Ding. Ding-ding.
Layme swam up slowly from sleep, dragged down by the weight of dreams she remembered having but could not remember in themselves. For a few confused moments, she wasn't sure what had awoken her, and then the alert came through her tragus pieces again.
Ding. Ding-ding. She had a blip waiting for her, and whoever had sent it wanted her to wake up and open it. They had set it to high priority so that it would alert her every two minutes until she rejected it, and would ding every ten minutes after that until she opened it. The sound was sharper, less easy to ignore than the mellow blip sound that had given blips their nickname. A stream of half-coherent curses ran through her head as she tried to get her eyes to cooperate. A combination of tiredness and falling asleep with her cons in made her eyes heavy and reluctant, but eventually she got them open and focused, and she pulled up her drive visual as she opened the info card on the blip. Direct audio transmission message, July 1, 21:06:46. Milo 131720 to Layme 122018. Via transmission port 21.522-46518. A ball of excitement settled into her stomach as she opened the blip itself—Milo wanted to talk to her. The feeling of importance was childish and stupid, and she knew it, but she admitted it was there... and that she enjoyed it. She liked knowing that something about her had caught Milo's attention. His message opened in her drive, displaying the flashy multi-colored equalizer Layme had set to accompany audio messages. The colored bars rose and fell smoothly in her vision as his voice played, whisper-close, in her ears.
“Hey newbie. Hope last night didn't tweak you out too bad. This morning, either. First hangovers are frizzy things, and I was trying my best not to trag it up, but God knows I've botched those kinds of things before. Anyway,” he added with the dismissive tone of someone who has gotten carried away in their own thoughts and was just now returning to the matter at hand. “There's another pulse tonight. Not as big. It's supposed to be smoother—less about insanity and more about enlightenment, I guess you could say. If last night didn't scare you off, I've been asked to request your company once again this evening. Everyone was asking about you.” Layme was happy to hear that this last sounded tacked-on, a hasty assurance that it was not Milo who wanted her around, made as so not to scare her off. “It's smaller, like I said,” Milo continued. “No one who's going is tricky on looks or anything, so don't even worry about that. I'll meet you in your hall around ten and walk you down if that's ice on you? Blip me back, let me know. Hope I'll see you later, however you get there.”
The equalizer didn't even have time to fall flat with the cutting of his feed before Layme was opening a new blip to send back.
“Hey Milo!” she chirped, watching the bars of the equalizer record the sound of her voice. Layme, like most of the people she knew, had gotten a sound pick-up embedded in her jaw when she had her orthodontic work done, and it took care of all of the audio interfacing she did with her drive. “I've got a high tolerance for weirdness, so no fear. No one scared me away last night. I'd love to hit another pulse tonight, and ten sounds fine.” She accepted his offer before she realized she had no idea what time it was. There was a time-stamp on his blip to her, but she had forgotten what it said even as she had read it. She checked, and was surprised—it was already nine fifteen. She'd slept away the rest of the afternoon. She slid out of bed and started to the bathroom as she finished. “Ah, trag, I didn't realize it was late already. I must have crashed harder than I thought. Anyway! Ten sounds fine, I'll see you then. Gotta go!” She cut her feed as she turned on the shower, cursing herself for sleeping so much.
Forty-five minutes later she was sitting on her bed, dressed in black microdenims and a dark blue tank top, her eye makeup a knot of glittering blue and black twists, and her black boots from the night before once again tapping a nervous rhythm on the floor. Maybe there was some truth in the saying about history repeating itself. Hadn't she been in the same situation this time the day before?
“You're becoming a creature of habit, Ray,” she told herself in mock severity, and she laughed when she heard her voice shake. She was being ridiculous. It was her second night in the Dorm, and it was summer. There was no habit yet, only experiences and ones she hadn't gotten around to having yet. If pulses and new people weren't what she was supposed to be doing right now, then she was at a loss as to what she was supposed to do. Therefore, the only way forward seemed to be exactly the way she was headed.
