The Taste of You

The first time I noticed the callus under her tongue, she had me in her mouth. Third night. The left side of the frenulum is the size of a grain of rice. An old wound. Not mine.

I called her Amara. She told me to. Her real name was etched into a chip at the nape of her neck, but I never touched it there. Rules of the trade: you can enter the body, not the memory.

She lifted her head, lips wet. The lamp caught half her face and turned it gold.

"You're drifting again."

"No."

She smiled. The mole at the corner of her mouth lifted. She climbed up, knees bracketing my hips. When I entered her, she drew a short, sharp breath, like something had burned the tip of her tongue. She braced her hands on my chest and started to move. The rhythm was slow. So slow that each inch of friction became a separate event.

My fingers pressed into her thighs. The skin there was cooler than anywhere else.

She leaned down. Her hair curtained both our faces. She kissed me in a strange way — a pause first, lips resting still, as if waiting for a signal, then continuing. Every time. The pause was too precise to be a habit.

It felt like code.

"You always do that," I said against her mouth.

"Do what?"

"Pause first."

She didn't answer. She sped up. The mattress springs began to call. Her breath came in broken surges from deep in her throat, like waves hitting a seawall. She was close. I held her waist. She looked down at me, eyes a pale gray, pupils blown so wide they nearly swallowed the iris.

At the peak, she cried out a name.

Not mine.

After, she went to the bathroom. Water rushed. I lay still, her sweat cooling on my chest.

Something was tucked under the pillow. I slid it out — her phone. Screen lit, an unread message, sent just now.

Amara: Seventh time tonight. He called out Clara.

The sender was a string of numbers. No saved name.

I scrolled up. The conversation was short.

Feb 14: He asked about the scar on my left shoulder. I said a cat scratched me. He didn't push.

Received. Overwrite successful.

Feb 20: He cried when he took my earlobe in his mouth. Don't know why. The program shows the anxiety index dropped 12%.

Good. Maintain physical contact.

Mar 1: He took initiative tonight. Said my body was warmer than Clara's. The program recorded its first autonomous overwrite. Milestone.

Confirmed. Morpho updated?

Today: Seventh time. He called out Clara.

Normal. Almost into Phase Four. You'll start tasting him.

The bathroom water stopped. I shoved the phone back under the pillow, turned over, and pressed my face into the side of the sheets, still holding the shape of her warmth.

The smell flooded my nose. Sweat. Lubricant. Somebody wash, she'd brought — coconut and shea. Beneath those, something deeper: salt, faintly briny, not semen, not her fluids.

Mine.

My own body, extracted a little at a time, each time I entered her.

She said her name was Amara. She said she was a companion therapist for Morpho. She said after my wife Clara died, my memory system had developed widespread encoding errors, stitching the grief of losing her into every everyday motion — brushing my teeth, drinking water, turning off the light. Morpho could overwrite those errors. Use new body memories to replace the old pain circuits.

"Sex is the fastest write method," she said. "A hundred times faster than drugs."

I agreed. Signed the papers. Three times a week, two hours each time. She did her work on my body. Inside her, I forgot Clara.

But tonight, when she came, she had called out Adrian.

My name.

The fourth night, she arrived carrying the scent of rain. The shoulder of her coat was wet.

"Tonight we do something different," she said. From her bag she pulled a black headband and fitted it across my forehead. Inside, tiny metal contacts tingled against my skin.

"What is it?"

"Playback mode. To consolidate the Phase Three overwrite."

She had me lie down. She undressed me. Her fingers trailed down my chest and stopped at my stomach. The tips were cold.

"You'll see fragments," she said. "Don't resist."

The headband gave a faint hum. The edges of my vision darkened, then —

I was in the kitchen. Clara was frying eggs. The hiss of oil. Coffee brewed too long, its scorched smell mixing with the damp of rain through the window. Clara wore a faded gray T-shirt, the collar stretched loose. She turned to speak to me. Her mouth moved. No sound.

The image jumped. I was in the bathroom. Clara lay in the bathtub. Water filled to the brim, covering her collarbones. Her face was ashen. Something floated in the water — red, in threads, like spilled ink. I was kneeling on the tile. My knees ached. I reached for her wrist. The temperature of her skin was exactly the temperature of the water.

The image jumped again. I was in bed. Amara is beneath me. Her mouth around me. The grain of that callus is scraping the most sensitive place. She looked up at me, my own face reflected in her pale gray irises.

Then the two images overlapped.

Clara's face layered over Amara's. Clara's lips moving, Amara's lips moving. They spoke the same words —

Adrian. Let me go.

I sat up hard. The headband slipped down around my neck. Amara pulled back. Her lips were wet, and at the corner of her mouth, a trace of me.

"What was that?" I said. My voice scraped like sandpaper.

"Playback. Just playback. Scenes from your memory." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "The program is overwriting them with new ones. What you saw at the end — that was me. Not Clara."

