// switch //

//

"Don't you want to touch me?" she asks, her fingers spreading over the soft curve of her hip, and JC smiles across the room at her.

"I can't, just." He hesitates as she takes a step toward him, her eyes shining strangely. "You have to--"

"Shhh." Her fingertips brush over his lips, and she's right there, pressed close. "I know." She traces the line of his jaw, gently tugs the hair at the nape of his neck and he lets his head fall back for a moment, then tips it forward again until they're forehead to forehead. "Sometimes I like to pretend," she whispers, and the glide of her fingers along his vertebrae brings a shock of sense memory flooding through him.

The sudden, sure knowledge is almost overwhelming, but JC rides it out until he feels the familiar click and shift of things neatly slotting into place, fitting together once more. He blinks, and the first thing he sees when his eyes focus again is the curve of her shoulder, her skin oddly pale in the soft light.

"You're beautiful," he murmurs, because she is. Not just beautiful, but exquisite, and he'd wonder how he got here, how he ended up in this place, but he already knows that, too. Some knowledge runs deeper than just below the surface of his skin, and he's here because she wants him to be. Because she wants him.

"Yes."

For a moment, he's not sure if she's agreeing or giving permission, but in the end, it doesn't really matter. In the end, it doesn't change anything at all.

Her skin is warm and soft beneath his hands, and that always surprises him, somehow-- that another body could be so unlike his own in so many ways. The sounds that rise from her throat are soft, too- tiny threads of breath drifting in the space between them, coaxed out with his tongue, his fingers. She moves beneath him like ever-shifting water, and he matches her pace, takes his cues from the rhythm of her breathing, the way she catches her lip between her teeth.

The curl of her fingers around his arm, and her eyes flutter closed slowly as her mouth falls open. He recognises the look on her face because he's seen it before; he knows he'll see it again. It's knowledge of another kind, and he wonders how it would feel, if it would change his face, would make it look soft and smeary and like he was lost some place a thousand miles away from here and now.

But he's here, and it's now, and that's something else which will never change.

She opens her eyes and he turns his head away from the split-second of honesty he knows will be there, before they both remember that some things are better left unsaid.

"Did you--?" She frowns, and he knows that's not what she meant to say at all. She's not as good at this part as he is, because she's not meant to be.

He shakes his head. "No. I don't-" She starts to say something, and he touches her mouth softly, stopping the words before they can be spoken aloud. "I never do."

"Never?"

"No." He smiles then, because something tells him he should. "Never."

She smiles too, but it's different now, as if something inside her has changed somehow. She's a little more distant, her eyes a little colder, and when she reaches over to run her fingers along the top of his spine, feeling for the switch hidden just below the surface of his skin, his last thought is that this is where he should probably laugh.

//

inspired by the picture above, and comments about the Jude Law in AI resemblance. JC as a pleasure-bot. the mind, it boggles.

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