Comforted by the thought, Layme answered Milo's knock on her door five minutes later with no trace of the shake in her voice. In fact, there was a spring in her step that hadn't been there before. She couldn't keep the feeling of surety away—she was exactly where she was supposed to be, doing just what she should be doing. The doubts from the night before, and the panicked uncertainty from earlier that morning both seemed to have vanished, and she was nearly laughing as she thumbed the release on the door. Milo smiled back, one eyebrow cocked up in bemused wonderment, and she thought again of how lucky she was for someone like him to take notice of her.
“Hey,” she said a little breathlessly.
“Hi,” he replied, making another half-bow and offering her his hand. He was wearing the same red shirt and black denims as earlier, but the flash tattoo was gone from his eye. She remembered now that she had never gotten rid of hers—it spun light green and contrasting up and down her arm. Oh well, she thought, though the thought wasn't without a pang of regret. Too late to worry about it now. As she took Milo's hand and stepped out into the hallway beside him, however, she felt her pulse pick up its pace, and she wondered if he noticed. Surely the tattoo was giving her away.
“I'm sorry for sleeping in so late,” she said as they made their way past flashing, spinning doors. Raucous laughter issued from behind many of them, and as they began their descent on the stairs, a group of giggling girls came rushing up in the other direction, talking in loud whispers and shrieking nerve-gratingly as they passed. Layme shot a questioning glance at Milo, who rolled his eyes.
“Drunk already,” he said distastefully. “I've never understood the point of drinking the hard stuff so early. Makes you look like an idiot. Anyway, no worries on sleeping in,” he assured her. “Everyone does on their first day. Jag, people who have been here longer than you still do it. Not everyone has the blood for alc, especially the hard stuff. Takes some getting used to. The stuff for tonight is a lot more ice, I promise.”
“What's the difference?” Layme asked, genuinely curious. She'd always thought there was just alcohol, with very few variations.
“Well, Dorm alc's never just straight alc. We have jaggin' smart people around. Might as well put them to use, yeah?” Layme laughed and nodded. “So our Chem specs add stuff for us,” Milo continued as he and Layme continued down the tightly spiraled stairs. “Either to amp us up or chill us out. It's damn cool—whatever sort of buzz you need, you can pretty much as for. They've even got some really helpful trag for focus when the school year starts. And,” he added, the mischievous grin back on his face again, “so far as any of us know, it doesn't react with itself.”
“It doesn't do what?” Layme asked, confused, but just then they reached the end of the stairs and Milo led her across what looked like a random sitting room, still holding her hand, to a door on the opposite wall. Judging by the volume of the music she could hear, she guessed this was the other side of the door where she, Dren, and Kalla had signed in to the system the night before. This meant she had gone through the room and up the obscenely long, twisting flight of stairs to get to Milo's room... but try as she might, she still had no memory of it.
Milo swept through the door with her in tow with no hesitation whatsoever. He just pushed it open, releasing the semi-contained sound of the music into the profanely quiet and empty lounge room. Layme marveled for a moment at the drastic nature of the action, and then she laughed at herself. It wasn't drastic to him at all; it was simply moving from one room in his house to another, so to speak. She was struck by the realization that hadn't hit her until that point—this wasn't an extremely temporary thing. It wasn't going to be taken away from her. She was going to live here until she took her twenty-ones, and that was a span of time that was as close to unimaginable as anything she'd even thought. She laughed again at the sheer wonder of it, and when she looked up to catch Milo's eye, he was smiling in that puzzled, good-natured way again.
Thoughts? he mouthed, and she realized she couldn't hear him. Retrieving her hand from his and holding up a finger for patience, she brought up the airwave network overlay on her cons and linked into the big room's macro-local feed. Curious to see if she could do it, she decided to tap into his sound feed directly, just like all the Dragons had done to her the night before. A few gestures and mid-air keystrokes, and she shouted triumphantly, the sound lost in the loud music.
“Gotcha,” she whispered, and a thrill went through her to see the surprised look on Milo's face as her voice came through his sound pieces.
“Nice work,” he said, his voice carried effortlessly to her ears as well, his grin once again lighting up his face. “Who taught you?”
“No one,” Layme answered, confused. “I've been asleep all day, remember?”
Milo's look of surprise melted into confusion of his own. “So you direct-hit my sound feed on your own? No one showed you the trick?” She shook her head tentatively and Milo let a low whistle through his teeth.
