In the next few weeks, Layme lived a life that seemed to be speeding out of her control. It was a sensation similar to the one she had had just after her arrival in the Dorm—a sense that everything was moving too fast, and she was not quit moving with them but beside them, not quite able to keep up. She started her firewall program the morning after her encounter with the lightning-storm, but she was careful to do it when she was away from Milo so as not to repeat their fight, under the pretense that she was working on her outfit for the masque—which, after months of planning and preparation, seemed to be approaching with abnormal speed. Because of this, she and Milo were meeting with Zink and his technology team even more frequently, putting finishing touches on decorations and fixing a slew of small problems that hadn't shown up until the very last minute. In addition to planning for the masque, classes for the spec-ed section started the second week of September.
“I have no idea how I'm going to do this,” she told Milo at one point, sitting cross-legged on his bed amidst a scattered bunch of touchpads, most of which were overlapping with each other, making them hard, or in some cases, impossible to read. “I have to triple-check the guest list for the masque to make sure we have enough alc to keep them happy—” She held up the touch in her left hand. “—try and figure out what classes I'm actually taking—” She raised the stack of three in her other hand “—finish the tech trag to make sure everyone at the masque is anonymous—” She half-kicked a pile of touches at her feet. “—and on top of that, I need to get my own jagging costume ready!”
“I thought you were working on your costume?” Milo asked, looking up from a touchpad of his own and raising an eyebrow in confusion.
“I am,” Layme assured him hastily, inwardly cursing herself for the slip. “But we're the focal point of the entire pulse! All eyes will be on us! At least until they get a hit of your Red Death,” she amended.
Milo grinned. “Ah, but you forget! No one will know who we are! Isn't that the whole point of all those parameters and bugs you're working on?” He gestured to the tallest stack of touchpads, which Layme had knocked over with her half-hearted kick.
Layme groaned and flopped forward on the bed, resting her head on her arms. “See?” she said, her voice muffled. “There's so much jagging trag to do I don't even remember what I'm doing!”
She felt the weight on the bed shift, and heard Milo's voice come from across the room. “I've got just the thing for that!” he called. “I was saving it for when classes start on Monday, but I think maybe three days is too long to wait.”
Her interest caught, Layme raised her head so she could see what Milo was talking about. He was rummaging around in his closet, and after a moment of searching he seemed to find what he was looking for. “Aha!” he crowed. “Got it. Just one second...” He emerged a moment later with a clear bottle full of purple liquid that could only be alc, and two empty glasses.
“I don't know, Milo,” Layme said uncertainly, raising her head and resting her chin in her palm. “Do you really think that's going to help anything?” She felt a twinge of guilt at her attempt to sway him. Part of her reluctance was because she wasn't sure the alcohol would help her finish anything—it usually made her relatively lazy in that respect—but it was also because she had been drinking as little as possible since the day Milo had come back from the med wing, after she had the revelation about abandoning her programming for sex and booze. She hadn't told Milo; she was afraid he would get angry at her for programming again in the first place, or at least try to convince her to drink how she used to. She wasn't so much afraid of him being angry—he could never stay angry at anyone for long, and especially not her—but more worried that if he tried to convince her to pick up her old drinking habits, she would cave in and do it, simply because he was the one asking.
“This is an Ell-Milo special!” he said, grinning.
“Another one?” she asked, smiling back and rolling her eyes. He waved a hand at her in mock dismissal.
“This is your one-of-a-kind Eyeglass alc.”
“Eyeglass?” she asked, confused. Usually she was pretty good at matching named drinks to their functions, but this one defied her.
“It helps you focus,” Milo explained, already in the process of pouring two glasses.
“I don't know,” Layme repeated.
“What, you don't think it'll work?” Milo joked.
“I never said that,” Layme assured him truthfully. She knew it would work; it was the after-effects she was afraid of. She was still working on her firewall, and she hadn't entirely given up on finding out who Lightning Storm was. She had more than enough experience with alc, especially the kind Milo and Ell made, to know that the post-pulse lull was her problem. If she got into it, she would never want to leave. She had managed to stay out of it for a week an a half, partly because she had been drinking less to begin with, but also
because she had been skipping the gel-beads and morning Mellows that had kept her in the lull and out of the grips of the hangovers that waited just outside its borders. Somehow Milo had managed not to notice this, but she waited anxiously every time she dumped a Mellow with the gel-bead dissolved in it. Her head had pounded ceaselessly for the first two days, as if all the hangovers she had pushed away for the past few months had been stashed away, waiting for a chemical-free moment to strike, but it had been worth it. Her firewall had progressed much more easily, and she hadn't had to think as hard to remember what parameters and limits she had already worked with. Now, threatened with something that could either help her or set her back almost exponentially, Layme was torn.
