Genesis Lost - Books 1 - 6, page 58
I knew her mouth wanted to fucking drop open, but she had enough decency to keep it at slightly parted lips. For the second time in my life, I just wanted to disappear from this world and take that family curse right with me. She wanted children, and I couldn’t give her any. Could, but shouldn’t.
I waved my hand at the program and closed the hologram, my son disappearing from our sight like it had to from our minds — this could never happen.
“Why are you so upset?” Autumn asked, her voice extra sweet but a bit shaky.
“Oh, because that’s so fucking hard to grasp?”
“Sh.” Ruth shook my arm. “Just because they cleared the floor for us doesn’t mean you can talk like this. If someone hears you —”
“I don’t give a shit if somebody hears me.” I wiggled her hand off me. “Stop poking around in shit that isn’t any of your business.”
“Max…” Autumn walked up to me and placed her soft hand on my shoulder, sinking her thumb into my skin ever so slightly.
I wanted to grab her and take her into my arms. Apologize for being so broken. For being a genetic fuck up, that would bring nothing but heartbreak to a family.
“You know we don’t care about those things. Just because there is a chance doesn’t mean —”
“What the hell did you just say?” I pulled away from her, taking two steps back plus one extra. “Well, you should fucking care, Autumn. Have you ever seen such a disease chipping away on someone's life? How they are just a little bit less of themselves each day they wake up?”
“No, but —”
“Exactly, you haven’t. Neither have you seen someone cry the day they left for the hospital. Because the person knew she would never come back home.”
Autumn tried approaching me once more, but Ruth held her arm out and stopped her.
“It was just for fun,” Ruth said. “I will take her upstairs, and maybe you wanna calm down a bit before you follow us. This was supposed to be a cool trip after that interview, but I gotta say you’re totally spoiling it.”
At that, she hooked arms with Autumn and walked off, climbing the glass stairs to the next floor.
A mix of bile and kale pushed against my uvula. I should have taken her to the side for a mature dialogue. Instead, my anger took over the wheel and jumped on the highway, just a gear away from road rage.
I breathed my breakfast back down with a slow count to ten, and with it the fury which burnt the lining of my stomach.
There was only one reasonable thing I could do with all that nastiness bottled up inside me: find Kenya and confront her.
I ran upstairs skipping every other step and found Ruth and Autumn in one of the insemination rooms. Ruth swung her hands onto her hips. “You calm now?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I leaned myself against the doorframe, all calm and focused, and hid my tense fingers in my pockets. “Sorry for losing it down there. It’s just that… um… I guess I can’t expect you people to understand those kinds of things since you don’t have other options.”
A deep sigh rumbled through Ruth’s body, and she deflated right in front of me, shaking her head as if I had said something wrong.
“Us people?” She shot me the kind of look that leaves you bleeding and bruised. “Funny you say that because the last time I checked, we came from the same species.”
“That’s not what I meant —”
“What did you mean then?” Ruth pouted her lips, her brows coming down into a frown like knives ready to stab me. “Seriously, I don’t get how you can always say the damn wrong thing.”
“What? I… I didn’t…” Their stares continued, so sharp I thought they’d peel my skin. “Whatever. I just came to say that I am going upstairs to find Kenya.”
“Good idea. Bye!” Ruth kicked the door shut, and I had to jump back to keep it from breaking my nose.
Flabbergasted and pissed, I took another two flights of stairs, arriving at Kenya’s office panting and confused. Terribly confused.
Her large office stood empty.
Her name tag was gone.
My eyes blinked like an emergency light. Still no sign.
What the fuck?
“Can you keep a secret, Max?”
I swung around on my heels.
Councilman Merrick stood in the hallway, his hands piously folded in front of his chest. His gaze pinned me down without a single bat of his eyes, a smirk hiding behind the neutral straightness of his lips. “We wanted to wait a few days more before we would make it public.”
Freezing cold gnawed on my toes. “Make what public?”
“Kenya passed away this Friday.”
Something heavy dropped onto me, leaving me with thundering questions.
He placed his cold hand on my shoulder, but his eyes remained unmoved. “Do you think you could hold on to this information for a day longer? With this event being so close to the interview, we all figured it best to wait.”
I watched his hand from the corner of my eyes. This made no sense. “How did she die?”
“Who knows.” He took his hand off my shoulder and shrugged, backing up by a few steps. “Just old I guess. From what I was told, she most likely just fell to sleep never to wake up again.”
He smiled. The kind of smile that looked painful to the eye of the observer, as if the facial expression revolted against the truth.
“Can you?” he asked, running a hand through his sparse hair. “Keep a secret?”
Ruth’s voice came from the staircase by the elevator, “Max, we’re done.”
I kept my eyes on Merrick, his hands rubbing across the bridge of his nose repeatedly. With nothing but a nod, I turned around and left him standing in the hallway, making my way back to Ruth and Autumn with hurried steps.
“What did she have to say about it?” Ruth asked.
I placed my finger onto my lips and gestured them into the elevator. It wasn’t until Merrick’s face disappeared that I spoke up, their eyes glued to my lips. “Kenya is dead.”