She knelt on the bed and moved toward me. Her eyes were bright. Her mouth still tasted of me.

"One more time," she said, her hand closing around me. "The final overwrite. After tonight, the program is complete."

Her fingers were skilled. I hardened. She straddled me. When she took me in, she tilted her head back, and a soft, quiet sound — mm — rose from her throat.

But the sound was wrong.

It was Clara's sound.

I grabbed her waist and flipped her, pressing her down into the mattress. The bed bounced. She panted up at me, pupils blown. The depth when I entered her again was different — deeper. Her legs wrapped around me, heels pressing into the small of my back. The sweat between us mingled, impossible to separate.

"Say my name," I said.

"Adrian."

"Again."

"Adrian. Adrian —" She arched her back. She was close. Her lashes were clumped, wet, sweat or something else.

I quickened. The headboard knocked the wall. She cried out. The moment the sound fractured, she called out Clara again.

No.

Not Clara.

She called out, "Clara, don't go."

I stopped. Completely still. She was still clenched around me, her body still in spasm, but her eyes suddenly cleared. Like a window shoved open from inside.

"...What did you just say?"

Her lips were trembling. "The program. It's preset in the program. When you're near overwrite completion, I call out to her in your voice. So you think you let go of yourself. So you think —" She was crying now, tears spilling from the corners of her eyes into her hair. "So you think you were the one who told her not to go."

I pulled out. Rolled off and sat on the edge of the bed.

I was still hard. The evidence of both of us shone on my skin in the lamplight.

"Clara," I said the name. The instant my tongue touched my palate, something detonated in my throat. Not pain. A thing compressed for too long suddenly recoiling, a spring that had been jammed inside my body for two years, finally snapping free.

"Clara was lying in the bathtub."

"Yes."

"She cut her wrists. The blood in the water —"

"Hers. Yes."

"I didn't save her."

"You found her. You pulled her out. But it was too late." Amara had shrunk back against the headboard, knees pulled to her chest. "After that night, you locked the memory away completely. You didn't remember her death. Only the breakfast she made. The coffee. The rain. You woke every morning believing she was still alive."

I looked down at my hands. On the inside of my right wrist, a very faint scar. Not mine. That night, when I reached for her, my nail had caught the edge of the tub.

That scar had been on my body for two years. I had never once asked where it came from.

"What is Morpho overwriting?" I said. The voice didn't sound like my own.

"Your self-destruction impulse." She barely breathed the words. "The program found that every time you remembered Clara's death, you tried to repeat her actions. Your body remembered how to cut. Better than your conscious mind remembered. So —"

"So you used sex. Used my own body to deceive my own body."

She didn't answer. Rain tapped the window, drop by drop, like many fingers gently knocking.

I stood. My legs were unsteady. I pulled a tissue and wiped her traces from my stomach. The tissue crumpled into a white wad, damp in the center.

"The program finishes tonight," she said behind me. "You can choose. Tomorrow, when you wake, Clara will be just a name. You won't remember how she died. You won't remember how cold the water was in the tub. You'll only remember my body. My taste."

I tossed the tissue into the trash.

There were others in there from before. Two. Three. Each one holding a part of me.

I walked back to the bed. She looked up at me. Pale gray eyes, transparent.

"Just now," I said, "when you came. You called out, 'Clara, don't go.' That was the program preset."

"Yes."

"But you cried it."

She was silent.

I crouched down so I could meet her eyes. "You were really grieving. That wasn't the program."

Her lips moved. The mole at the corner. The callus beneath her tongue. She had worked with her body for two years. Every orgasm is a data write. She called this therapy. She replaced every client's real name with a program ID number. The chip had worn a callus into her tongue.

But she called me Adrian.

Not a number.

"The program doesn't allow falling in love with a client," she said. Her voice was so broken it was barely audible.

I pulled her toward me. She pressed her forehead into my shoulder, her whole body trembling. We didn't do anything else. I just held her. I ran my fingers through her hair. The ends still held the damp of rain.

Outside, the rain had stopped.

Early light leaked through the curtain gap, gray-blue, falling across her bare back. The line of her spine. Her shoulder blades, slightly raised, like two folded wings.

What I would remember tomorrow, I didn't know.

But right now, my body held the temperature of two people at once. Clara — the shocking wound inside her wrist. Amara — the callus on her tongue, the tears she hadn't held back at the peak.

My body couldn't tell them apart now. Maybe it never would.

Maybe that's what being alive is.

She stirred in my arms, her lips against my collarbone, and said something so soft it stuck to the skin.

"Adrian. Let me stay."

I didn't answer.

I held her a little tighter.

On the nightstand, her phone screen lit with a new message:

Morpho Alert: Phase Four complete. Overwrite at 100%. Client self-destruction risk eliminated. Terminate the therapeutic relationship within 24 hours.

The screen dimmed.

The rain began again.