“Trag. That's... that's pretty tough.” He eyed her speculatively for a moment. “You a Tech spec?” he asked, his eyebrow raised again, but in wary skepticism instead of puzzlement.
“A what?” Layme asked, more confused than ever.
Milo pressed the heel of one hand to his forehead and shook his head. “Right, I kind of forgot you're new. Let's grab a drink at least, then we'll get into the boring trag. Deal?”
“Sure,” Layme agreed, mystified. She followed him to the same circle of cushions and stools that he, Taz, and the others had occupied the night before. As they sat down, she recognized some of the faces, and Milo greeted the people there.
“Hey Rye, Hikka. This the smooth that Ell makes?” he gestured to the drinks at the center of the circle, champagne flutes on a low table this time, and Layme heard the confirmation of his assumption through her traguses. She must have automatically been accepted into the local sound system, some piece of tech or another having recognized her call number. Milo grabbed two glasses and handed one to her. She noted the green and blue pressure strip along the bottom.
“What does this mean?” she asked.
“Two things, actually,” Milo answered, taking a long sip of his own drink before pointing at the pressure strip on it. “The green is the kind of alc—it means it's what we call smooth. Calmer. It brings you down instead of hyping you up. The blue inside the green means Ell—he's one of our Chem specs—customized the formula. Some people say it doesn't matter who the spec is, and the drink is all in the type modifier, but I beg to differ.” He drained the rest of his drink and smiled distractedly, turning the glass between his fingers to catch the light. “Ell's smooth has always been one of my favorites. I hope he passes down his tricks to someone so all you midgety traggers don't miss out.” There was some light laughter as other members of the loose group caught Milo's sentence. He continued the spin the glass's stem between his fingers and his eyebrows drew together in what Layme was pretty sure was some serious thought. She sipped at her own drink and watched him, content, for the moment at least, to be silent. She let the music—a calmer, flowing style tonight, just as Milo had promised—play around her like water. Finally Milo set the glass down and turned to her.
“Will you try something for me? A test of sorts, you could say.”
“Sure,” Layme agreed, shrugging and setting her own glass down. “Lay it on me.”
Milo pressed the tips of his fingers together and stared at her over them, his brow still drawn together in thought. “Alright. We're obviously in the middle of about a dozen feeds and drives right now—micros, macros, locals, you name it. You know that?” Layme nodded. “Right. Okay. So you managed to hit my feed and bypass the access door. You know that direct-hit was canceled out by the local being broadcast in this circle, right?” Layme nodded again; it made perfect sense. The singular signal of her hack to Milo's sound feed was over-powered, and therefore kicked offline, by the stronger local signal of the little group, because all of their six or seven signals were broadcasting the same signal. Her singular unique hit-code couldn't handle the competition, so to speak. Milo nodded as well, but whether it was in approval or something else, she couldn't tell.
“Hit me again,” he directed suddenly. “Here in the local range.”
“Do you want the hit to coexist or to override the local?” she asked, not missing a beat and unable to keep a grin from her face. She was pleased to see Milo raise his eyebrows—both of them this time—in surprise again. The surprise was replaced momentarily by a grin that seemed to proclaim that he was calling her bluff. She was inwardly pleased; to call a bluff, there had to be a bluff. She wasn't bluffing.
“Override,” he said, looking smug and leaning back in his chair. Layme kept a poker face. If he thought she was bluffing, it would be even more fun to see his reaction if he thought he had presented her with a real challenge.
He hadn't, of course—she had learned to amplify her call number's broadcasting strength when she was twelve. Still, it seemed prudent to at least take a stab at not destroying his ego, and so she kept her face blank and sat back as she called her override access visual up on her conscreens. Even in her desire to placate him, however, she couldn't slow the way her fingers flew over the nonexistant keys of the keyboard parameters she had set for herself. They poked the air in front of her face like an over-enthused child's hands popping soap bubbles. She barely saw them; her eyes were entirely focused on the lines of code that were appearing before her. Finally her keystrokes slowed and she entered the closing lines for what she wanted and saved the setting.
“Done,” she said calmly, smirking as she cut her visual feed to see Milo, chin resting on the backs of his hands, arms braced on his knees, gazing at her with wonder.
