Not thrusting; not even moving. She focused on the rolling cycles of the nano, her clit tingling, an orgasm swelling from deep inside.

  Nicole clenched. Stopped. Clenched.

  The bots shook in rhythm, building waves of pleasure.

  Clive started to move again. She moved with him, keeping his dick all the way inside, to the hilt, not allowing his thrust.

  He leaned forward, buried to the balls, and g
rabbed her tits as his hips began to shake. His breath was hot on her neck. She felt her own orgasm swell. And swell. And swell. And …

  Clive gripped her hard as he unloaded inside her, pulling her tight against him. She massaged him from the inside, rolling the pressure points up and down his shaft in a stroking rhythm.

  Then she came herself, everything wet and slick between them.

  Waves came for long seconds and then it was over.

  Clive was behind her, panting.

  They both rolled to their sides, Clive still locked deep inside.

  “Don’t pull out,” Nicole said. Her pussy wanted to grip him, to massage the last bits of pleasure from his cock.

  He almost chuckled. “With you, Love? I wouldn’t dare.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  April 3, 2039 — Voyos Island

  Nicole, though she was now closer to 30 than 20, didn’t think she had any business reflecting on the world’s changing ways. In another decade or two, she could start talking about the way things had been “when she was young.”

  And yet, now that she’d finally sat to watch Pretty Woman, Nicole couldn’t help but feel like a geezer — rolled over by the rapidly approaching future.

  She’d never seen the original Pretty Woman but had been hearing about the Nectar remake of the classic film for over a year. She’d thought about taking Clive to see it in one of District Zero’s increasingly rare theaters during one of their long off-island encounters, but the time had never been right for a love story — or for taking her client, who she had to keep reminding herself wasn’t her lover — to see it.

  In recent months, while Clive had been away at the island summit, Nicole had been reverting to her old self now that the injected nanobots had been purged from her system and there’d been no reason to replace them.

  And Nicole’s perhaps overly sentimental self, of course, had been very interested in seeing the movie that had become a national phenomenon.

  Pretty Woman had made headlines because it was a Charisma and Benson Young production. But it had stayed in the spotlight because, despite the explicit scenes, it was far from being your grandmother’s porn. The remake, critics said, had captured the original’s mainstream appeal and heart — and so into the mainstream the new film had leapt. Bluenoses had huffed and puffed about explicit sex having no place in mainstream films, but the detractors were missing two things. For one, some amount of unsimulated sex had been sniffing the peripheries of mainstream film for decades. And secondly, people who turned their noses up at sexuality in this day and age weren’t far from outright bigots.

  It wasn’t 1990 anymore. Sex was everywhere, so it only made sense that it’d be in film. That was good news for Nicole; sex work, at least in the cities, was decreasingly seen as immoral or something to hide. And so the movie had hit big. Stroking the zeitgeist, and all that.

  The film was about a prostitute and her client. When you thought about it, the oddity wasn’t in the new film’s explicitness, but the old film’s censorship. The story had always been about sex and the transaction of power. The remake simply took off the original movie’s blinders and showed it.

  Nicole, sitting alone in her small house while the man she wasn’t in love with and didn’t want to be rescued by was away for five months, sat on her couch, knees to her chest, crying as the story unfolded on her screen.

  Why was she so goddamn emotional over a stupid movie?

  She missed Clive. God help her, she really did miss him.

  At first, she hadn’t thought she would. She’d carefully rebuilt that mental wall: her paid work on one side and her personal self on the other. It wouldn’t matter if Clive had to be away for several months, she’d assured him when he’d bid her goodbye in February. Of course it wouldn’t. She wasn’t attached. There were a thousand other ways for a girl to get off.

  The actors on-screen moved from touching to undressing. Their action started high, above the waist. The businessman Edward tried to kiss Vivian the hooker, but she told him no — not on the lips. She moved down his bare chest and slipped something else between her lips instead.

  Nicole, with her eyes inappropriately wet, wondered if she should be turned on. She probably should be, but something in the Youngs’ magic managed to make the scene (and the full-penetration to follow; she’d read all the reviews) more seductive than truly erotic. And so the wheel went, with Nectar slowly pulling sex into the mainstream.

  The island spa’s business had steadily climbed, ever since the film’s release. It didn’t feel like a coincidence. As the world changed, companies like Wellness would make billions supporting a nation’s newly admitted desires.

  Clive left and Nicole strutted confidently about the island, working the tables with renewed fervor. She took the lead more often. Diners constantly requested to dine under her table, and she’d been asked about sideline freelance gigs. She’d turned them all down for no reason at all.

