sex bots 04 - one night steined (6 page)

He skimmed a finger down her arm, over her baggy clothes. “So come with me now.” When she didn’t respond, Frank touched the back of her hand, daring her to let him lock fingers. “Give me a chance.”

She spun around, knocking off his touch as she rotated. “I won’t let you mess with my system anymore.” She’d complained before about Frank’s reprogramming, but never flat-out told him to stop.

It was a day of change for her apparently, and Frank didn’t want to set her back by arguing. “How about a deal?” He stepped back a few paces, giving her more room.

Kuri cocked her head. “What kind of deal?”

Frank crossed his arms. He didn’t want to give up the opportunity to get her on his table and her brain open for his scalpel. But he wanted something else more. “Spend the night with me.” When she opened her mouth to argue, he rushed to make the deal sweeter in case he needed to negotiate up. “Just one more chance. Maybe you’ll remember more.”

“Frank, I can’t…”

“I saw that you remembered something. There was that second, when you answered the door. I know that you remembered something.”

Kuri paled, her hand fluttering to her hair to comb at a loose strand. “I don’t know if I remembered. I never see more than flashes.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“If you won’t remember anyway, just spend the night with me. It’s safer than you being alone. We don’t have to have sex.”

She scoffed, so he grabbed her hand. “I’m serious. Stay with me. So I can keep an eye on you.”

Kuri bit her lip. “Like I’m a little kid?”

He laughed. “That’s the last thing I see you as.” Frank gave her a smile—trying to be seductive though he didn’t know how. “Think of it as an experiment.”

Her shoulders dropped—the only sign she’d agreed. “Whatever, Frank.” Kuri looked up, giant eyes flashing. “But if we’re doing this, I’m not spending all my waking hours hiding indoors.”

Frank’s nerves strung tight. He knew where she was going with this, and didn’t like it one bit.

Her lip twisted into a challenge. “If you’re going to court me, Frank, you’re going to take me on an actual date.”

The elevator opened on Kuri’s floor just then and Frank rushed to shuffle into Kuri’s apartment to hide. But she blocked his way, keeping Frank prisoner as a lifer passed only three feet away.

His heart thundered in his chest. Frank ruffled his collar, flipping it up to cover his cheeks. He wished he hadn’t left his hooded sweatshirt back at the office. “You know I can’t do that.”

Kuri lifted her eyebrows. “Oh really? You’re out now.” She pinched his chin. Her fingers were cool and soft. “And you left your man-cave to find me last night.”

“Yeah, but that was… I was only trying to keep you safe.”

Kuri rolled her eyes. “My ass says differently.” She surveyed Frank’s appearance—from the dress shirt he’d never taken out of his closet to the loafers that pinched his feet, and finally to his face, smooth but ripped from the razor. Kuri arched her eyebrows, her expression thoughtful, but not unkind. “It seems I’m not the only one who’s been making a few changes.”

* * * * *

True to his word, Frank didn’t so much as let her change her clothes. So as they coasted down the hill and through downtown, Kuri hand-combed her hair and wove it into a makeshift braid. The long strands kept catching in her glasses and falling in her eyes. “You should have at least let my do my hair.”

It wasn’t a big deal—there were showers at the office under Pike Place Market, towels and toiletries of all kinds. Kuri even kept a few changes of clothes in her cube normally. Of course, they were packed in the moving boxes. “Do you have any mousse I could borrow?”

Frank’s lip curled up in a smile. “How do you think I stay looking so suave?” He looked different than she’d ever seen him before. Cocky, maybe? Or perhaps a little arrogant.

Her body tightened, like it knew something she didn’t. It was as if her thighs and belly had some kind of sense-memory, and being close to Frank with his rough voice and rugged smell set her nerves on alert. Kuri could only assume that whatever happened the previous night, her body had enjoyed it. “I’m not going to ask, you know,” she said.

“About the mousse?” Frank steered around a curve under a building. He gently patted the steering wheel as if he were humming a nameless tune in his head.

“No. About the sex.”

Frank didn’t react, but she could tell he wanted to. His big hands held the steering wheel a fraction tighter, so the muscles of his forearms bunched where he’d rolled up his cuffs. “What about it?”

