Chapter Twenty-Two
The kids burst out of the French windows and explode on the perfectly manicured lawn, running as if they have never been outside
before, with primal joy. At their centre is Megan, who flops down onto the grass in the middle of a group of friends. They
laugh and tease one another with easy affection that makes me smile. I never had that kind of camaraderie at her age, and
I’m glad she has it. I’m glad they all do. I had to wait for Rani to find out about friendship, and so much more that life
has to offer. Megan is off to a good start, and I have to admit I think Forrest helped her on her way.
“She was excellent, wasn’t she?” Hal says, joining me on the terrace.
I’m very conscious of his physical presence next to me, his height and the way his arms fill out those suit sleeves.
Hal built himself to be built, which makes sense if he’s based on Kai Raider.
There were pages of prose dedicated to how Kai Raider’s arms rippled with muscles, capable of great strength and yet deep tenderness.
Shyly, I give Hal a long, slow sideways look from the top of his blond head to his Italian leather shoes.
I bet those thighs could master an impetuous stallion with a couple of squeezes too.
Turns out I really fancy my bioengineered AI in all sorts of naked-thoughts ways.
“Yes,” I say, the word coming out in a bit of a squeak. “It was impressive actually. To see how Forrest worked with Megan
to help her articulate her feelings. It really changed how I saw her and challenged all the assumptions I made about those
kids, but more than that it changed how she saw herself, and that’s really special. You can see that affected her friends
the same way too. It was like someone was finally paying attention to them as human beings and not just sausages in a sausage
factory.”
“I am certain that processing teenage children into food isn’t standard practice,” Hal says, “so I’m going to guess that that’s
a colloquial expression that I haven’t heard before. I will add it to the database.”
“This must be so weird for you.” The thought suddenly occurs to me. “To inhabit the world in this way. See and hear and taste . . .
Do you taste?”
Hal turns to look at me and his intense blue eyes darken to navy.
“I do taste. My tongue can do everything tongues are designed to do.”
“Oh . . . oh.” I turn back to the view. More naked thoughts ensue.
Fortunately, a distracting cheer rises from the kids as a succession of waiting staff march onto the lawn carrying silver
platters piled high with burgers and fries, and several carrying a selection of fizzy drinks.
“I thought I’d get it delivered!” Lady B calls to the kids through a megaphone that only someone like Lady B would have lying around her castle.
“Enjoy! And please pick up all your rubbish and take it to the recycling afterward!” She lowers the megaphone and smiles at Hal and me.
“Our gardeners would have a heart attack if they could see them now. Now, have you two made up?”
“I . . . oh, I hadn’t realised . . .” I splutter.
“Nothing gets past these eyes,” Lady B tells me, pointing two fingers at her eyes and then at me. “They’re like a steel trap.”
“We have,” Hal says happily. “It was my fault, but it’s all sorted now.”
“Glad to hear it, and well done today, both of you. Every single project here is truly wonderful. I have no idea how the judges
will choose.” She looks out at the kids, scattered all across the lawn like confetti, and waves at them.
“It’s nice to have them here, really,” she says. “They liven the place up. Much less stressful than this month’s Bridezilla.”
“Bridezilla?” I ask her.
“We’ve got a big society wedding at the weekend,” Lady B says. “Normally wouldn’t host one when the prize is on, but the father
of the bride is some big cheese in Parliament, and Albert says it’s best to keep him sweet. But the bride! You’d think that
no one else had ever been married before. The girl’s a tyrant! Which reminds me. I need to talk to the gardener about finding
exactly the right sort of rosebuds.”
Lady B gives the kids a final wave, and they respond with smiles, and waves and shouts of thanks.
“It’s almost like they are not all terrible monsters,” I say more to myself than to Hal.
“Your experience of childhood and school was a particularly traumatic one,” Hal says.
“You might benefit from talking therapies to help you process those latent feelings.” Then he smiles at me, a sweet and gentle smile.
“But I know you don’t enjoy meeting strangers.
So, you can always talk to me. I’ve acquired several qualifications in psychiatry since I began. ”
“Really?” I look up at him. “When?”
“I don’t really sleep,” he says. “This version of me sleeps. This body needs rest and fuel just like any other. But my mind
is here”—he taps his head—“and in your system too. And it just goes on and on, thinking, learning, and growing.”
“That sounds exhausting,” I say.
“I am starting to understand what it means to be tired,” Hal tells me. “It’s actually quite a pleasant sensation, especially
after a productive day.” He looks at the long queue in the buffet that I forgot to join. “You will be sad if you miss the
sandwiches. I’ll fetch you some.”
He heads off before I can agree or otherwise and, to be fair, there has never been a day in my life when I have not wanted
sandwiches. So, you could say Hal’s making assumptions, but you could also say he just knows me so well that I don’t have
to ask, or worry about asking, or how other people might see me and my love of sandwiches and whether or not they are judging
me, somehow. And that is actually lovely.
“Ava!” Rani calls out to me from across the terrace.
No doubt she was covertly observing my conversation with Hal, and I know she noticed me checking out his thighs and probably even clocked my flustered blush when he talked about tongues.
She is coming over here right now to interrogate me in detail.
Just inside, Hal is piling a plate high with sandwiches, as Rani is making her way through the crowd to get to me.
Rani has absolutely no faults whatsoever, except maybe that she is always extremely interested in what I’m thinking and feeling.
You might say that is the mark of a true friend, and I agree with you, but I’m not ready to enter a full forensic dissection yet.
These thoughts and feelings I’m having for Hal are not only confusing but brand-new and I want to keep them to myself for just a little longer.
Dammit, I have to let the sandwiches go and make my escape. Rani is my best friend, but I can’t talk to her about what all
this means yet when I don’t know. So I pretend I haven’t seen her and make a break for a collection of big trees in the opposite
direction from the maze of doom, using some local businessmen as cover as I slink down the steps and out of sight.