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Seasoning packets. MSG. Jokes about tofu made by people who’d never even tried it. Roman’s sunglasses. Bucolic planned villages with scenic cows and winding streets and guest rooms that were too cold and too stifling.
She flipped from one side to the other, thrashed her feet around beneath the covers, and thought about things that made her angry until she got too hot and had to stick her leg out.
Then she got too cold. Frigid air blasted from a vent beside the bed, and for crying out loud, what did they set the thermostat to, 45? It was fucking freezing.
Hoping for a reprieve, she got out of the bed and opened the door, but when she climbed back into the tall guest bed it was even worse. Like the princess and the pea, she couldn’t get comfortable—only the problem wasn’t something under the bed, it was her. She was a kernel of kinetic heat in a room where she couldn’t find stillness, and Roman was right on the other side of that wall, just there, awake. Creaking.
It didn’t make sense for him to be awake. Insomnia was for people with a conscience, people with feelings. Robots like Roman put on their old-man pajamas and initiated their shutdown routine, and then they didn’t open their eyes again until their processors came awake with a beep in the morning.
“Go to sleep, robot,” she whispered at the ceiling.
Two-ten. Two forty-five. Three-seventeen.
Creak.
Ashley threw the covers off and put her feet down on the cold floor.
She picked up her flip-flops and tiptoed out the door and down the hall, thinking of varnish over smooth wood, pebbles under her toes, sand on a beach. That was what she needed—to feel honest texture on her skin and push against it. Something rough. Something real.
Her feet made no sound on the carpeted stairs. The deadbolt yielded to her fingers and thumb, the door opening with a soft sucking sound. A broken seal. Escape.
She paused on the front porch with her sandals dangling from her fingers.
There was nowhere to go.
Roman had brought her here, and she didn’t have a key to his car. She couldn’t go in the Airstream, because she’d run out of cleaning jobs she could do without more supplies, and she couldn’t handle looking at all those boxes and admitting to herself that she was far too scared to open them.
She picked her way down the brick path, closing her eyes at the feeling of the day’s stored-up heat soaking into the pads of her feet.
Her toes curled.
Better.
She walked all the way to the sidewalk, but the sidewalk wasn’t what she wanted. Neither was the road beyond.
She turned and walked into the garden, where there was mulch and dirt and a metal bench beneath a redbud tree. Ashley sat and gathered fallen seedpods into a messy pile with her feet. She picked one off the top and deconstructed it. The brown pod flaked away, but when she tested a seed inside with her fingernail, it gave. Alive.
She found a stick, dug a small hole with it, and tucked a few seeds inside. A futile act of sabotage. They would never be allowed to grow.
The door opened, and Roman came out. Shirtless.
His jeans sat so perfectly on his hips—low, a little loose, framing the thick curve of oblique muscle at his sides. Showing off his abs, which were the sort of abs men acquired by punishing themselves at the gym for hours every week. The sort of abs that belonged on a man who hated dessert, excess, and life.
Roman’s abs. Roman’s attitude.
Roman’s body.
She looked at his feet, because she didn’t want to look at his stomach and want him and hate herself for it, and she didn’t want to see his face.
Loafers. No socks.
Robots didn’t wear loafers without socks. She knew that—knew he wasn’t a robot or a Ken doll or any other inhuman thing she wanted to make him into.
He was a man who had visited her grandmother when she was sick. When she was dying.
He was a man who’d come after her in the middle of the night. A man who now asked, “You all right?”
Which wasn’t fair at all.