Kuri sighed. She’d brought it up only to say that she wasn’t going to bring it up, and now she was screwed. “I’m not going to ask how it was.”

He glanced at her just long enough to cock an eyebrow. Kuri had never seen him do that before and she wondered if he’d tinkered with his programming to enable that tiny muscle twitch. The guy was such a freak.

“Do you want to know how it was?” he asked softly. His voice was gentle, as if maybe he understood.

Kuri couldn’t remember a single time she’d had sex, though she’d never told that to Frank. She may as well still have been a virgin. “No thanks.” She laced the words with as much disdain as she could. “It’s probably best I don’t know.”

“Whatever you say.” Frank patted her leg, but pulled away right when she might have complained. He let the issue drop, keeping a tantalizing thread of curiosity suspended in the air between them.

“So, not much left to do at the office?” Kuri leaned back and crossed her legs, letting their connection snap. She set her mind working on checklists of tasks. Moving was a big chore, and if she focused on her role in the company, maybe she could stop her imagination from wandering back to Frank’s mouth, and his hands. Her center pulsed, and Kuri shook her head in frustration. She felt sore, worked. It vexed her to no end not to know why.

“I sent Bane to pick up the moving truck this morning. We’ve got most of the team on hand to load it up.”

“Why not Shani?” Kuri wasn’t ready to let their argument from the previous day drop. Fighting with Frank, she felt on solid ground. Plus, it was true that Frank favored Kuri and Bane for jobs that required interaction with humans. With Barbie and Q-ter, Kuri understood why—Barbie was just too spacey. It wasn’t that she couldn’t pass as human. But the girl couldn’t accomplish the types of tasks Kuri and Bane could manage. Barbie worked best at the coffee shop where she pulled espresso.

“Would
you
want to wake up Shani for a job at six a.m.?” Frank pulled into the parking lot and set the car to idle. In the early morning, the waterfront was cold and damp. Light shone across the lake—the only glimpse of clear sky Seattle would get before the sun disappeared into the ever-present blanket of cloud cover.

Kuri shrugged. “Okay, maybe not for an early-morning job, but you should give her more work around people. She’s a lot less combative since she hooked up with Royce.” Kuri climbed out of the car and then shivered at the early-morning chill. On the other end of the lot, an eighteen-foot moving truck curved onto the asphalt and eased up next to the loading dock.

Frank waved to the driver, Bane. “I’ll think about it. But we need her for stein recovery. If I was going to train someone for public relations, I’d be more likely to choose Royce.”

She grabbed his shirt when Frank would have walked away. “What about me? I’ve been wanting to work on recovery and extractions for years.” Kuri bit her lip. Sure, she’d mentioned it, but never so directly.

“Are you kidding?” Frank snorted a laugh through his nose. “You black out on a regular basis. I can’t send you into the field with a gun.” He turned away as if the whole topic of conversation was ridiculous.

Kuri wanted to smack him. “What if I stopped blacking out? If I wasn’t
glitching
anymore, could I do ops?” She didn’t know where this new determination came from. Before, Kuri had dreamed about running her own extractions, saving steins who were being abused, setting steins free. For some reason, today she imagined she might be able to do it someday.

“We’ll see.” Frank looked at her as if she’d gone insane. Maybe she had. “If you wanted it that bad, I could have done a system reset and…”

“No.” Kuri marched past him, to where Bane stood, hovering near the truck. The blond former-military stein pretended to fiddle with his phone, though Kuri was pretty certain he knew Frank and she were fighting.

“If you get to make deals today, then so do I.” She walked past him, in Bane’s direction.

He huffed behind her.

Kuri ignored him. “If I can stop altogether, I want to learn to fight.”

Frank chuckled. “You don’t even argue when someone makes incorrect change,” Frank called from behind her. “And you want to learn to fight?”

She could tell he was nervous, that the ground was shifting beneath him. “Doesn’t matter, Frank. Those are my terms. If you’re right—and your super-love stops my
glitching
, then I want my own gun.”

* * * * *

Frank wiped the sweat off his forehead and bent to lift another box. His lower back ached, but after ten hours of hauling, most of the office had successfully been transferred into the truck.

“You should have gotten more of the girls to help.” Bane stepped up to take the box from Frank’s arms. The military-grade stein shifted the box higher to get his weight under it. “Where are Kuri and Barb?”

