Regulators, p.8
Regulators, page 8
I walked down the row of stalls, wondering which would be best. Nothing in the space looked very . . . clean. When I decided that all of them were likely as unclean as the next, I went into the first one after it struck me. I had a bit of trouble figuring out the latch, but after I managed it, I was glad I hadn’t asked Paige to help. It seemed very simple. After the fact. Sort of like angles in Ballistics after getting a different instructor.
Upon pulling down, I realized that the denim of the shorts had dug into my skin below my navel, leaving an almost itchy red line. I didn’t like it. But that was better than all the remnants of skin on the toilet seat. I hated toilet seats. Except for my own.
“This is disgusting,” I said, right before I heard the main restroom door open and someone else walk inside. Some random, unknown person.
It took me a while to do my business regardless of how badly I needed to, as I was not accustomed to using the bathroom so near to other people. I couldn’t believe it was considered a communal space. I could feel my eyes wanting to change themselves due to the skin, so I closed them and tried to pretend I was in the bathroom attached to my room. That was what I always did when I had to use another and deal with what I was currently dealing with, but at least those had all been intended for one person at a time. I supposed I did have performance anxiety.
After I had finished up—which took much longer than was probably acceptable—I vacated the small stall and went to where Paige was already waiting for me near the sinks.
“Where’s your purse?” she asked.
“In the vehicle.” I’d forgotten all about it which was likely due, at least in part, to my preoccupation with the leaf. It was mostly due to the fact that I wasn’t used to carrying it and could find no reason to do as much. Nothing in there was mine, and I had a difficult time trying to justify carrying it around for no reason.
“You have to remember it,” she whispered. “Someone can steal it.”
“Sorry,” I grumbled. Did people really take other people’s things, or what was certainly not theirs regardless? Why would anyone do that? They weren’t supposed to. Would they not get in trouble for that?
Once I’d finished washing my hands, several times that still didn’t seem good enough, I waited for the random woman to wash hers and leave before grabbing some paper towels, wetting them, and wiping off the backs of my legs.
“Are you afraid of germs?” Paige asked, watching me. “What you’re doing right now is one thing, but you pretty much scalded your hands. Four times.”
“Germs are fine,” I barely said. “I don’t like skin.”
“Can you like . . .” She trailed off for a moment, still watching. “Never mind. I’ll ask you later.”
Seb and the two boys were walking around the inside of the building together when Paige and I left the bathroom. Seb had a white bag in the crook of his arm, which made Paige laugh for some reason. More like giggle than laugh. He extended it in the air toward me when I got close.
I took it, saying, “Sorry,” for what felt like the millionth time today.
Something to my right caught my eye—a young man, possibly around my age or so, wearing a strange thing on his head.
“What is that?” I whispered extremely quietly to Paige. I doubted anyone but our company could hear me.
“Cowboy hat,” she whispered back.
I kept looking at him, just curious about it and why he was wearing it on his head. He looked over at me like he knew I was looking at him, looked away, looked back at me. And he smiled.
“Hi,” he said.
I opened my mouth, trying to figure out what to do. But he’d spoken to me, so it would be normal, I thought, to speak back to him.
“Hello,” I said back. “I like your . . . cowboy hat.”
He looked back at the aisle of unknown things in front of him and behind me, still smiling. “Do you?”
“Yes,” I answered. I’d just told him I did, so I didn’t know why he felt the need to ask me. That was weird, but I was glad I’d said the right thing. Used the right word if not said the right thing. I looked down at him, seeing him also wearing denim, but it fit him much differently than Garret and Brent’s fitted them. It was . . . tighter. I wondered what the point of it was. It was already uncomfortable enough.
Seb in his denim didn’t count. It looked too different for comparisons.
The random male must’ve seen me doing what I was doing because he asked, “Do you like my pants too?”
He talked kind of funny. I liked that as well. It was different.
I smiled until something touched my left hand. Then I jumped, just a little. When I looked, I saw Seb standing there nonchalantly with his left arm full of unknown things and his right hand . . .
What was he doing? Holding my hand with his hand? Why? Was that all right?
I didn’t see how it could possibly be all right. I didn’t require assistance with anything. Why wasn’t he letting go?
I glanced at the young man in the cowboy hat, who glanced at me, up at Seb, then pursed his lips and looked forward. He grabbed something directly in front of him and walked away. What had he been waiting for if what he’d been looking for was right in front of his face? Surely he hadn’t missed it.
I would’ve asked Seb what he was doing, but he was acting so strangely that I just attributed whatever he was doing to something normal that I clearly didn’t know about. So I went along with what he was doing despite the confusion and worrying about how much and what sort of trouble I could get in for it. I let him pull me away by my hand in the direction of a counter, behind the young man in the cowboy hat. I really did like the hat, and I really did like his pants for some reason.
Especially from the back.
No. I realized I didn’t like the pants from the back.
