Page 51 of The Genius
“I only corrected you when you got something wrong.”
“Then I must have gotten a lot of things wrong according to you, because you fucking corrected me daily. It was humiliating.”
Shelly moved on the sofa – showing more of that creamy skin before she tugged the t-shirt down to cover her thighs. “I’m sorry. I guess it’s the empathy thing you talked about. I don’t always sense when it’s the right time to keep quiet.”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t that I didn’t like you, Shelly. It’s just that from the moment you arrived it was clear to everyone that being at the school was a short stop for you on your way to the moon.”
“The moon?”
“Not literally. But you were always unique, and we all knew it.” I held out my hand with the palm down. “There was us.” I smiled at her and raised my hand way up. “And then there was you. I’ve already told you how jealous I was of you.”
She looked like she was processing what I’d just said and finding it hard to believe that anyone would be jealous of her.
Moving closer, I placed my hand on top of hers. It was a bold move and I was nervous she would slap it away. Touching a woman from the Northlands like this would be dangerous, but Shelly was a Motlander and she just looked at my hand with interest. “Shelly, there’s one thing that I still can’t figure out. Why did you have sex with me?”
She sighed. “You can’t let it go, can you?”
“No, it’s a fucking big deal to me, and I don’t understand what happened.”
“I told you I was curious. I work on optimizing sex-bots for Nmen, and for weeks before you came in, I’d been studying Nmen testing out Mindy. Every time I watched them, questions popped into my mind. Some of them stayed in the room and cuddled with her as if they were pretending she was real. That confirmed to me that my idea of Natura had merit. People always say that men only care about the visual, and that’s why the sex-bots have those unrealistic proportions. But I think Nmen long to feel a connection to a real woman.”
“Of course we do.”
Shelly, got up on her knees, her eyes shining with interest. “Be honest. If you could choose between Mindy or Natura, what would you pick?”
I smiled at her sudden enthusiasm and chuckled. “Nice try, but you’re avoiding my question. Why me?”
With a sigh she bit her lower lip. “It wasn’t something that I’d planned, Marco. It just happened.”
“You could have stopped me. Why didn’t you?”
She looked away with a troubled look in her brown eyes. “Maybe I should have, but I wanted to know what sex feels like. When you mistook me for a sex-bot, I just went with it.” She rubbed her nose. “For research.”
“For research?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You had sex with me as research for your work?”
“Something like that.”
“That sounds pretty cold.”
Shelly shrugged. “What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. That you felt attracted to me, maybe.”
She looked thoughtful. “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me and that I’d be safe with you.”
I groaned. “At least there’s that.”
“And I always thought you had nice eyes,” she added.
“Did you at leastenjoyyour research?”
She gave a small shrug. “It was different.”
My jaw hardened. “Is that a no?”