“This is a test, then,” he murmured. “Hey, Dragons, can anyone hear me?”
There was no answer, but Layme was sure it was only a formality. He must have known her coding had worked as soon as she entered the close-off—the others' voices had vanished from his ears as well as hers. Milo smiled again.
“Nice work,” he conceded, grabbing another drink and gesturing for her to pick up the unfinished one she had set aside. She did so, still smirking, and raised his glass to her wordlessly. They both drank, and they both took another drink from the table afterward.
There was a period of silence where they only sat and let the smooth run through them, the music's heavy and somehow ethereal rhythm play around them, and then Milo's voice came through Layme's feed.
“So why aren't you a Tech spec?” he asked.
“I have no idea what that means,” she reminded him. “So I really can't say.”
“A spec is whatever you're specializing in,” Milo explained. “You have Chemistry specs, Math specs, English and Language specs—pretty much anything you can think of. Kind of like the old style colleges and their degree systems. Of course, specking doesn't mean the same thing as degrees did before the reform, since your job placement is still your job placement, and that's pretty much it, but people say specking can give you an edge, get you a higher merit start into what you want to do. Or what you're chosen to do, I guess—specs are based on the score on the Standards that got you in here in the first place. After that brilliant little show, I would have pegged you as a Tech for sure. So what are you?”
“I don't think I'm anything,” Layme answered after a moment, still feeling confused. Milo shook his head and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture as if she was mistaken.
“Impossible,” he declared. “When you got your reassignment letter, what section's score did it say had tripped the decision?”
“It didn't,” she answered, after a moment's thought, and when she saw his disbelief, she protested. “No! Really! I remember the letter. It said that my General Intelligence score was above average, and they congratulated me on my achievement.” Milo was still looking at her with a now-tell-me-the-truth kind of expression, so she sighed in amused exasperation and ran a search on her drive for the original overlay. It came up almost at once, and she attached a copy of it to a blip to Milo. He opened it, and she saw him reading it and re-reading it—she had a moment to wonder how he was doing that, since he didn't wear conscreens himself; he hadn't had any micro-saline in his bathroom, she recalled—before Milo spoke again.
“Impossible,” he said again, but he sounded much less certain this time. “I've never seen that before. No one comes to a Dorm without a spec. No one.”
“I beg to differ,” she said, taking another drink from her glass. She felt herself smirking again. For whatever reason, his astonishment was feeding her ego rather than making her feel uncomfortable. She supposed it had something to do with the heady feeling of power that came with capturing his attention so completely.
“So you're a newbie without a spec, who can hack direct hits that overpower local feeds, without any guidance from other Dragons,” Milo said skeptically, as if he was still waiting for her to admit that she had tricked him somehow.
Instead, she answered, “Yeah, that's about right,” and finished her second drink in one smooth motion. She watched Milo shake his head in disbelief before taking a third one. She noted that she couldn't feel the smooth like she had felt the stuff from last night—there was no bloom of heat in her stomach, no penetrating roots of warmth crawling through her veins. She just felt loose, like until this point she had been tied down with flexible strings that had been cut away completely. She wondered if Milo was feeling the same thing. She looked over towards him then and found his dark blue eyes riveted calmly—if there was such a thing as calm riveting—on her from where he sat back deeply into the armchair beside hers. In a small wave of annoyance, she considered asking him if he saw something green, but decided against it. She was being silly. Hadn't she just been thinking of how much she liked his attention? She simply smiled more widely instead. “Thoughts?” she asked, almost unconsciously mimicking his short, rhythmic style of speaking.
“Would you try something for me?” he countered, as if he hadn't really heard her inquiry at all.
“Another test?”
“Of a sort.”
“'Of a sort,'” she repeated, laughing. “Fine.”
“Hack my drive,” he dared her, and his eyes locked with hers in a challenge.
It was Layme's turn to raise an eyebrow in skepticism. “Is that all?”
“You think you're better than that?” Milo asked.
“Maybe I do,” Layme replied evasively, hoping it would keep his interest.
“Fine then. I'll try to keep you out. Firewall you. Trag, I'll brick wall you.”
“What's your spec, Milo?” she asked abruptly.
