LITMIR.BIZ

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guard down, or lingered too long, late at night, in my deepest thoughts, my entire body came alive like someone had dunked me in liquid current, every nerve tingling and wanting.

      Just not for any of these would-be playmates.

      The Merge. The stupid, unwanted, unasked for Merge, and Benjamin Venec’s own innate, dark-eyed appeal. Damn it, thrice.

      I knew it was probably a lost cause, but Joan was cute as hell, and I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. Maybe getting to know her over a few drinks….

      “You want to join us?” I asked, turning to indicate my for-now demure coworkers. A look of disappointment touched Joan’s face: no, she really didn’t. She wanted me to go with her, somewhere else, right now.

      Some of the shiny rubbed off at that. Even if I’d been at loose ends and hot to trot, a quick hit wasn’t my thing. I’m a bit of a hedonist, yeah, but I liked to know the person I was with, more than just a name and a favorite drink. So with a regretful smile, and not really any regrets, I let that fish slip back into the sea and went back to my team.

      “You feeling all right, dandelion?” Nick almost, almost managed to sound like he was seriously concerned for my well-being.

      “Yeah, I’m fine.” I twisted on a grin. “She was…too young for me.”

      “Young.” Nifty sounded like he wanted to challenge me on that—and rightfully so, because she clearly had been well above the age of consent, but he didn’t. That, in a way, was worse than if he had ragged on me. It was either pity or worry, neither of which I could deal with right now, even if I had anything to tell them.

      If I let them, the team would ply me with drinks and do their best to console me on whatever they thought was wrong, distract me with bad jokes or horrible stories, maybe try to fix me up with someone they knew who would be perfect…and normally I’d let them, accepting their own odd ways of showing they cared. But suddenly, my skin was too raw, my nerves too exposed, and I just needed to be by myself.

      “Okay, I’m out,” I said, finishing my drink. “This little puppy is going home. Alone. I’ll see y’all tomorrow.” I grabbed my bag, paid out enough to cover my drinks, and waved goodbye before anyone could get a wiseass crack in about me being the first to leave. Okay, it was unusual but it wasn’t totally unheard-of.

      Not recently, anyway.

      I worked with trained investigators, each and everyone of them hired because they were obsessively curious, and incapable of walking away from a puzzle. I would lay odds they were playing paper-rock-scissors even now, to determine who got to ask me what was going on, tomorrow. And once they started digging, they weren’t going to let up. Not them.

      Great.

      I walked out into the night with the beginnings of a killer headache under my scalp, and a roil in my stomach that had nothing to do with the empanadas I’d eaten.

      The Merge was starting to interfere, not with my ability to do the job, but my coworkers’. They were going to be focusing on the mystery of me, and maybe not on the work at hand. Of all the problems I thought this might cause, that hadn’t been one I’d considered.

      “So what now, Bonita?”

      The great thing about New York City—you can carry on an entire conversation with yourself, and even without an earpiece nobody gives you a second look. The usual chaos of Port Authority in the evening was weirdly soothing to get caught up in. If you know how to walk with the flow, you can get lost in the swirl of people, like being a single grain in a sandstorm, carried around and dropped off where you needed to be by some weird magic. All you had to do was not consciously think about what you were doing or where you were going, and let the universe carry you there.

      I caught the A train uptown. Spring is the best time to ride the subway: everyone’s dropped off the heavy coats that overstuffed trains during the winter, and the summer’s sweat hasn’t begun yet. Considering how full the train was, that was a blessing. Bad enough some hip-hop wannabe teenager tried to hold the door for his pack of slower-moving friends, causing the conductor to bawl something incomprehensible until they were all inside and he let the door go.

      On another day I might have been tempted to send a spark from the metal door into his hand, for being a jerk, but my focus was all inward, right then.

      Fact one: the thing I’d worried about was here, the Merge was impacting work. That it wasn’t happening exactly how I’d feared didn’t change the fact. So, one excuse for avoiding it, blown out of the water. Or, at least, taking on water and sinking fast.

      Fact two: my coworkers were right; this reluctance to plunge into new adventures with someone attractive and attracted was…very much not like me.

      Or, at least, not like me-who-was.

      J had always claimed that there would come a day when I’d settle down with, as he resignedly put it, “a nice little household.” Even he, who’d known me since I was eight, couldn’t imagine me being happy with just one person, either male or female. I had always liked—I still did like—variety.

      And it wasn’t that my sex drive was shut off entirely. Pietr might not set off sparks but it had never been about that; we used each other for mutual comfort and release, full knowledge of what it was, and I…

      I…

      By the time my train had dumped me out at my stop, and I’d climbed the stairs to street level, the stutter in my brain and the rawness of my nerves had finally resolved itself into fact number three.

      I felt guilty.

      I felt guilty because I wasn’t cheating on a guy I wasn’t in a relationship with, who knew I was having sex with someone else and had agreed with me that he had no right or cause to say anything other than “don’t let it get tangled in the job.” And we hadn’t.

      But the stress of it all—and the guilt—was starting to bleed over into my relationship with Pietr, too. The fact that he understood, even if he didn’t understand all of it, just made me feel worse. I liked Pietr. A lot. He was easy to be with, he understood me, and didn’t ask for anything I couldn’t give.

      Not even explanations.

      “Damn it.”

      That did get me a look from the woman coming down the stairs, more mild curiosity than anything else. I ducked my head and went back to thinking quietly.

      J was right. I was changing. And I resented, not the fact of change—that would be like resenting breathing, or rain: you needed those things for life to go on, and not changing in the face of new experiences and knowledge was just dumb and counterproductive. But I resented the hell out of the fact that this had been shoved on me, without so much as a by-your-leave or instruction booklet, and was demanding change without, as far as I could see, giving a damn thing back in return.

      “Gonna have a lot of cold showers until you get this thing licked,” I said to myself as I unlocked the front door of my building and dragged myself inside. “And, okay, licked may not be the best word to use, in context…”

      As always, just being inside my apartment soothed me. The space itself wasn’t much, and the building was drafty, but inside… Someone else might find the vibrant burgundy-and-pale-gold walls too exotic, the mix of antiques and thrift store finds too distracting, but to me, it said “home.”

      I pulled off my boots and dropped them on the parquet floor, wincing at the sound. It was still early, but my downstairs neighbors were always on my case about every pinprick of noise.

      Yeah, the decor was me, but the building…not so much.

      I dropped my bag on the nearest sofa, and walked across the open space into the kitchen alcove. It was a decent-size studio, as things went, and got gorgeous sunlight, the few times I was home during daylight hours. The glasswork mosaic that hung on the wall where most people would put a flat-screen TV glittered when I turned on a lamp, a pale reflection of what it did during the day, and I noticed with dismay that a few of the

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