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Antilles? Was
that your last master?” She saw the thing was standing now, staring pointedly
out the window. “What. Huh? What?” The whirs it made were very quiet.
    “Would Miss Evie prefer to dress ... ” it
said, “ ... more privately?”
    “Miss Evie is going out for coffee,” she
said, throwing her shirt on savagely. “Miss Evie is going out shopping. Miss
Evie,” she seethed, trying to get into her jeans and tripping a little, “is
going out. ” She glared at it. “And when she returns, Adam had best be
gone.”
    It whirred and clicked, but Evie didn’t
wait for it to reply. She slammed the door despite her pounding headache and
made for the nearest Starbucks flushed and embarrassed, though she wasn’t quite
sure why.
     
    There was no way it could be alive, she
thought . When she looked at it that way, sipping on her coffee as she
stared out at the rain from the Starbucks, it made a lot of sense. Adam really
gave no sign of being alive- alive. He’d winced, yes, but that could very
easily have been her imagination. Had he really blushed when she was changing ( had
she really just changed right in front of it? ) Or was that just ... was it
a program or ... she wasn’t sure.
    She went over that moment again and again,
turning it this way and that. How he’d pretty much jumped to his feet,
his eyes going to the window, all those furious clicks and whirs growing
quieter.
    The memory came back, then, through the fog
of her hangover, of stopping last night in the rain. She had been shivering,
near tears, wanting to just give up on walking, her feet tired, and she had
been soaked all the way through. Adam had been standing beside her, clicking,
and then he’d ... he’d just reached down and put one arm around her knees, the
other around her back, and she had felt the steady grip of those arms lifting
her up and drawing her close to his ( its? his? ) bronze chest, and then
he’d started walking again.
    “Just say where,” he’d said, in that warbling
voice. “This thing will carry you. It does not tire.” And she’d started crying
then, partly due to how tired she’d been, but also because she couldn’t stop
shaking, the cold and what they’d done to him in the clearing still so fresh in
her mind. Had his arms drawn her closer then? Had they held her even closer as
she wept, her hand pressed to his chest as he stumped through the puddles in
the rain?
    She’d fallen asleep at some point in the
walk, she must have, because she remembered waking up to find those little
copper balls staring down at her. It was funny, she thought, stepping out under
the awning of the coffee shop, but she hadn’t felt so cold then. You’d think a
thing made of metal would be cold, and maybe it was only her body heat warming
it up, but she hadn’t really felt the chill at all. Maybe it was all those
gears turning inside him, but she had felt so warm, and safe and ....
    She had bought a pack of cigarettes. She
was smoking one now, apparently. Evie looked down at her fingers as if she was
holding a snake. When did that happen? she thought. The fuck? You
quit. We quit. “I thought we agreed on this,” she said to herself. Smoking
again? Her mother’s voice chimed in, now sounding mildly mechanical and
flat and clicky at the same time. That isn’t a good sign, my girl.
    “Shit,” she said out loud, under the
awning, sucking back on it just to spite all of them.
    Hopefully, the thing ( Adam? he or it? )
was out. Was gone. She didn’t want to deal with all this.
    Smoking was a bad sign. It would be so much
better if she hadn’t taken ( him, it?) home, if she’d just left it there
as a thing she would wonder about from time to time. Because, let’s be honest
here, he ( it? fuck ) had done nothing but laugh at her that morning.
    Had he? ( it? Jesus!) She lit another
cigarette. It was just ... he was so ... she couldn’t think of a word to
pin on him at first, but as she heard that flat, sardonic warble in her head,