“Bio-anatomy with a medical/surgical focus,” he shot back with no hesitation. The sudden change in topic hadn't thrown him off at all, it seemed.
“So you're not a Tech?”
He laughed shortly. “If I was, Zink would have me already. Are you going to do this or not?”
She said nothing for a second, only stared him down, thinking. “No,” she said finally. “I'm not.” Milo's grin widened in smug triumph.
“I knew you couldn't do it, tweak.”
“I'm choosing not to do it, tragger,” she said, but her voice was light, teasing, and so was his. She doubted she could feel real anger if she wanted to. The smooth certainly did have a calming effect. “You said yourself you're not a Tech spec. I'd put you to shame. I have a feeling you don't take bruises to your ego particularly well.” She was leaning towards him now, her elbows resting on the arm of the chair where she was sitting, her chin set comfortably in her hands, her eyes half-lidded and slightly predatory. A part of her—a thin, quiet part of her, a part that was not whiny but that had the potential to be—wondered where all this bravado was coming from in a girl who was little more than a tech-obsessed social recluse until twenty-four hours previously.
Instinct, she thought, and she almost laughed out loud again. She had to admit, it was probably right.
Be honest, another part of her brain objected almost prissily. It isn't just instinct, is it, Layme? It's sex-drive. That's what it is. The smooth is bringing it out somehow, and you're all but batting your eyes at him.
She was forced to admit that part of her brain was probably right after the next part of her odd exchange with Milo.
“And why would you care if my ego happened to be bruised?” he asked rather lazily.
“Because,” she said slowly, debating with herself for half a second over whether or not her next statement was a good idea. “Because if your ego is bruised, you probably won't dance with me if I ask you.”
“Oh?” Milo asked, his voice cool and collected as before, but Layme had not missed the flash in his dark eyes. What had that flash been? Surprise? Eagerness? Confusion? “Are you asking me to dance, then?”
“That depends,” Layme said cryptically, partly to match his style and partly so her invitation didn't seem so direct. Simply asking him to dance with her felt presumptuous, something so blunt it was nearly indecent.
“Depends on...?” he prodded.
“What your preference would be if I was asking.”
“We-ell,” Milo said slowly, drawing the word out so that it was nearly melodious and also reminiscent of a cat's purr. Layme was reminded of Taz's drawling voice from the night before, and it didn't seem so odd all of a sudden that she and Milo were related. “I do believe that if a beautiful lady was asking me to dance, I'd have to say yes. And,” he added, smirking again, “if that—” He pointed to her left arm, where her pulse tattoo coiled and writhed along her arm with frenetic energy. “—is any indication of your motives, I'd say you are asking. In which case I'd certainly have to accept...”
He let his words trail off into nothingness, and Layme was suddenly aware that at some point during the conversation, he had moved so that he was sitting similarly to her: his chin rested on his over-lapping fists, and his face was a mere six inches—maybe even less—from her own. A charge shot through her chest in spite of the three—or was it four now?—glasses of smooth flowing through her system, and she found herself holding her breath, lest the puff of air scare him off.
And then suddenly, in the time it took her to blink, he was gone—he had sprung up from his chair and now he stood before hers, yet again offering her his hand. Releasing the breath she had been holding, Layme just barely stopped the mixture of frustration and annoyed amusement that threatened to roll her eyes. She took his hand again and let him lead her to the dance floor, an action which seemed odd and much too formal because she was in denims instead of a dress. She let him do it anyway. If nothing else, the special drink of Ell the Chemistry specialist was more than good at making her complacent. She briefly reflected that, in lieu of the fact that it also seemed to have loosed the hitherto mostly-restrained sea of her sex drive—the only part of me that anyone could call “typical teenager,” she thought—that complacency could be a very bad thing, but the thought was small and rather silly. It wasn't as if someone had drugged her. She wasn't even drunk, not compared to last night, and if she had managed to spend the night in Milo's room and keep her underwear on when she was not even able to remember her own name, she was relatively certain she could do the same now. She was more aware of herself and her surroundings, at least.
