Passion Model Read online

  My fingers brushed the keyboard but didn’t push any keys. I didn’t know Declan’s code, or his District, or anything more about him than the scent and taste of him. He knew where to find me, but I had little hope he’d do so. How long had he waited? Not long enough and I couldn’t blame him. Hadn’t I been angry when I’d thought he’d ditched me?

  The steam shower responded to the warmth of my body and switched on as soon as I stepped into the plazglass enclosure. Instant heat seeped into my body. The steam wrapped around me, and needles of nearly scalding artiwater pounded my flesh. It was just what I needed.

  Kaelyn waited for me outside the bathroom with a glass of synthfruit juice and a slab of some sort of fragrant cake. “I ordered this for my Gemma.”

  Even my disappointment couldn’t take away my sudden appetite. It had been hours since I’d eaten, and I’d worked hard today. I gobbled the food and drink, gave Kaelyn the plates, and ran my internal ultrasonic tooth cleanser. Then, still naked, I coated myself with waterproof protective dreamcream and got into my water bed.

  The curved metal lid closed over top of me with a low, comforting click. Darkness instantly bathed me, and silence cloaked me. The water adjusted rapidly and perfectly to my exact body temperature, which had elevated slightly after the steam shower. I put the mouthguard between my teeth and plugged my ears, then slipped the duel-pronged flexicord into my nostrils and felt for the switch that would turn on the oxygen. The first two seconds of forced air were as stale and shocking as always, but then it was as though I were breathing regular air.

  I slipped down into the water. Floating. The water caressed me, held me, lifted and dropped me, all as gently as a mother crooning her child to sleep. The slap, slap of it against the inside of the bed had the rhythmic quality of the sea.

  I floated, aching for sleep and not finding it. No matter how I tried to tell myself it was stupid to pine away over a man I barely knew, my mind kept returning to his face. The way he whispered my name. The feeling of his hands on my flesh.

  I floated. Thinking. Yearning. Would he try to see me? What would I do if he didn’t?

  I’m an Op. It’s my job to find out who and where people are. With my access to Newcity’s database, System, it shouldn’t be difficult to trace Declan. The truth was, I was afraid.

  No person had ever affected me this way, not even Steve. My ex-husband’s face rose briefly in my mind, but any memories of the love we’d shared had been replaced with the sight of his face on the viddy screen the last time we’d spoken.

  His lip had curled in disgust, and his eyes hadn’t quite been able to meet mine. He’d asked for money, and I’d refused. I hadn’t asked him why he’d decided to dissolve our union. The answer had been all over his face.

  It was too soon to imagine sharing my life with Declan the way I’d shared it with Steve. Yet I couldn’t stop my mind from turning over a picture of us, laughing together. Holding hands. Standing before our friends and family to share the vows that would join our lives as husband and wife. Loving him.

  I had loved Steve once, enough to agree to bind my life to his. His touch had made my body respond. We’d even laughed together, though it seemed I only ever cried alone. If I hadn’t agreed to join him on the hoverbike ride, perhaps we’d still be married today. We might have had children.

  That choice had been taken from me. I’d never create life or carry a child in the womb the doctors had determined unimportant to save. Compared to the organs that allowed me to live, lungs, kidneys, intestines, I suppose their choice made sense. But now I pressed my hands against the flat plane of my belly and imagined the scarred mess inside.

  In our world’s past, motherhood had once been assumed to be the sole purpose of a woman’s life. Her role was to create, bear and raise children. Time had allowed women more freedom of choice, but motherhood had still been considered the shining icon of womanhood, the pinnacle of purpose for the female sex. More recent advances had further removed that assumption. Same sex pairings, artificial insemination and birth control reversible only by surgery had made having children more of an active choice than ever before. Women can choose to have a uterobot carry the egg and sperm joined in a laboratory rather than become pregnant themselves. We can choose our children’s gender, hair and eye color, genetically determined height and weight, resistance to disease and aptitude for tasks.

  I still had choices. Too many of them in my opinion, but I could still be a mother if I chose. But I didn’t want a child without a father, and I didn’t want a home without love.

  I wasn’t afraid to make love with Declan, but I was afraid to love him. I’d gone down that path before, with Steve, and had my love torn from me like meat in the teeth of feral beasts. The accident had stolen more from me than my internal organs; it had taken my marriage.

  I floated, dreaming. I couldn’t maintain the melancholy thinking of Steve and my accident always brought me. The water soothed away those old aches, which is why I invested the money in the water bed to begin with. No matter what befell me during the day, no matter what might wound or scar me, sleeping in the water, the real water, always made everything better.

  I spread my legs to feel the water caress every part of me. In the silence, the beating of my heart became the thud of ocean waves. I thought of my holo program and the blue ocean I’d created.

  In the blackness, I couldn’t be sure if my eyes were open or shut. Soft sparkles of color drifted through my vision, like tiny stars. If I reached out my hands to either side, I’d feel the warm inner lining of the water bed, but I chose to keep them resting on my stomach. I wanted no tether, nothing to ground me. I wanted to float, to drift, to let the day slip away from me.

  Despite the warmth and gentle rocking of the water, I couldn’t relax enough to fall asleep. Tension coiled through my body, my thighs, my shoulders, my neck. I stroked the smoothness of my belly and felt the tension even there, muscles jumping beneath the skin.

  The situation with Relava preyed on my mind. She hadn’t needed to be destroyed, but desperation had driven her recklessness. She’d lost her life because of her own fears. Still, my responsibility in the fiasco bothered me.

  My hands smoothed lower, to the swell of my thighs. The muscles there ached, but the warm water would relieve the pain by morning. My fingers touched the sensitive inner flesh, and the skin there trembled at my touch.

  If I’d met Declan tonight as planned, we surely would’ve ended up making love. His hands would’ve touched me where my own caressed me now. I let my fingers drift a little higher, to brush the soft lines of my pussy and my swelling clit. I closed the third finger and thumb of my left hand on that spot. Just behind the bundle of nerves was the switch that forced my body into instant sexual arousal. I didn’t need to press it. My touch against my flesh and the thought of Declan was enough.

  I parted my legs farther, and the water lapped at my openness. I rocked my hips against my hand. The stars in my vision grew brighter, sparkled, pulsed in time to the throb of my arousal.

  I slid the first two fingers of my right hand inside my opening and felt the slickness even the water couldn’t wash away. My hips jumped, and my clit began to heat. I moaned in the back of my throat, the mouthpiece muffling the sound. I slid my fingers in and out, deeper, harder, imagining them as Declan’s cock. My other hand stroked my clit in slow, rhythmic circles that brought me to the edge, then eased me back.

  The water sloshed. My knees bumped the sides of the tank as I drew them up to tilt myself further against my hands. I thrust my fingers slower, and slid my left hand up to caress my jutting nipples. The water licked at my erect clitoris, teasing it, taunting it. No matter how I pushed against it, the pressure wasn’t enough to send me into orgasm. I teased myself with it until my body became a blast of sensation, and even the stars in my eyes faded into a white hot glare.

  At last I could hold out no more. I left my breasts and slid my hand once more down to my cunt. Once, twice, I tweaked my clit with my