  It wasn’t because she was missing Clive.

  Not at all.

  Within a few weeks she began to feel like a junkie, making her way through the case of nanobot refills left behind by Clive. Did she really need those things to get off, using the vibrator that paired with them?

  No. And they reminded her of Clive.

  Not that she missed him, of course.

  And so the new toy sat in its box. The nanos went unused. Her confidence returned to normal: buoyant and bubbly, with a funny exterior, but somehow tentative inside. She felt oddly plain and vacant.

  And again, in a decidedly different way, she wondered: Who is Nicole Shaw?

  On-screen, Edward came inside Vivian. Nothing simulated or censored; he pulled out and the viewer saw it all.

  Everything was changing, everywhere in the world. But especially here, in Nicole’s small house. Especially in her heart.

  She’d been with Clive for five full years. Even now, she had no idea where they stood. Or rather, she felt reluctantly certain of the heartbreaking truth.

  Clive, gone for nearly half a year.

  Did she really think he wouldn’t be screwing other women? He was Clive Spooner and she was merely Nicole Shaw, glass table girl. He was Edward and she was Vivian. Real life was seldom a perfect story.

  As the actress on-screen ran a finger across her lower lip and licked it clean, Nicole took another tissue and blew her nose. It was all so sweet. So romantic.

  This had to end. Clive wouldn’t return for another three months.

  She had to end it when he did.

  Better to rip off the bandage than continue dying slowly.

  “I don’t need to be rescued,” she told the actors on her screen.

  CHAPTER SIX

  June 14, 2039 — Voyos Island

  Nicole looked down at the stick. Technology had transformed the landscape, but pregnancy tests were still the same basic kits they’d always been.

  “Shit,” she said.

  This wasn’t good. Something had been amiss for a while now, but Nicole figured she was just getting sick. It made sense; she’d been sliding into a shallow depression throughout all of April and May and hadn’t been treating herself well. She ate right and exercised because her profession demanded it (nobody wanted a fat girl smearing the glass above them), but she hadn’t been sleeping, had been consuming her requisite calories via synthetic snack foods, and didn’t exactly have Clive’s EndLax available to flush it all through her.

  Few people here thought much of modern medicine. On Voyos, it was all ointments and acupuncture, massage and meditation. There were even shamans who took off-island clients. Nicole had felt sick, and drank tea. Seeing a physician wasn’t even a thought.

  Nicole put a hand on her belly. She had to call Clive. She wasn’t sure how she’d reach him at the summit, but she had to. It was June. He’d left in early February. Looking down, she saw almost no bulge. There was only a slight bump, but until now she figured her discipline had been slipping. It hardly seemed enough to account for a 4-mont
h fetus, but she’d heard that sometimes girls didn’t show much in their first pregnancy.

  Not that she had much experience or knowledge. Her mom had died before they’d had a need for the details, and Nicole was an escort before the world’s smoke had fully cleared. Her mother had probably learned all about babies and how they grew when she’d been younger, but their childhoods had been worlds apart. For Nicole, who’d had major surgery and started a career that treated pregnancy like cancer, taking the time to learn the details of child-bearing — during the apocalypse, on her own, without a mother — would have been like learning to weld for the hell of it.

  Regardless, she was pregnant. No question. The results were unambiguous and, according to the package, 100 percent accurate. The same was supposedly true for the other six tests she’d taken in the last 12 hours.

  How had she not noticed for four months?

  And … you know … didn’t a girl need a uterus to get pregnant?

  Of course she did. Otherwise, what had been the point of crying all those times about never being able to have kids?

  But answers changed nothing. Nicole knew she was pregnant, and that the baby was Clive’s. She’d worked with Sam on the tables since he left, but Sam was born on Voyos and would be more sterile than a laboratory test tube. He’d also made it abundantly clear when they met that he’d had a vasectomy, probably trying to pretend that was unusual in an attempt to woo Nicole into an exclusive contract.

  Proof of the contrary was right in front of her.

  Nicole picked up her tablet and ran a Forage search.

  She didn’t like to think about the fall. The black times. Her mom died in the aftermath, in what passed for a hospital. Nicole nearly passed in the same almost-hospital a year later. Back then, she’d believed in the medical system even as it crumbled, largely due to her father’s insistence that those in charge knew what they were doing.

  A doctor was still a doctor, he said, and doctors, especially now, were needed. But what did he know?