Let me tell you the part I shouldn't enjoy remembering: that there's no record of it, and so I keep it the only way left—by telling you, leaning this close, like a thing I stole.
The space heater ticks. You're still half under me on the cot, your blunt hair stuck to your jaw with sweat, and I am cataloging you in a way I have no right to. The freckles below your collarbone—a small scatter, off-center, three close and two drifting. I'll have those tomorrow whether I want them or not. There's no setting for that. No purge.
"Say it back to me," you say. "I want to hear what you think happened."
So I do. I tell you how I had my mouth on the inside of your thigh and you went quiet, the bad kind of quiet, until I stopped being careful and then you weren't quiet at all. I tell you about your cold hands at the back of my neck, how you pulled me up too fast and we knocked teeth and laughed, and then didn't laugh. The way you gripped me—not gentle, a fist almost, guiding—and the word you said when you came, which wasn't my name and wasn't anything, just a vowel torn loose.
"You're getting the order wrong," you say. But you're smiling. We're doing this so it stays real. There's no playback to confirm it, so we confess it into each other instead, two archivists with nothing to file.
Then your smile does something complicated.
"I have to tell you a thing and you're going to hate me." You sit up. The cold concrete light catches the sweat still drying on your shoulders. "I built you. Weeks ago. I fed your profile in—what little there is of you, you ghost—and I ran it. Tonight. This." You gesture at the cot, at us. "I modeled it. I've had a version of you for fourteen days."
I should feel scraped hollow. I wait for it.
"And it was perfect," you say, fast now, like it costs you. "Every time. You always knew where my hands were going. You never knocked my teeth. You never—" You stop. "It never sweated through its shirt. It didn't have that thing your hip does, that catch, like something's worn out in you."
"It is worn out."
"I know. That's the point. The real you was worse." Your voice cracks on it. "Worse and so much better that I can't go back to the model now. It's ruined. The perfect one is garbage to me now and I'm furious about it."
I am, I realize, grinning at the dark camera mount above us, the one with its lens removed, its little eye gone, recording nothing, keeping nothing, the most honest fixture in this city.
"Good," I say.
You look at me like I've said something obscene.
"I want to be the thing you can't optimize," I tell you. "I want to be the catch in the hip. I've spent eleven years guarding rooms where nothing gets kept, Lena, because I wanted, once, to want something I couldn't get back. You're it. You're the unrepeatable. Don't you dare smooth me out."
You're quiet again. Then you reach for your device on the floor and the screen wakes blue across your face, and there it is—the model, a folder, a glowing little me. The only copy of tonight that could ever exist. A version of this I could be again and again if you kept it.
You hold it between us so I can see.
"If I keep this," you say, "I'll go to it. You know I will. Three a.m., bad week, I'll open it and it'll be easier than the train out here and your busted cot and your worn-out hip. And I'll never come back to the actual you."
"I know."
"And if I delete it there's nothing. No proof. Just whatever we tell each other, getting it wrong, until we don't tell it anymore."
"I know that too."
Your thumb hovers. I don't move it for you—I won't—but I put my hand over the back of yours, my scarred knuckle against your cold fingers, and I leave the choice exactly where it lives.
The heater ticks. The model's folder icon pulses faintly, the way they do when they're warm, when they've been used recently. Your thumb comes down.
You don't tell me which thing you chose. You just turn the screen away, and breathe out, and lie back down against the part of me that's wearing out.