Milo was looking at her quizzically, his confused frown deepening into real concern, as if he had just thought of something. He chewed on his lip for a moment, apparently trying to decide how to voice his concern, and then he said in an oddly halting voice, “You're not... pregnant... are you?”
Layme only blinked at him for a moment, and then burst out laughing. She laughed until her stomach hurt and it was hard to breathe, her forehead resting on her arms again. She knew Milo was probably confused and possibly angry, especially if he thought she was laughing at the concept of getting pregnant—unplanned conception was not low on the list of illegal activities—but she couldn't help it. Here she was, lying to him, or at least not telling the whole truth, and he thought she wasn't drinking because she was pregnant. Somehow the combination of the two situations just struck her as being utterly hilarious, in addition to the fact that he had completely blindsided her—she had honestly forgotten that getting pregnant was possible, however slightly. Eventually she recovered, her flood of laughter slowing down to a random trickle of giggles, and she sat up and wiped at her eyes.
“Oh God, Milo, I'm sorry,” she said, seeing him standing frozen with a bottle in one hand and two full glasses in the other, a slightly alarmed look on his face. “Jag. No. No, I'm not pregnant. And I swear to God I wasn't laughing at you, really. I just kind of forgot that could happen.” He raised an eyebrow in question. “That I could get pregnant. I kind of forgot that could happen. In theory.”
“In theory,” he agreed, still sounding confused. He handed her a glass as he sat down beside her and she took it, if only to avoid the awkwardness that would descend if she didn't. “I mean, I know the chances are infinitesimal—”
“Point zero-zero-zero-one percent chance—” Layme interjected, sitting up again.
“—right, but that's still a chance, right?”
“A hundred-thousandth of a percent of one,” she agreed, setting her Eyeglass down, and he stuck his tongue out at her. “Really, though, Milo,” she said, feeling serious all of a sudden. “I can't think of the right word to explain what I'm trying to say, but that was really sweet of you. To ask, I mean. To care.”
“Of course I asked; why wouldn't I?” he said, and he looked as if he meant what he said sincerely—he could not imagine not caring if he, in some random moment of bad luck, actually gotten her pregnant. Layme, who had heard stories from all of her female cousins and even from some of her Dorm friends, about the rare unplanned pregnancy, knew that more often than not the father either was never told or pretended not to know, and the mother went quietly to some black-market inner-city pharmacist to erase the problem as quietly as possible. Layme looked at Milo in all of his sincerity, and she felt an upsurge of affection strong enough to cause a lump to blossom in her throat, and tears to sting warningly in the corners of her eyes.
He must have noticed something in her expression, because he set his glass down on his desk the instant before she flung herself forward to hug him, her hands clenching on the fabric of his shirt as if she was afraid he was doing to try and vanish. He hugged her back, not quite as hard but no less meaningfully. She took a few unsteady breaths, trying to push back tears and also the feeling that had pounced upon her; the feeling that she might lose him.
“I love you, Milo,” she whispered fiercely, and she felt his surprise. So far as she knew, neither of them had said that out loud, not even in drunken black-outs or post-coital bliss. She was afraid in that moment that he wouldn't say it back, but she did not regret it. In that very moment, with his arms around her and his warmth keeping her from tears, she meant it.
“I love you too, Layme.” He sounded surprised but not unsure, and she knew that she had to be honest with him. She pulled back from the hug and looked him in the eye.
“The reason I don't want to drink is that I can't concentrate as well. I know that's what the Eyeglass is for!” she objected, seeing that Milo was about to argue. “It's not the alc as much as the lull. And it's not just for all this, either.” She gestured to the translucent sheets of plasti-glass, the touchpads that glowed in a plethora of colors on his bed. “I've been programming for a while,” she confessed, looking down at her lap. “A firewall system. And I finished the cat that I was working on for Tessa before that. I know that you didn't really want me to, but—”
“Does anyone else know?” he asked, and she remembered that it was the same sort of question he had asked the first time. She almost mentioned the lightning-storm program and the mysterious unknown source, but something in the way he was looking at her made her reconsider.
“No,” she said, guilt sinking sharp claws into her stomach. Hadn't she just resolved to be honest with him?
He doesn't need to know that, she argued with herself. I've got it under control. That's what the firewall program is for.
An edge of some sort seemed to melt from his face at her answer. “I don't mind if you program, Layme,” he said, and she wasn't sure if it was her own continuing dishonesty or something else, but she was suddenly certain he was lying. “I can see that you love it. Telling you not to would be like... like telling me not to do drinks with Ell,” he said after a moment's consideration. Layme, however, was unsatisfied.
“But you don't like it,” she pressed. “Do you?”
“Layme, I just said I wasn't going to stop you from doing—!”
“Do you?” she repeated, searching his face desperately for honesty.