Milo seemed to have found a spot he liked on the floor, which had changed from the star pattern of the night before to a slowly changing sea of colors which seemed to rise and fall like waves. He stopped and turned to Layme, and the seriousness of his gaze made her blush again. She was sure the tattoo on her arm was moving so fast it was nothing but a sea-foam-colored blur, and she cursed herself for not remembering to get it taken off. The fact that Milo could see how he affected her made her feel strangely at his mercy, as if he had some sort of control over her simply because her heartbeat was playing up and down her arm. Gives a whole new meaning to wearing your heart on your sleeve, she thought disjointedly. After what seemed like an eternity, Milo dropped his gaze, adjusted his grip on her hand, and placed his right hand on her waist. Confused, but trusting, she let him lead her in a slow and almost awkward waltz of sorts. The steps were out of traditional rhythm, but after she stopped trying to make sense of them that way, she realized they were revolving and twisting to the syncopated, irregular beat of the music. Layme moved with him, sometimes stepping forward, sometimes back, sometimes to the side, and she found that her sense of bearing was as confused as it had been after leaving Taz and Milo's circle the night before. She had no idea which direction she had come from. Just when she was sure the dance couldn't be any stranger or full of any more energy—or perhaps tension was a better word for it—Milo let go of her waist and raised her other hand in his, evidently wanting her to spin. She did, and when he made no move to continue the dance otherwise, she spun again, just for kicks. When she stopped the movement, however, she found that the alcs she had drunk had affected her more than she thought, and she lost her balance, stumbling forward.
Milo caught her against his chest, and when she shook off the dizziness, she noticed the quickness of his breath, and the way his hands held her without moving, as if he was afraid to break her. Or that she would break him. When she looked up, his dark blue eyes caught hers, and she could see the flecks of silver in them. A memory, blurry, surfaced in her mind: she was on Milo's lap, kissing him, noticing the specks of silver like shards of mirror in the rings of his irises and glittering at the ends of his hair... Her own breathing sped up to a pace close to his own, and she wondered if he was thinking of the same thing, and if there was more to the memory than her muddled mind had been able to dredge up. She found herself hoping not, because if she was doing something with Milo, particularly something like that, she wanted to remember it...
Her hands were pressed against his chest from the way she had fallen, and her fingers trembled as she traced them, barely touching, up his chest and neck, until one hand settled lightly on the side of his face. Milo stood, frozen, his eyes still locked with hers until they closed as she rose on tiptoe, to press her lips ton his. His hands moved from near her shoulders to her waist, helping to hold her up; he was too tall otherwise. And then he was kissing her back like he had the night before, and she had one hand braced behind his neck so that she could pull herself closer. She finally broke the kiss, not because she wanted to, but because her nervous, shaking limbs protested at the effort of holding her up so strangely. Her breath came in small gasps, and her hands, resting on the flat planes of his chest again, felt his own breathing come to him much the same way. She looked up at him, and somehow she knew he was going to try and apologize.
“Don't,” she said. Her voice was barely a whisper, but it came to his ear softly and clearly, borne by the air to his sound piece.
“Don't what?” he asked, his own voice just as close.
“Apologize. Don't apologize.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Really?” he asked, and she caught the hint of a smile in his voice this time. She stretched up on her toes and kissed him again.
“Really,” she whispered with her lips brushing against his. He kissed her back again, eagerly, and as the seconds passed, a cynical part of her brain awoke.
He doesn't mean it, this inner cynic whispered viciously. He's drunk and he's horny and you're a piece of ass.
Lies, another, much larger part of her argued. We have something here. We... we click. No one said anything about sex. And even if it does happen, it means something. There's energy here.
The little cynic probably would have argued, but at that moment, Milo broke away from her. His eyes were bright and he was smirking. He tilted his head in a gesture that seemed to indicate leaving, or at least relocating, and Layme nodded. Neither of them spoke; their voices would have shaken with energy if they had. Layme followed Milo through the crowd, and she found herself once again in the cluster of chairs where Milo and Taz and the others had sat with her the night before.
“Here, or go up?” The sound of Milo's voice on her traguses made her jump. She had forgotten he could do that. She debated for a moment, her inner cynic and inner optimist debating wordlessly. The optimist won. Probably, she thought, because the smooth gave it a boost. But so what? As long as she recognized that fact, she would at least not be able to blame her actions on altered judgment. She also assumed that “going up” meant back to one of their respective bedrooms—most likely his. The cynic in her head, its voice losing volume exponentially, cried for her to at least stay here, where other people were, to maintain some semblance of decency...
