Buying Time

What was even more odd, she had begun showing signs of jealousy. *Jealousy*. She seemed to resent that, as an SM employee, my body was accessible to any stranger who could pay for it. Anyone with $100 to their name was entitled to stick their cock up my ass. *My ass*. The ass she was starting to get proprietary feelings toward.

When I last time saw her — I no longer thought of it as being therapied and readjusted — I had been sure she’d been about to tell me something. When I left, there was extra warmth in the goodbye kiss she gave me, and there was something shiny in her eye that might just have been a tear. Now what could that have been all about?

“Armin, I don’t know how… how to say this.”

“Teeya, I think I know… ”

“These feeling I’ve been having, I can’t… no, I don’t want to… I have to…

“I care, Armin. I care for you more than I care for my own life. From the first time I saw your face, I somehow knew… knew that you were my destiny.

“I’m betraying everything I once valued. My loyalty to my chosen profession, the oath I gave to SM and their bloody-minded Directorate, my friends and colleagues, my clan group… everything. I… I… let me say it. I love… I love you, Armin. I love you more than myself, more than life itself. Because by telling you this I’m killing … killing myself, committing professional suicide, condemning myself to death or worse. SM will destroy me for this. But I love. I love. You. I love you!”

I took her in my arms and we cried together, and our tears mingled.

And that put us on the road leading to damnation and ruin — or to salvation.

“Our civilization is doomed, you know,” she told me.

“Doomed has an ominous ring to it, Teeya.”

“Doomed. It’s been years since you could breath the outside air without a filter, the oceans are poisoned, the only way to grow crops is under glass in a culture of artificial nutrients, and epidemics of antiexinic-resistant strains of bacteria kill hundreds of thousands every day. It’s only a matter of time before the entire social structure collapses. And there isn’t much time.”