Page 17 of Entity

For a second, I’m lost for words. My face must be turning bright red. “Oh, um. Thank you. Uh, listen, I need to go clean up.” I gesture vaguely toward the staircase leading up to my guest room. “Are you okay alone for a few minutes?”

Eros nods, standing. I drag my eyes away from his cock. “I’ll clean myself up, Kit.”

“Okay. Thanks again.”

“You’re welcome.”

Overcome with a sense of surreality, I hurry up the spiral staircase. I’m almost to the top when Eros speaks, stopping me in my tracks.

“Kit,” he says. He sounds almost pained. I lean over the railing and meet his gaze. He looks — strange. Almost sad, or… some emotion I haven’t seen on him. Which program is this? I wonder. The one where he apologizes that my orgasm was somehow subpar?

But he says nothing.

“What, Eros?” I prompt.

And then, like a window closing, Eros’s furrowed brows even out, his smile returns, and he shakes his head. “I don’t know. I forgot what I was going to say.”

7

Back in my en suite,I head straight to the shower. I’m sticky with sweat, and I smell like sex. Who knows how long Ian will be busy doing… whatever it is he’s doing. And Eros said he’d be fine on his own down there, so I decide to take my time.

I shed my clothes and climb into the shower, turning the water up as hot as it will go before it scalds, and stand in the hot stream until my heart returns to its normal rhythm.

I take a long, steadying breath. There’s nothing wrong here; I did nothing wrong. This isn’t like the time I accidentally fucked a married guy. Ian is famously a bachelor. This isn’t like the countless times I’ve fucked a near stranger while drunk, either. I’m fully sober. I just had pancakes, for God’s sake. And Eros isn’t a stranger. He’s… well, he’s a sexbot. He’s built for this. It’s hispurpose.

Still, I feel unsettled.

“Best sex of my life, though,” I say aloud to the shower.

And better than that, it’s incredible content for the book. If Ian lets me, I could turn this into a chapter of its own. “Testing the Pleasurebot,” or something. I’ll come up with a better chapter title when I’m not sex-stupid, but whowouldn’twant tobuy a book with a first-person account of what the original Eros model is capable of?

I dry myself off, suddenly excited, all my unease dissipating the shower’s steam. It’s hitting me little by little: the reality of this. I just fucked areal-life robot. And I’m going to write a book about it. A guaranteed bestseller. I’ll be rich. I’ll be fucking famous.

Pulling on my clothes, hair still wet, I feel clean and refreshed inside and out. I feel competent, satiated,light. I pull my hair into a bun, knowing it will dry in nice, loose curls that way, and grin at myself in the bathroom mirror.

Something catches my eye in the reflection. Movement in the room behind me.

I freeze, adrenaline spiking through me.

It was probably just a shadow, a drone passing by outside, silhouetted against the window. The lights are off in the adjacent room, and the curtains are drawn, drenching the corners in near blackness.

I turn away from the mirror.

There is a shape just inside the closed door of the guest room. At first, I don't understand what I’m seeing. It looks like a dark shadow, floating or hovering.

Wait, no.

It’s an arm. A long arm, reachingthroughthe door from the hallway outside. Slow and shadowed, seemingly unhindered by the door in its way, it reaches for me with outstretched fingers.

And then it flickers. Lines and spots of white skitter across the shape. At the same time, a heaviness grips me, and I feel like I’m being pulled down through an impossibly tight tunnel, every cell of me crushed flat. My vision darkens at the edges.

Then the arm’s fingers seem to lengthen, to curve toward me.

Heart in my throat, I reach for the bedroom light switch.

I flick the light on.

The shape is gone. My room is empty.

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