Page 66 of CHOICE Lover
With the pitying look she’s giving him, she knows he’s lying.
“You can’t extract my secrets with your bargain. That’s extortion,” he says, though there’s no heart in the accusation. He’s only scrambling to rewind this unasked for turn of events.
Still, her face goes pale. “I’m so sorry. You’re right. That is atrocious of me.”
Now he feels bad about making her feel bad. This is why he invented manupartners.Tell her, the voice in his mind demands. He’s not sure if it’s his conscience, his brother, or the overly moral body double he’s been chatting with in the spare room. Perhaps all three. Defeated, he walks over and drops onto the couch. He pats the spot next to him.
The prospect of what he’s about to do is terrifying and freeing at the same time. As she walks to the couch and sits, it feels like he’s having an out-of-body experience. That has to be his nerves. He remembers a vaguely familiar feeling when he first started CHOICElover and experiment after experiment kept failing. He was so close to giving up. Electra sitting beside him brings him closer to the present.
“You don’t have to share anything you aren’t comfortable with,” she says. “I shouldn’t have brought up the bargain. I just don’t understand.” She shakes her head like she’s admonishing herself. “No, it doesn’t matter. You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
He opens his mouth to speak, but the words get stuck. She takes his hand, squeezing it reassuringly.
He exhales a deep breath. “I take it you read about what happened to Jerme?” She nods. “I’ve never talked about his death to anyone. No one, not even my staff knows I had a twin. Jerme is why I started CHOICElover.”
Her eyes go wide, but she nods again, urging him to continue.
“He committed atmosphere-assisted suicide. We were twenty-one. He met a woman, 3Zeez. They dated for a few weeks. He became convinced she was the one. In such a short time, he built his whole life and identity around her. They bled into each other. It was strange, and I warned him that they were too interdependent. That if something happened, so much of him would go with her that he’d be a shell. He stopped coming home after a while. I didn’t see him often after that.
“Turns out I was right. She left one day out of the blue. He never found out why or where she went. After five months together, all he got was a message telling him not to look for her. A month later, he walked outside without a mask. I saw it on video a few days later.”
With her free hand, she reaches up and strokes his cheek. Not his cheek. She’s wiping away the tears that have sprung free. The tears that always fall if he allows himself to relive that moment.
He shakes the too-potent memory off, telling her about their unstable mother, the other woman that broke Jerme’s heart. He tells her about the seven years he wandered aimlessly through life until the day he came up with the idea for manupartners. He tells her how he still visits the site where Jerme took his last breath.
“Oh, Res6. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to lose a sibling like that.” Before he can stop her, Electra has thrown her arms around him. She’s half in his lap as he finds his arms snaking around her back. They sit there for a long time until the searing pain in his chest becomes numb. She gently strokes his back as he weeps into her chest for a change.
He pushes her away a little. “Electra, your blouse.” He points to her shoulder to show the damp spot. She glances at it, then gives him a sad smile before brushing her fingers across his cheeks again. Embarrassment at his mental collapse crowds in, and he stiffens, but she leans forward and kisses one still-damp cheek, then the other.
“I’m sorry,” he says, cheeks burning. Has anyone ever kissed him so tenderly? Shown him such care? Never. Not even his own mother. It’s almost more than he can take.
“You have nothing to apologize for. When you have an open wound, it is normal for it to hurt when you revisit it. Thank you for sharing that with me. I know it was hard for you.”
He’s so caught off guard by her understanding reaction that he has to ask, “Does that help you understand what CHOICElover means to me?”
“It’s a legacy in honor of your brother,” she says, moving off his lap. “Perhaps I was a little too harsh with you. You created manupartners to save people like your brother.”
He wants to pull her back.Needsto pull her back to him. Because now it feels like there’s something missing where she’d been moments earlier. This is the exact reaction he’s spent his whole life avoiding. “I thought if he had a companion whose interests aligned with his, then that never would have happened.”
“Res6, I think it’s important to clarify that the type of relationship you described with your brother and his girlfriend wasn’t interdependent. It was codependent, which I know courtesy of my stepmom Janet, the therapist.”
He shakes his head, trying to process what she’s saying. “I don’t understand.”
“I won’t claim to know your brother, but he was probably struggling long before 3Zeez came along. When people are rejected by a parent, it can cause a number of unhealthy relationship patterns later in life. Our parents can give us all sorts of fucked-up trauma.”
“Your birth mother died because your family didn’t have the resources for her treatment,” he says, thinking he’s following. Datasets and DNA records are so much simpler.
“Exactly. It sounds like his relationship with your mother gave him an insecure attachment style, which may have led to love bombing with 3Zeez. It’s a lot of pressure to be someone’s everything.”
That can’t be right, can it? Even if their mother wasn’t there for them, they were there for each other. “But we had the same mother, and I’ve never put that kind of pressure on anyone.”
She shrugs. “Everyone responds differently. Someone else with the same parental abandonment issues might respond to relationships with distrust—”
“Or avoidance,” he fills in for her. All the pieces snap together with startling clarity. Like always, he and Jerme were opposite sides of the same coin. In over a century, he hasn’t learned what this woman taught him in ten minutes. He should have done better. Been better. Shame crawls up his neck, making him want to abandon their conversation and flee. But he knows somehow that would reinforce that there is something defective about him in her eyes. He forces himself to stay put. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” She offers him a gentle smile. “Thank you for sharing that with me. It helps me see you better.”
Her words mean more to him than he can handle. He probably should ease into this vulnerability thing, but here he is in the deep end, flailing.