I supposed I must’ve been staring and that staring was an inappropriate thing to do because Seb shook my hand in his a little, which made me look up at him. I assumed if he wanted me to drop his hand, he would’ve dropped mine. So I stopped staring at the pants in front of me and watched a young man and woman entering the building together. They were also attached at the hands, for some reason. She had one hand in his and the other hand on his arm that was holding her hand.
I looked far up at Seb’s face, watching him watch the two of them walk inside. He looked down at me. I smiled, his eyes narrowed, and I put my right hand on his right arm like the female was doing to the person she was walking in with.
Holy sh–
My thoughts were interrupted by Paige laughing quietly behind me. I glanced over my shoulder at her, smiling hugely at getting to do what I’d asked to do earlier that he’d told me I wouldn’t. When I looked back up at Seb, he was smiling a little, shaking his head like he so often seemed to. I thought, possibly, that the smile was forced, but I didn’t really care. People’s faces always looked nicer when they were smiling, and it seemed Gens were no exception. A little nicer wouldn’t hurt them any, when you had to be around them. I wouldn’t have thought as much before I’d seen it.
He glanced down at me to say, “Both eyes.”
My smile grew a little wider.
The young man in the cowboy hat looked back at me for the briefest moment before taking what he’d picked up from the shelf off the counter and leaving the store. He stuck an unknown, round thing in his back pocket, for some reason. I had no idea what it was, but . . . I didn’t know what most of the things inside the space were. We were next, though I didn’t really know for what.
Seb finally dropped my hand, putting all the things in his left arm onto the counter neatly. I watched that, and I watched the female behind the counter scanning the items and looking at Seb between scans. It was . . . interesting, the way she was looking at him. She met gazes with me a few times, but she kept looking back to him.
It was only when Seb’s arm wrapped around me that she took one last hard look and finished what she was doing with the scanning.
Strange.
It was so strange, both the physical contact and the reactions to it. His hand rubbed on my right arm for a moment before he removed it entirely, reached into his back pocket and pulled the . . . wallet from it. I watched as he opened it, removed a plastic thing from the inside and handed it to the female. She did something with it and a machine spit out a piece of paper that he wrote something on with . . . something.
When she handed him the bags of things he’d put down on the counter, he took them with his left hand and grabbed my left with his right again. I spared one last look for the female behind the counter who watched us for a moment before tending to the next person waiting to be tended to.
I would’ve thought it would be more difficult to keep up with a Gen walking, but it really wasn’t. I supposed he was walking slowly due to being attached at the hands to me. He released my hand when we got near the vehicle, opened the door for me without a word, and then walked to his own side.
Strange. Obviously I’d figured out the door and could’ve gotten it on my own.
It was only when we were all inside the vehicle, with our seatbelts on and my leaf returned to my hand, that Seb said, “There was your first social lesson.”
“That people hold hands?” Garret asked. “What’s the purpose of that?”
“People enjoy touching each other,” Seb said, starting the car and pulling away. “I know they teach you that physical contact and closeness is wrong, but it’s not out here. People touch other people all the time.”
“For what reason?” Brent asked.
“Because they enjoy it,” Seb replied. “And because it can be like . . . staking a claim. Did you notice the reactions?”
Brent said, “The guy with the weird thing on his head stopped talking to Jaycee.”
“And the girl behind the counter?” Seb asked. “Did anyone notice?”
“I did,” I said quietly.
“Anyone other than you,” Seb said.
Why did I not count?
“I couldn’t see through you,” Garret told him. “You’re like . . . a wall.”
“She stopped looking at Sebastian,” Paige said. “She stopped looking at him just like the guy in the cowboy hat stopped talking to and looking so much at Jaycee.”
Garret asked, “What’s a cowboy hat?”
“But . . . why?” Brent asked. Nobody answered Garret’s question. “What does looking have anything to do with anything, and what does two people touching each other mean?”
“It’s the equivalent of verbally telling someone to back off,” Paige said. “It’s like looking into someone’s eyes and saying, I own this person, you have no chance. We’ve been doing it since the dawn of mankind.”
“No chance for what?” Brent asked in confusion.
Doing it since the dawn of mankind. How strange.
“What people want from people of the opposite sex,” Seb answered.
“I didn’t say it this time!” Garret nearly shouted. “Maybe we should get pissed off at you for bringing it up again.”
Paige sighed. “Sex the action and sex as in people are two totally different things. To males, females are the opposite sex. To females, males are the opposite sex. Gender. The action is something completely different.”
“But related,” I said quietly. Would it have to be?
“Something like that,” Paige said.
I was staring at the side of Seb’s face when I said, “So you basically told that person that you . . . owned me, and he understood?” Could all people understand silent queues? Was it that ingrained into people, because they’d been doing it since the dawn of mankind? Or was it something you were taught out here?
“And he told the girl behind the counter that you owned him when he put his arm around you,” Paige offered from behind me.
“Just to teach a relatively easy lesson.” It wasn’t long after that at all when the vehicle stopped moving again and Seb said, “Arms.”
All right arms went out to him.