“What?” Ruth clenched her hands around the aluminum rail. “Why would you say something like that? She isn’t dead. She can’t be.”
“Her office is empty. Her name tag is gone. Councilman Merrick told me she just fell to sleep and didn’t wake up.”
It took Ruth a while to realize what I had just told her. “But I just saw her when I picked up Autumn, and she looked as feisty as ever.”
“Sometimes old people just die,” Autumn added, “even when they are healthy.”
“Yes but…” My voice trailed off, distracted by the way my stomach churned. This was too unexpected. Too close to the interview to be a coincidence. “I’m getting a strange vibe about all this. First the interview. Then Svea’s snarky comments. And now Kenya. He asked me to keep it a secret for another day before they announce it to the public.”
“Do you think that’s why they’ve been on the pyramid this morning?” Ruth asked. “Remove her name and all?”
“Maybe.” I placed my finger on my lips once more, the elevator announcing the ground floor with a ding. We stepped outside and left the building, huddling together as soon as we stepped out of the building’s shadow.
Autumn stared at the ground, avoiding my eyes, her face not the usual porcelain type of pale. It was more of a sickly kind of pale as if something was eating her up from the inside.
Shame crawled up my legs on all fours, leaving me paralyzed and unable to take proper breaths. I fucked up again, letting our differences grow into a thirty-inches thick border. We needed to talk. The mature type, with all cards on the table. And I knew just the place for it.
Chapter 19
Autumn
“I’m not saying Kenya wasn’t murdered.” I placed a steaming mug of coffee in front of Ruth, who sat cross-legged on her bar stool. “But why would somebody go through such a hassle and risk, if the person is almost a hundred years old? Why not just let it run its natural course?”
“Max thinks they killed her before she got another set of votes on her seventieth anniversary.”
I plopped myself on the stool next to her and scratched a chunk of pineapple off the crust. “Max also thinks this stuff belongs on a pizza. Clearly, something’s wrong with the way he sees the world.”
Ruth gave me a pitiful sort of smirk. “I’m sorry for what he said yesterday. I had no clue he wasn’t an approved donor.”
“Don’t mention it.” I struggled my voice into something gentle, yesterday’s brutal pain still seeping to my core. No matter how close our bodies had been, the distance between us now seemed unscalable. “I overstepped a boundary and put him on the spot. I have no clue where that shitty idea came from.”
Except that I kinda did. The program was like a fortuneteller, and I fell for the age-old trick. That cheeky boy with his hazel brown eyes would never happen — that much he made clear.
I paid a nickel for a lie.
“I slept with Max,” I mumbled it like a confession, but it didn’t make me feel an ounce lighter.
No fucking surprise.
Ruth couldn’t give absolution.
“No kidding.” She took a sip of her coffee and leaned back, her hands wrapped tightly around her mug. “Given the awkwardness between you two ever since the beach trip, I kinda figured that out.”
I pulled my knees to my chest, staring at the gap between them. “You’re not upset with me? For ruining the experiment and all?”
“The only thing I’m upset about is that I couldn’t be there and watch.”
“What?” I couldn’t prevent my mouth from gaping. “Honey, if you ever make it to one of the clans for some reason, do yourself a favor and don’t blurt out shit like that. The guys would go nuts over marrying you with that sort of kink.”
“I am saying this from a scientific standpoint.” She slipped off the barstool. “Wait here…”
Ruth disappeared between piles of books in the corner of her living room. She pulled them toward her and grabbed behind them, retrieving a whopper, bound in purple.
She plunged it onto the fancy marble counter and opened a random page, showing a man and woman, their limbs and genitals tied into a painful looking knot.
“What the hell is this?” I flipped through the pages, each one spicier than the one before.
“It’s a book about all things sex.” Her eyes studied the drawings inch by inch, but there was no lip licking or signs of arousal. Just a set of overly curious eyes, taking in the technicalities. “When I signed up for the university, I wanted to study human sexuality with a major in sexual psychology. My skill counselor didn’t approve it, of course. Said there is no need for that sort of degree.”
I closed the book and pushed it aside. “You are too curious for your own good.”
She smiled an innocent smile, grabbed the book and buried it once more leaning against the wall, hidden by piles of approved literature. “So… was he any good?”
A giggle pushed out of my chest, replaced by a warm feeling which spread across my lungs and penetrated my chest. “He did ok.”
More than ok. What we shared that night, as fragile as it was, stole my breath. Along with my virginity. In return, he gave me love. Max gave me what I had been searching for all my life. In retrospect, it now seemed as useless as boobs on a bookshelf.
I didn’t notice when Ruth left to open the door, and neither did I realize when Max suddenly walked up next to me.
“I won’t go in for work today and took the day off,” he said, an insecure tone in his voice. “How about I make good on that promise I gave you, and show you the church?”
I grabbed my coffee mug and clung to it like to the edge of a cliff. “Um…”
“Isn’t that a bit risky?” Ruth asked. “The church has been blackzoned and with everything going on right now —”
Max held his hand up in a silencing wave. “Got it all covered. Never underestimate the scientist raised by a rebel. Wanna come too?”
