Page 107 of Guiding Desire

“Kitten, if you didn’t like anything, you’re going to tell me now.”

“No, I liked it.Hmmwas meant affirmative.”

“You say the weirdest things sometimes. Fine. You can listen now. About what you said yesterday, I don’t like the notion of you thinking like you might die and like your parents would be left suffering. I don’t like the notion of you thinking fucking Alesa looking down on you is justified. I hate that you’re feeling lost. But I get it. I’ve been thinking about what to say to you, but I figure, the important bit is, if you lined up every Conduit in the city, on the planet, and I could choose one to imprint on, I’d still pick you. Thought you should know.”

Orrey tilted his head back until he could see Senlas’s face. “Even if it were Coldis?”

Senlas laughed. “Especially then. I won’t lie to you, we tried making out that one time, but it was just not right. We’re more like brothers than anything else, which means I love Col, but I love you in a completely different way.”

Orrey’s eyes went wide. “You love me?”

“Yeah.”

“But we just met.”

“Yeah. But that’s okay. I know what I want. You can take your time though.”

Take my time,Orrey thought.I suppose Coldis was right after all.

Senlas rinsed Orrey’s hair out without getting any shampoo near the grafts, and after the bath, Senlas took a quick shower himself. Back in his own room, Orrey found a box on the bed, marked with his name and Senlas’s—no, also his—address. The branding on the box told Orrey these were the clothes Taros had ordered for him yesterday.

Orrey was tempted to figure out where the delivery pad was instead of opening this box, which looked extremely unassuming.

“You cost more than I spend on clothing in a year,” he told the cardboard.

The little alarm bot got excited when Orrey approached the bed. Its tiny bot eyes had been fixed on the box. Orrey was glad not even it could bring itself to mistake a box for a sleeping person.

Yet it made hopeful, alert noises when it recognized Orrey.

“I’m not going to sleep,” Orrey told it.

It kept making the same noises, ventured a little closer to where the table ended on a steep drop if you were an aged alarm bot.

“If you throw yourself off things, you’ll break eventually.” Orrey opened the box, the decorative tape much easier to peel off than the kind cheaper brands used. “Well, there’s that.”

The clothes themselves were wrapped in a soft, synthetic fabric meant to resemble high-quality paper. Each piece was individually wrapped, and a sticker at the top marked the pieces as “pre-laundered for your comfort.”

“Fancy, fancy,” Orrey said. The alarm bot was getting excited, moving closer and closer to the drop off the little table, but through some miracle, it didn’t fall.

Orrey didn’t want to unwrap everything all at once, but he broke the seals until he’d found what he’d actually been wanting to try on: wide white pants with golden swirls rising from the hems like flames, licking up to knee height, and a deep green shirt that, in its simple cut, reminded Orrey of his uniform, although it was softer and not quite as tight in the straight collar. The color had made him think of tara leaves, of all things, and it had been why Taros had had such an easy time talking Orrey into getting it.

When he was dressed, Orrey activated the mirror in the closet and looked at himself. “Definitely not anything at all like the uniform,” he said.

The alarm bot chirruped when Orrey smiled at his silhouette.

Just before he turned the mirror off, his eyes fell on the precious volume sitting on his desk. Orrey turned, walked over to the desk, and ran his fingers over the cover.

He’d looked at it the night before, had read the very first poem it contained. “Can’t read more than a poem at a time. That would be greedy. I’ve never been given anything like it, and I have to make it last. Do you think I should read another now?”

The bot made an affirmative noise as if accepting an alarm.

“I think so too.”

Orrey opened the book. The second poem wasn’t long.

We begin in sleep and dream

Of our futures; the seam