“Well, Kuri’s in my office working on some time tables.” Frank had given her busy work, turning her down when she offered to help with the lifting. Kuri didn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet and Frank wasn’t about to let her hurt herself hauling heavy things all day.

“And that couldn’t wait ’til tomorrow?” Bane grumbled as he shifted the box to a more comfortable position, higher against his chest. “We coulda done this in half the time with a few more hands. Plus, Shani’s ready to strangle someone. Why isn’t Royce here? He shoulda been here all day.”

Arriving next to the open truck, Frank set down his box and flexed his fingers to regain circulation. “Royce needs to stay hidden still. Synadate issued a fresh warrant for him the other day.” He arched his back, listening to a loud series of cracks. “Hell, his makers are determined. Back in my day, you snatched a stein and never heard about it again.”

Q-ter stood next to the truck with a clipboard. He checked the label on the boxes and then pointed to the back left corner of the truck. Frank lifted with exhausted arms, and waddled into the truck. “No company would admit to a stein being stolen. Or that the steins were illegal in the first place, like the girls.”

When Bane and he had maneuvered their armfuls to the perfect cubbies set aside by Q-ter, Frank plucked off his packing gloves. Then he rubbed his mismatched hands. “Sure, the military kept looking for you, but only on the down-low. Synadate’s got a real hard-on for Royce.”

Bane snorted out a laugh. Considering Royce had been built as a sex slave, the
hard-on
analogy was all too appropriate. “You considered plastic surgery?” Bane leaned on the concrete wall, pulling a water bottle from his cargo pocket. He drank a long swig. “Royce doesn’t have to look so pretty now that he’s out of the business.”

Frank shook his head. This was exactly why everyone at the ZU needed him. Bane was a smart guy, but didn’t understand shit about other people. “Are you nuts?” He didn’t want to spell out for Bane that Royce was way too vain to ever volunteer to have his face rearranged. “He’s not like you.”

Bane shoved the bottle back into his pocket. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, Bane Connor was almost as good-looking as Royce. But unlike Royce, Bane saw his looks as an impediment more than a tool. “Maybe, maybe not. But you could ask him. Have you even considered asking him what he wants?”

“I know he doesn’t want to—”

“Really, how?” Bane crossed his arms. “How do you know?”

Shaking his head, Frank reached into the cooler and plucked out a water bottle for himself. “I just do.” He unscrewed the cap, not meeting Bane’s eyes.

“Bullshit.” Bane pushed off the wall, hauled open the fire door and headed back into the building.

Frank gulped down half the bottle in long draws. He could feel Q-ter’s eyes on him, and knew from experience that the kid would back up Connor. Ever since Q came to the ZU, he and Bane had formed an axis of resistance against Frank’s authority.

“Don’t you start with me.” Frank stepped past Q and tossed the bottle back into the cooler.

Q-ter only shrugged. “I didn’t say anything.”

Frank didn’t have time to get into it. “Whatever. Is Shani back yet?”

“Nope.” Q checked his watch. “She said an hour. Traffic between here and the east side sucks this time of day.”

Frank pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes. He’d wanted to be spending time with Kuri by now. Instead he was waiting for Shani to pick up two more ZU members, Ben and Kee, from their apartment on the other side of Lake Washington. “I never should have let them live so far away.”

Q-ter’s dark eyebrows drew together behind his giant glasses. “Let them? Who says you
let
them do anything? Ben works out there. Makes sense they’d want to live close to his job.”

Great. Now Q-ter was siding with Ben and Kee too—and Ben wasn’t even a stein. He was a human who’d gotten
involved
with a stein. “Fine. Just tell me when they get here.” Frank dragged open the door and stalked through the hallways.

A figure holding a box marched toward him. Thin legs in sweatpants trembled under the weight.

“Kuri.” Frank rushed toward her, snatching the box from her hands. “I told you. Me and Bane got it.”

She pressed a hand on her hip and marched around to the front of him, barring Frank’s way. “Oh please, Bane told me to get my behind out of your office and help. He’s calling Josie too.” She pried the box out of his hands with an exasperated huff. “Why you thought you boys could do this on your own…” Kuri stepped around Frank and started down the passage. She smelled like a bouquet of orchids and lemongrass.