Robin Wasserman - Frozen

“You know who I am,” I pleaded. “Come on, Terra, you know me.”

“Yeah, but there’s an easy way to fix that.” She walked away with mouth breather number two, leaving me alone again.

Walker found me by the pool.

“So it’s okay? To get wet?” he asked, sitting down beside me.

I shrugged. I’d taken off my shoes and plunged my bare feet into the water. It was cold, or at least, I thought it was. Temperatures were still a challenge. “Everything’s okay.”

He dipped his feet into the water, then shivered. Cold—I’d guessed right.

“I heard what happened.”

I shrugged again. That was an easy one for me, one of the first things I’d mastered. Maybe because it was so close to an involuntary twitch.

“You should have texted me,” he said. “I was looking for you.”

I’d been sitting out by the pool for almost an hour. He couldn’t have looked very hard. “It’s fine.”

“So, were you, uh… you and that guy, you weren’t—”

“You’re seriously going to ask me that? You think I was lying too?”

“I don’t know.” He looked down, tapping his foot against the surface of the water, gently enough that it didn’t splash. “I guess not.”

Our shoulders were touching.

“You know what?” I said. “Just go.”

He shook his head. Rested his hand on my lower back. Leaned in. “What if I don’t want to?”

It felt like my first kiss.

In a way, I guess, it was. And just like back then, I wasted it, worrying about where to put my hands and what to do with my tongue and whether I should be moving my lips more or less—and then it was over. At least he didn’t look too repulsed. His eyes were rimmed with red. But they were open.

Most people had vacated the pool area once I showed up. The ones who’d stayed behind were staring at us. We got out.

The grounds of Cass’s estate were huge—and, once you got away from the guesthouse, mostly empty. We had a favorite spot, a clustering of trees at the top of a sloping hill—the same hill that, when we were kids, Cass and I had rolled down, shrieking as we bumped and slid, the grass and sky spinning around us. Walker and I stayed at the top. He was shivering.

“Nervous?” I asked. We sat facing each other, his legs crossed, mine tucked beneath me so that I could rise up on my knees and reach for him.

He shook his head. “No reason to be.”

He didn’t ask if I was nervous.

Walker took a deep, shuddering breath, and then his mouth was on mine again, his hands at my waist, slipping beneath the black T-shirt. I stiffened. His hands on the skin—How would it feel? What would he think of the body when he saw it?

“You okay?” he whispered. His eyes were closed again, his face pinched, like he was expecting a blow.

“Okay.”

“So, you can, like, do stuff?” he asked.

“I can do anything.” I tried to force myself to relax.

Asking call-me-Ben about it, back in rehab, hadn’t been the worst moment of that hell, not even close. But it had been humiliating enough.

“Can I get wet?” I’d opened with something easy. “Or will I melt or short-circuit or something?”

And call-me-Ben had had the nerve to laugh. “You’re fully waterproof.”

“What about sleeping?” Another lob. Working my way up to the real question. I barely heard his answer.

“The body will simulate the sensation of fatigue, as a signal to you that it’s time to shut down for a few hours, give the system a rest. Tests show that it’s probably a good idea to follow your normal schedule by ‘sleeping’ every night.”

“Can I eat?” That was a no.

Just like there’d be no more bathroom breaks, no more tampons. At this point, call-me-Ben suggested I might be more comfortable talking to a woman, but by woman, I knew he meant Sascha , and I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction.

“What happens if I break?” I asked.

“You’ll come to us,” said call-me-Ben. “Just like you’d go to the doctor. And we’ll fix you up. But if you take care of yourself, it’s unlikely to happen. Although we attempted to emulate the organic form as much as possible, you’ll find this body much more durable than the old one.”

“Why?”

He looked surprised. “Well, for all the obvious reasons. It seemed economically efficient, not to mention—”

“No. I mean, why that, but no other differences? Why no superpowers or anything?”

Ben frowned. “This isn’t a game. We’re not trying to create a new race of supermen, no matter what the vids want to claim. This is a medical procedure. We want to supply you with a normal life, as much like your old life as it can possibly be.”

“So… I should be able to do anything I used to do,” I said.

“Within reason,” Ben said. “Anything.”

“What about… Well, I have this boyfriend, so… Could he and I…?”

Call-me-Ben looked like he wanted to summon Sascha, no matter what I said. “As you’ve been told, your internal structure is—obviously—quite different. But the external structure mirrors the organic model completely.”

I must have looked blanker than usual.

“You and your boyfriend will be fine,” he clarified. “All systems go.”

I didn’t think to ask him how it would feel.

Now I knew: It felt wrong.

We didn’t fit together: not like we used to. Our faces bumped, my elbow jabbed his chin, his legs got twisted up in mine, and not in a good way. Every kiss got broken by a murmured “sorry” or “ouch” or “not there” or “no, nothing, keep going” or, always, “it’s okay,” and we did keep going, his hands running up and down the body, my fingers searching his, trying to find the dips and rises they remembered, but everything felt different against the fingertips, distant and imagined, like I was lying in the grass alone, pretending to feel the weight of Walker’s body on top of mine.

Things didn’t get very far.

“Sorry,” he said yet again, rolling off me. I pulled my shirt back on. It was one thing for him to touch the body, but I didn’t want him to have to look at it while we were lying there. I didn’t want to look at it. If I didn’t have to see it, I could pretend. That was easier in the dark. “I can do this, I just need a minute.”

“It’s okay,” I said. Like a parrot who only knew one phrase.

“I know it’s okay,” he snapped. “I just need…” He snatched a pill out of his pocket, popped it into his mouth. “It’ll be fine.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing. Just a chiller. Help me relax.”

“ Another one?” I knew he’d been popping them all night, and probably most of the afternoon.

“Don’t worry about it.” He rolled over on his side. “Okay. Ready?”

I pressed my hand against his chest, holding him in place. “You say that like you’re gearing up for battle.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It would just be nice if you didn’t need to be totally zoned out before you could touch me.”

“I don’t need anything.”

“Every time you come near me, you look like you’re being punished.”

“And what about you?” he asked. “I touch you, and you freeze up. It’s like hooking up with—Forget it.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Just say it,” I insisted, and, maybe out of habit, he followed orders.

“With a corpse.”

I sat up. “What a coincidence. Me being dead and all.”

He sat up too, and hunched over his knees, cracking his knuckles. “You have to admit… it’s kind of weird.”

“Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed. Life has been oh-so-normal for me these last couple months. Not that you would know.”