Page 115 of Even Robots Die
“Were you going somewhere?” she asks, surprised by my sudden apparition.
“I heard you at the door,” I tell her as I open the door completely and walk back to my desk on the right side of the room.
She follows me and closes the door after her before walking in my direction. She passes the table and chairs on the left near the entrance and stops right in front of the bed and sits on the edge.
If I didn’t know she’s most likely here because she’s worrying about her father, I would dream of pushing her on the bed and tasting her a lot more thoroughly than I did earlier today, but I don’t think it would be welcome now.
She looks exhausted. It’s in the way her shoulders are slightly slouched and her eyes are barely staying open. It’s in the way she doesn’t even question me about where she can sit and just goes where it’s the most comfortable for her. She doesn’t care if I have something to say about it.
“I guess he didn’t show up at the door yet,” she tells me.
I think she meant it as a question, but her weariness is seeping into her tone and instead it just sounds like she knows it for a fact, and I don’t know if she’s sad or disappointed.
I’m not surprised he is not here yet and I don’t think I need to voice it because I think maybe she was expecting it too.
“No,” I tell her still, with a shake of my head.
A heavy sigh escapes and she drops to her back and looks at the ceiling, lying on my bed, her feet still on the ground.
I’m still at my desk, holding the edge of it with both hands. She’s on my bed. Truly. And all I can think about is the fact that I’ll soon be sleeping in her smell.
“What can we do while we wait?” she asks after a few seconds.
“You should rest,” I tell her. I see her raise her head from the bed as if she wants to argue, but I continue talking so she understands my thought process. “You look tired, and don’t tell me you slept most of the afternoon. I know. But I also know you got shot and any person would feel tired after such an ordeal. I’ll stay awake and I’ll wake you up when he arrives.”
She turns on her side and moves slightly higher up on my bed. From this position, she can look as she speaks.
“I can’t sleep,” she says with a yawn.
I raise an eyebrow in a ‘who are you kidding now?’ obvious sign that she definitely catches.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m exhausted. I know I need to sleep, but my brain won’t let me. If I lie down, it’s going to start running through the list of the things I need to do tomorrow. It’s going to worry about what I need to do for my sisters’ school, what I need to do to stop Dad from spending money he doesn’t have, and so on. It will spin and spin and it will take me an hour, maybe two, just to fall asleep, and even then it’ll probably be in the middle of a thought. My mind can’t be turned off.”
It’s truly amazing how her brain functions, but I can also see how it makes her feel so tired most of the time. My mind has been plaguing me with thoughts of her lately, but I know that before that it was straight-forward. Sleep has never been a question before for me.
“First, we’re going to change a little something in what you said,” I say. “We will switch everything that you said with a ‘we’. We’re going to figure out together what we’ll do tomorrow, what can be done for your sisters and your Dad, and if it helps you sleep better, I’ll provide you with different options and we’ll find the best optiontogether.”
I see her eyes shine from where she’s looking at me on the bed, but she quickly closes them so I don’t see the tears threatening to spill. It feels like she doesn’t allow herself to seek help most of the time. Maybe she’s not used to people freely giving any and I want that to change for her.
I don’t really know where that feeling is coming from. I learned not to question that since I met her. It’s not like my brain was broken when I met her and I could feel nothing.
It was, jackass, I tell myself.
There is no reasonable explanation for the fact that every single thing she did pulled me out of whatever the birds did to me. I have no way to explain how I first became obsessed with her when I shouldhave felt nothing, or how I feel this need to protect her and care for her now.
There is no reasonable explanation, and yet here I am, making her “I” a “we”, as if there is no her without me.
Am I getting sappy? Maybe, but there is something about Florentine that makes me feel things I shouldn't.
Hell, she could be my daughter. Fuck, she’s younger than my own daughter.
We weigh our options for her sisters, her Dad, and everything that needs to happen, and her answers take longer to be spoken and the tone of her voice becomes lower and lower.
Until there are no answers anymore and they’re replaced by a deep breathing.
That’s exactly when my holo notifies me that I have an incoming message.
I step out of the room and listen to it at the lowest volume possible so I’m sure that it won’t wake up Florentine.