“No,” he admitted after a moment's pause. “I don't like it.”
“Why not?” she asked, her voice quiet.
“I just don't,” Milo hedged, not looking at her.
“Milo!” Layme pleaded, wondering momentarily how things had changed so drastically in the last ninety seconds. Hadn't she just been telling him she loved him? “I don't understand,” she said. “I don't know what you don't like! That I'm not drinking? That I'm programming? Both? What?”
He muttered something to quiet for her to hear.
“What, Milo?” she demanded, and her voice cracked in tandem with the tears blurring her vision.
“The progging, Layme, okay?” he shouted suddenly, unconsciously shaking her hand from where it rested on his forearm. “I don't like that you're programming! Programming's not... it's...” He paused for a moment, struggling to find whatever words he was searching for. “It attracts attention, Lay, alright? If you're a proggie, people notice you, and usually it's not the right kind of people.”
“You think because I'm programming I'm going to cheat on you?” she asked, amazed and hurt at his mistrust.
“Layme, no,” Milo insisted, and he was pinching the bridge of his nose again, they way he always did it when he was so emotionally charged that words threatened to stop for him entirely. “It's like... like... like walking up to a Govlie and saying you're explosive, or waving around a glass of alc in front of someone who knows you're not legal! It's dangerous, Lay,” he said, and his voice had lost its heat. Instead, she saw something like helplessness in his face, mixed with a second emotion she could not identify.
“It's not like I'm going around shouting about it,” she pointed out, but her own voice had quieted, softened. The argument may not have been won, but she knew it was over.
“I know, love,” he said, and he sounded tired. It was the term of endearment more than anything else that made Layme move over so that she was next to him instead of facing him, and plant a soft kiss on his jaw.
“I'm sorry,” she said, and she felt another small prickle of guilt. She was apologizing for the fight, not the programming, but she wasn't going to clarify. Let him take it how he wanted to. A lie of omission, her brain supplied relentlessly, and she told herself mentally to shut up.
“I am too,” Milo said softly, and she wondered if the fact that that was all he said was deliberate, if he was doing the same sort of thing she was. She thought the answer might be yes, and she shoved the knowledge away.
“I love you,” she breathed against his neck, and she felt rather than saw the smile this brought.
“And I, you,” he said with his usual eccentric flourish. She felt the words as they vibrated through his vocal cords, and suddenly she was thinking of nothing—not Lightning Storm, not her programs, not school, not the masquerade, not the argument that no one had won—but him, and how very much she wanted him at that moment. She met him halfway as she moved for a kiss; apparently his own train of thought had been running parallel to hers.
Tessa's got it right, she thought, curled up with him afterward. Make-up sex is better. She drifted, as she usually did, just beyond sleep, enjoying the heat of his hand in hers, and his chest against her back, when the sound and feeling of his voice came as a soft tremor.
“Hey Lay?” he asked sleepily.
“Mmm?” was the only reply she seemed able to manage.
“Do something for me?”
“Mmmm.”
“Lay?”
She forced herself to be articulate, if only a little. “Mmmyeah, sure.”
“After you're done with your project... your firewall or whatever... don't start a new one, okay?”
The residue of sleepiness that had been clinging to her vanished like midday dew.
“Lay?” Milo inquired after a moment of silence.
She swallowed convulsively one, twice, trying to un-stick the word from her throat, and for a second she was afraid she would not be able to force another lie through her lips. Perhaps she had reached her quote for the night. Finally, her voice unlocked itself. “Okay,” she said, her voice hardly more than a breath. Milo must have heard it, because there was a satisfied sort of grunt from him, and after a minute, she felt him slide the rest of the way in to sleep. Layme, however, lay awake, her heart beating just a little bit too fast, an uncomfortable prickle running along her skin and up and down her spine. She tried to backtrack into the half-sleep she had been in before, but her eyes kept snapping open like a broken set of antique window shades. The places where his skin touched hers seemed to burn as if she was sleeping next to open flames, and finally, unable to stand the feelings anymore, she slid out of bed, freezing once when Milo made an inarticulate sound and rolled over.
Careful to be as quiet as she could, she pulled on her jeans and the first shirt of his that she could find, her own clothes and shoes somewhere unknown at the time, and she thumbed open his bedroom door.
She paused only once more to make sure the light from the hallway hadn't woken him up. Layme shut the door and, with a small hiss of the hydraulic mechanism, left Milo asleep and unaware of her absence. She scanned into her own room a minute later, set her sound feed to silent against the blips she was sure to get in the morning, and climbed into bed.
The hot, uncomfortable feeling of guilt and secrecy, though lessened, persisted, and there was a faint glow on the horizon that heralded the coming of dawn before Layme was finally able to surrender to the blank expanse of sleep.
<< Part One, Post 6
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