Ruth’s eyes brushed me only slightly and wandered back to Max, her eyebrows giving a quick wiggle. “Somebody has to keep the vials turning at the lab, and I’m already running late. Besides, my neighbor Julie went on to a conference at one of the other districts, and she wants me to check on her plants. Just don’t get caught.”
She shouldered her bag, slipped into her shoes and headed to the door, but didn’t leave without a final remark.
“If you need inspiration,” she winked, “you know where to find it.”
She pulled the door shut behind her, leaving Max behind with a questioning look on his face. “Inspiration for what?”
“Advanced yoga positions.”
“Oh.” He scratched the nape of his neck. His other hand fell awkwardly by his side, not knowing what to do. “Well, um, I actually came to —”
I pressed my fingers onto his lips, and his eyebrows jumped up. “No, I’m the one who has to apologize. What I did was childish and I know I crossed a line. I just wish you would have told me about it.”
“Yeah…” He climbed onto Ruth’s bar stool, hands on his lap and eyes focused on the ground. “Guess I should have. I never really talk with anybody about her.”
I let my fingers comb through his wild hair, parting it to the right and picking strays out of the way. “So that’s what all your research at home is about? Finding a cure for the disease that took your sister?”
He shrugged his shoulders as if offering it as an apology, making my insides weep for his loss.
I wanted to tell him that I didn’t care.
Tell him that it didn’t matter to me.
But it mattered to him, and as much as it tore me apart from the inside, I respected him even more for it. It’s not like we had a future anyway.
“I’m sorry for what I said.” His eyes searched for mine, and he cupped my face, letting his thumb climb across the mounds of my lips. “I used to be very reasonable and always said smart shit. But then I met you, and all that crap just spills out of my mouth. Guess I just wanted you to understand why.”
“I understand.” I really did. Even with those annoying tears rolling up my tear ducts, and the hairline cracks across my heart. This has been nothing but an experiment gone too far.
Sure, I lost my heart to it. Right along with my virginity. But hey, at least I got to experience love and heartbreak all at once. Not everybody wore that title as fancy as I did.
I gave a confident nod. “I got off before you came, remember?”
I sure did.
Remembered how he inched inside me.
Remembered his hard cock stretching my tight walls.
Not to mention how his cum spurt all over me in several massive jerks.
His stare wandered to my lips, and I swallowed hard before I continued. “Chances that something happened are slim. Back home we have protection in case a couple isn’t planning on getting pregnant. Doubt we’ll find that kind of stuff here, so we better don’t repeat it.” Creepy how my body revolted with shivers against my wise and mature words.
“Not really sure how I feel about that,” he said in a low and husky voice as if he meant it, but didn’t. Heat waves swept over me like high tide, and the way his eyes caressed my breasts didn’t help. At all. But I had to let this go.
No matter how he drove up my pulse, how he made my heart clench, how he made my pussy drip, I had to push away from him and… holy fucking shit his hand darted around my neck, pulling me in for a kiss.
He let his tongue taste my lips, making my knees buckle and leaving me behind too weak to control myself. Too weak to even care.
He smelled like morning-Max: a fresh shave, a hint of mint from the hygiene pod and way too clean not to be licked.
I ran my lips along the side of his neck, placing kisses here and there, and fumbled with the waistband of his pants.
He placed his hands onto my arms, gentle but determined. “We can’t risk it. I would hate myself too much if you ever had to experience —”
“Shhh.” I gave him a fiery kiss to shut him up. “We won’t, I promise.”
I slid off the barstool and let my hand wander into his pants. His cock already waited for me, rock hard, giving an eager jolt.
I leaned over and let the tip of my tongue run along his shaft.
“Oh shit!” He clenched one hand into the bar stool. With the other, he cupped my chin and gave a tug. “What are you doing?”
“Am I doing it wrong?” I pulled away from his hand and let my tongue twirl around his cockhead. Before he could dart for my chin again, I slung my lips around the ridge and took him in until he hit the back of my throat.
“Fuck!” He gave a thrust with his hips making me nearly choke. “I have no idea what this is, but if you’re doing it wrong, then I don’t wanna know what it feels like if you’re doing it right.”
I came back up and wet my lips, only to repeat the tongue twirl followed by his cock fucking my mouth. Guttural moans escaped him, his mouth gaped wide open in a mix of lust and disbelief. A tiny amount of pre-cum settled on my tongue, its salty taste making my pussy swell and my head go dizzy.
He grabbed my hair, leaning back and pushing my head down with each stab of his cock. “Autumn,” he warned, but I kept going. I licked and sucked him until all his movements stopped, except for the jerks coming from his cock, emptying himself inside my mouth.
He stared at me from wide eyes, his chest heaving as if he had done all the work. To make a silent statement, I swallowed his load like champagne, the slight sweetness sending tremors between my legs.
“But what about you?”
“Don’t worry about it.” I walked over to the sink, swished water through my teeth and splashed some in my face. “Maybe you can repay me while we watch a movie?”
He pulled his pants back up, giving me an innocent look. “I wouldn’t know how.”