“Up,” she said, smiling. She couldn't deny that she wanted to. The thought of being alone with Milo was an electrifying one.
His smirk changed to a grin, and there was another flash in his eyes. “I'll race you,” he offered.
The idea was absurd—she had no real idea where she was going, and the length of his legs compared to hers pretty much declared him the winner—but she laughed. “Deal!” Milo took off at an almost leisurely lope and she sprinted after him, bursting through the door and bolting up the spiral staircase. The twists were making her dizzy again, but she felt exhilarated, and Milo seemed to be keeping a slower pace to be sure she wasn't left behind. During the last stretch, after they reached his floor, he bolted down the hallway ahead of her, so that when she arrived he had already scanned open the door. She stumbled in, laughing, and he followed suit, the door sealing behind them. Music like the kind that had been playing downstairs came up over the room's sound feed, apparently cued by the shutting of the door.
“You win,” Layme gasped, laughing and leaning on the wall with one hand. Milo stood in front of her, also laughing, his arms crossed over his chest. She simply looked at him for a moment as she caught her breath, and then she was moving across the room to where he stood without even being aware that she had made the decision to do so. Her heart was hammering in her chest; she could feel her pulse in her neck, her stomach, even the tips of her fingers. He stood stock-still until she reached him, touching his hand almost nervously, and suddenly they were pressed together again, their lips speaking silently against each other. Her arms were around his neck and his hands were on her waist again, first over her shirt, but then beneath it, branding her skin with their heat. It was as if an electric shock had jolted through her at his touch; she gasped without meaning to and kissed him harder, catching his lower lip between her teeth for a moment. A soft gasp to echo her own came from him then, and Layme realized she could feel herself shaking minutely as she slid her hand under Milo's shirt to better feel the frantic beating of his heart.
Coherent thought was slowly leaving her. She felt much as she had the night before, her short-term memory nearly gone, each glowing moment in time seeming to happen almost independently from the rest. Milo's short came off at some point, exposing the strong masculine lines of his chest. She found herself in only her bra and jeans shortly after that. His hands seemed to be everywhere at once—on her back, her arms, her face, tangled in the shimmering blue of her hair. She wondered if her hands felt the same way to him. Though all of this, there was kissing—lips, tongues, gentle pressure from teeth. It never seemed to end, and there were moments where she was no longer sure where Milo's half of the kiss ended, and hers began. The term want seemed to carry more significance to her now than it ever had before. After all, what had she ever truly wanted before this? Before him?
His hands were sliding into the back pockets of her jeans, and her hands turned to claws on his bare back as he shifted the attention of his kisses from her lips to her jaw, then her neck, her collarbone. She was sure her nails were digging furrows in his skin, but he didn't seem to mind. As he settled on a spot on her neck, she moved so that she was kissing his, just under his jaw, and she felt rather than heard the low moan that rolled through his throat.
Her mind, already glossed over somewhat by the smooth, was being assaulted with so much sensory input she could barely keep track of it. She was getting lost in the feeling of his lips on hers, her hands in his hair, his fingers spelling what must have been desire in ancient letters on the back of her neck. At some point they moved—or perhaps they had fallen, she couldn't quite remember—onto Milo's bed. Layme found herself beneath him as he ran one hand down her bare side, the other supporting his weight so he wouldn't pin her. Her breath was coming in irregular and passion-ragged gasps. His fingers traces light lines down her side and back up again, settling on the fastening of her bra, which lay midway down her ribcage on her right side.
“Off,” he said, and it was half demand, half request. She was more than eager to submit to it, and so she nodded, but before she could reach to undo it herself, his fingers unfastened the pressure holds with the ease of practice. She felt a brief pang of jealousy—who else had he done this with? How many other people had lain under him on his bed?—before Milo's touch distracted her again, roaming over the newly exposed skin.
She was losing track of everything again. When had his jeans come off? And hers? When had they been unbuttoned? The low tone of confusion grew then, allowing sane and cohesive thought to break through the raging and screaming directions of every hormone in her body.