I asked, “Why did you do that? Just to teach us the lesson?”
Seb didn’t respond to that.
Paige said, “I’m guessing that’s an explanation for choosing which half of siblings to put yourself into when the other would’ve made more sense. Physically. Am I right?”
Seb sighed.
“Can I see what it’s like?” Brent asked. “Holding hands. I just want to see if it’s as enjoyable as you all said it could be for people.”
“You want to hold my hand?” Paige asked him.
“Yeah, but . . .” He didn’t say anything else.
“But what?”
“Will we get in trouble?”
Everyone looked to Seb.
His brow furrowed as he glanced around. “What sort of trouble are you worried about getting into for holding hands?”
None of us said anything.
He focused in on me. “Why didn’t you pull yours away if you thought it was something you might get in trouble for?”
I said, “Because you took my hand, so I thought it was all right. Adapting to a situation I was put in.”
A few seconds passed before he asked, “What’s with wanting to touch my arm?”
I shrugged. “It’s interesting.”
“My arms.”
I nodded even though I wasn’t entirely sure it had been a question.
A few more seconds passed before he said, “No, you won’t get in trouble for holding hands. I’ll inform you if that changes, but people hold hands.”
Garret said, “Well, I want to do it too.”
I looked behind me for a moment, seeing Paige extending her hands to the two boys, who took them willingly. As Seb was clicking my com back in place and I was watching the three of them, I thought about it. I’d always been owned by many people. Being owned in the way they were talking about it now didn’t seem so bad in comparison to the way I actually was owned. It didn’t seem like it, at least. Holding hands was definitely more pleasant.
I met gazes with Seb and felt my mouth moving though I hadn’t given it permission to. “I liked touching your arm.”
He blinked at me a few times in what seemed to be confusion. “Why is that?”
I didn’t have an immediate answer and the longer I waited to respond, the more his eyebrows furrowed downward.
“Probably because her body wasn’t tempted to change into you,” Paige said from behind me. “She doesn’t like skin. I’m guessing that’s why. She must be in some way able to read some amount of genetic structure with contact. I’m thinking it’s highly unpleasant for her and that men’s genetic structure must not bother her due to an incompatibility with her ability.”
Seb raised an eyebrow at me. “Is that it?”
I looked in front of myself, frowning, and very quietly said, “Something like that.”
“Is that it, or is that not it?” Seb pressed.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
I didn’t know if Paige was trying to save me or just couldn’t help herself when she said, “I like holding hands. There’s something about the heat of it. This really might not be so bad after all.”
I looked over at Seb, finding him with both hands over his face.
“Both the females,” he said under his breath. “I should’ve known.”
“What does that mean?” Garret asked.
“It’s unfortunate, but you just might figure that out along the way.” Seb removed his hands from his face and the car started moving again shortly after.
I had to agree with Paige. It was partially the skin thing she’d mentioned, but . . . there really was something about the heat of it. Or just the feel of it. I didn’t know, but I found it very interesting, touching people on their skin without having to.
Chapter 07
Something
“Stop the car!” I almost shouted quite a bit later.
Seb sighed. “Give me a minute to find somewhere suitable.”
“I don’t care about suitable!” I exclaimed. “Stop the car!”
“It’s an SUV,” Paige said again.
I didn’t even care. Not what it was or that Paige wanted to correct me and had apparently given up on it with Seb, which meant she actually could and would let things go. I did not care at all. About any of it.
“Don’t act like an idiot on the side of the interstate,” Seb warned me as the vehicle slowed then stopped. “This isn’t like where we stopped before.”
I was fumbling around with the seatbelt buckle when he grabbed my right arm and unlatched the com.
“Don’t you want to see this?” I asked Paige in disbelief while Seb had me still enough to remove the metal from my wrist. Would she seriously rather . . .
Her eyes were wide and slightly glazed, like she’d been sleeping. I supposed she’d forgotten to put her sunglasses back on. Me shouting must’ve woken her, and even while incoherent, she could still correct someone when they were wrong. I believed she hadn’t known what she was doing or why it hadn’t mattered. Didn’t matter.
“Oh my god.” She sort of breathed the words, and I could tell . . .
She knew it didn’t matter.
“What is it?” Brent leaned over Paige to see out the windshield. His eyes widened. “What is it?”
“A sunset,” Paige answered. “Wake up, Garret!” She smacked him on the leg.
“Huh?” came from immediately behind me.
Seb sighed again.
“What is that?” Garret asked.
“A sunset,” Brent replied.
“Arms,” Seb said.
“Do people look at this?” I asked Seb while he was unlocking everyone’s coms. “For fun?”
“Sometimes.”
I opened the door, thinking his answer made us getting out of the vehicle feasible enough. Staying in would’ve—
“Don’t get hit by a car!” Seb warned as I was stepping out, which halted me.
Garret was out almost as quickly as I was, and he grabbed my right hand almost immediately, like it was a normal thing to do and was completely all right. Maybe it was.
