Page 286 of Light Leech

The next silence wasn’t as comfortable. She cut it short. “Is there something that’s bothering you?”

I shrugged as if I needed her permission to continue.

“Come on, Petya, I feel like we know each other enough to be candid. I mean, there isn’t anything else hiding between us, is there?”

I smirked. “No, and I guess that is the problem. You’ve seen what I do. What I am.”

“This again?”

“What again?”

“The whole ‘I’m a bad person and no one should love me,’ act?”

“It’s not an act.”

“Well, I’ve already told you that I understand what you have to do. It was like the first thing we went over when we met.”

“But that was just after you woke up to your real life.”

“Doesn’t mean you weren’t speaking to me. I’m not blind. I think we both needed some distance after I was pulled out of the Neon Idol mindset. Your passion wasn’t your fault. I was still fueled by the more promiscuous side of the Idol. Now we’re both soberly aware of what this is between us.”

“And that is?”

“A start. Infatuation. You like me, don’t you? That’s not just another act?”

I smiled and shook my head. “No.

“No what?”

“I like you.”

“Good, because I like you, too.” She held my hand and squeezed it, then let go before the others could bother us about it. “We both have our baggage, but we’ll carry it together. The world might be in chaos, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for this.”

“And this is?”

She laughed. “Me seeing if you’re the type of person I could spend more time with.” She sighed. I’m glad we had this conversation, it’ll make it easier to get you in to meet 3Rochi.”

“Why?”

“Because it’ll be easier to pass you off as my boyfriend than some executive when you don’t know anything about the music industry.”

I smirked. I couldn’t argue with that.

“Maybe after more time together we can decide if the boyfriend thing is more than an act.”

Chapter twelve

The Race

Istood silent while Ralia spoke with yet another group of pompous self-proclaimed geniuses who would rather not disclose how they got into the neurocore. The more hardened they became by Ralia’s “ lack of business discretion“, the more eccentric she grew, touching and prodding them verbally until they broke.

“You know, I actually program fixes,” she said. It was a lie as far as I knew. It was hard to tell what was and wasn’t true with her. “Me and my gals would go hard, zeggin’ ourselves up with any form of physical intoxicant until they couldn’t give me the buzz I craved, so I figured, why not step it up a notch? Same thing happened with fixes, but I could make my own there where I couldn’t with drugs, you plug? So I made the Galactitab, which–”

“I know what it does,” the man across from her said. His voice sounded like he was at the point of breaking into rage. “I just told you those ruined my job, hence the need for—“

She talked over him as if he had never spoken. “Like I was saying, the tabs make you feel like you’re communicating with aliens, which we all know don’t exist because the Earth is flat. They make you feel like you’re a genius because you’re the only human capable of intergalactic communication when the product says that all Galactitabs do is make you feel like you’re flying through space.”

“And that lie ruined my life. My wife left me, took the kids–”