“Wait,” she said, but she was out of breath. He didn't hear her. “Wait, Milo,” she said again, pushing him lightly away from her.
He rolled so that he saw laying beside her then, his own breath rasping in and out of his lungs in great pants. “I'm sorry,” he said before Layme even had a chance to try to speak. “Trag, Layme, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I never should have—”
“Stop, Milo, stop, wait,” she protested. Her voice shook, but whether it was from adrenaline or emotion, it was hard to tell. “I just—I know we were drinking, and you know what you're doing but—I just...” She took another deep breath, trying to get her thoughts in an order that would make sense. “I don't want you to do anything you don't actually want to do.”
Her surprised her once again by laughing. “I think,” he said, his voice full of the rasp of energy as well, “that's supposed to be my line.”
“I'm not kidding,” Layme argued, suddenly afraid that he wasn't taking her seriously. She wondered fleetingly how she could be thinking this way when every nerve ending in her body was begging her to shut up and resume what she had been doing.
“So am I,” Milo said. “Trust me, Layme, what I had downstairs wasn't nearly enough to fuck up my sense of judgment.”
“Right,” she agreed honestly, still trying to re-order her thoughts. “Right, okay.”
Milo hesitated for a moment. “What do you want, Layme?” he asked.
“You,” she replied without thinking.
“You're sure?”
“You're not going to try and talk me out of it?” she asked, while boggling inwardly at the absurdity of the conversation.
“No,” he answered. “I'm not. And not just because I want to get in to your pants. Do you remember what I said to you last night?”
“Honestly? Not a word.”
“I see something in you,” Milo repeated for her, and his voice sounded considering and thoughtful now. “Something that I don't think I've seen in anyone else. You're older than you look. I don't mean actually older,” he hastened to add, perhaps sensing her confusion. “I mean that there's... I don't know. You know yourself. I think that's what I'm looking for. You know yourself and you know the world around you. I trust your judgment,” he said again. “If I thought it would hurt you, mess you up, whatever, I wouldn't do it. But I don't think it will. If you want it, I'm not going to tell you no.” He laughed, but it was slightly bitter and cynical. “God knows I want it, too.”
Layme took another shaky breath, his words spinning in her head. “Yes,” she answered finally. She felt Milo turn to look at her, but she stayed staring at the ceiling. It seemed safer somehow.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Yes. Yes, I want to, yes.”
“And you're sure? Don;t just say this because you think I want you to, Layme, because believe me—and please don't take this wrongly—but if I only wanted sex, I have options. God, that sounds horrible,” he groaned.
“No, I know what you mean. And I'm sure.” As sure as I'm ever going to be, she thought. But she was telling the truth. If she didn't do it now, she would never be able to. That was the feeling that had settled over her.
Milo moved so that he was looming over her again, his eyes boring holes in her own. “Last chance,” he said quietly, sounding almost as if he was offering her a respite from an execution.
“Yes” was all she said, and the word was barely audible, even to herself.
Milo touched a finger to her lips and drew a line with it: over her chin, down her neck, over her navel, until it rested at the top of her unbuttoned jeans.
“Off,” she said softly, echoing his word from earlier.
He slid them down without a word and tossed them over the side of the bed with the rest of their clothing. There were more kisses then, more roaming hands and soft touches, until finally her hands made their way to the waistband of his boxers, tracing a line above the elastic. He noticed, and he stopped what he was doing to lock his eyes with hers again.
“Are you sure?” he asked again.
“I'm sure,” she replied, and there was no shake in her voice now.
And after that, no more needed to be said. There were no wasted moments spent looking for a method of birth control, a much-favored awkward scenario that they had both seen in old television shows. In addition to the mandatory contraception girls took from age thirteen, boys were on a chemical to temporarily reduce fertility from the age of eleven. So there were only slow gestures and heated skin and words that may or may not have tripped from distracted tongues to tumble from lips caught unrestrained in lust.
Any fluidity and congruency to Layme's thoughts dissolved at one point, and there was pain for a moment, but it was forgotten quickly. After that, she thought she may have called his name, but she couldn't remember.
After that, there was only a feeling of drifting into sleep, and Milo's arms wrapped warmly over her own.
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