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Years ago there was an accident.
It cost Izzy her left arm and most of both of her legs and even part of her fucking skull. She’s almost thankful she can’t remember the pain. Shock kept her blissfully numb and helplessly alive until help found her, and then she can’t remember the rest.
The skin on her face is mottled around the metal implanted to act as the base for the cybernetic eye to replace her old one. Wires run through her muscles now in place of sinew and nerve endings. Titanium replaced her bones. She has to mix special cooling fluid into her blood twice a month so she doesn’t overheat from just walking down the street, the soles of her shoes the only thing keeping her metal feet from clank-clank-clanking against the sidewalk.
There was pain at first, sure. Pain from where her once-soft skin was yet to scar from the new metal and silicone part rubbing against it with any movement. Phantom pain in her toes, of all things, kept her awake at night for weeks. But eventually, it all settled into nothingness, as life is wont to do. She can’t feel anything in her replacement limbs. It’s just all numbness and the odd pressure of walking on legs that fell asleep hours ago. She gets around fine, now. Time passes and one doesn’t have any choice but to keep on living as best as they can. So Izzy got used to her heavy, new, steel and wire body and kept living.
She finds herself in a bar at the edges of a port town settled on an asteroid somewhere off a few lightyears west of Mars. She can see the red planet winking down at her through the window, glittery and a short cryosleep away just outside of the cage of the artificial gravity field. She’d been born there just over fifty years ago, back before cryosleep and you had to age to travel planet to planet.
Now, she sits here and sips at a watery drink that she can’t taste. The artificial parts of her stomach keep her from getting anywhere near drunk, no matter how hard she tries. Good thing; cheap tequila goes down like water and whatever they did to her organs cured her lactose intolerance. Bad thing; once anything passed through her lips she had to rely on her sensors to tell her she had to go to the bathroom, flashing messages through her vision as required.
The music the bar is playing is old. Staticky and tinny through the speakers hanging from the corners. People mill around, shooting digital darts with flicks of their fingers at the targets posted every few feet along the back wall of the bar. Some folks lean on old fashioned, wooden pool cues, knocking old, numbered, colorful balls made of cracked resin around a green felt table. They laugh and they drink to get drunk and they all ignore Izzy as she hunches over the bar top with her elbows on the advertisement laden glass.
The need to be social is what brought her out today. Her warning messages had been flashing in the corner of her vision for weeks now, prompting You are lonely with a fucking, yellow frowny face. Social Interaction Recommended. Go to a park or join a knitting club! Every morning she rolled her eyes and flicked the notification away, but every morning it was always there waiting on the inside of her eyelids. She couldn’t figure out how to change the social settings and she wasn’t going to a mechanic to solve the issue of just being fucking lonely.
So here she is. As she ordered a drink, the notification appeared just long enough for her to see a green check mark materialize to the right, fade into another yellow smiley face and then disappear until the next time it was pinged by whatever chemical levels in her brain prompted it to appear again.
She supposes there's still a shred of humanity left somewhere in her, because despite not speaking to anyone aside from the robotic barkeep and despite seeing the plain as day winces when anyone got a proper look at the black metal spreading across her face like a disease, she feels better for being here. She likes the sound of the laughter and the half-hearted arguments about who's winning what or who’s turn it is to cough up the credits for the next request on the Jukebox app.
As if on cue, the song changes to something a little more modern and the other patrons erupt into cheers, breaking off to dance to the slow rhythm of the song. She’s just about to toss the rest of her drink back and go home, satisfied with her shitty attempt at social interaction when a sultry voice talks over the music, right against the shell of her artificial ear.
Her receptor isn’t expecting it and it fizzles a bit like a bad connection on an ancient landline phone before settling into the cadence of the voice. “-here before. Would’ve noticed.”
“What?” Izzy leans in, eyes still down on the ads rolling through the screen behind the glass in the bartop.
“Never seen you around here before.” the speaker repeats, close enough for her breath to flutter through the hair on the back of Izzy’s neck. It’s a female voice, tinged with years of smoking and talking over music in loud bars She feels the odd tickling of it standing on edge and fights off a shiver. “I would’ve noticed.”
“I’ve never been here before.” Izzy says. It’s the truth. “Just leaving, actually.”
“Well, don’t let me run you off, sugar.” Izzy can hear the smile on her voice and only looks up at her when she leans against the bartop on her elbows, reclined with her feet crossed in front of her, like she owns the place.
She’s tall. Six feet at least with her height boosted by the soles of her steel-toed work boots. She’s wearing grease-stained coveralls with the arms tied into a lazy knot low on her hips. Her tank top is cropped and white and so thin that Izzy can perfectly see the outline of dusky niplles peaking against the chill of the air conditioned air. Izzy must have been staring and the woman must have noticed because her Carribean blue eyes sparkle as her mouth crinkles into a smirk before wrapping around the mouth of a bottle of beer held loose in her hand. Her tawny blonde hair is caught in an old-fashioned navy blue and paisley printed bandana tied at the base of her neck.
“Eyes up here, princess.” she teases after she swallows. Izzy’s eyes snap back up to her face. It didn’t help that her nipples are right at eye level.
Information scrolls along the top of Izzy’s vision as her facial recognition software picks up the stranger’s face. Joanna Lynn Rackham. A wrap sheet two miles long starting from when she tried to knock over a pawn shop at 14 and got picked up by a juvenile detention center. Now, she’s employed at a mechanic shop a few blocks over. Izzy was familiar with it and its reputation as a chop show, trading under the table android parts from Earth to Mars.
“Don’t believe what that thing’s reading out to you, baby. Not even my name. Call me Jack.” she reaches her palm out and Izzy places hers into it with a firm shake.
“‘M Izzy.” she answers.
“Izzy.” Jack rolls the name around on her tongue like a piece of candy. She smiles, and the warmth of it settles into Izzy’s bones like morning dew on Earth. “I like that. What's it short for?”
“Dunno. Guess it’s just where I stopped growing.”
Jack snorts so hard that beer comes out of her nose.
It lifts Izzy’s mouth into the first genuine smile she can remember having in a long, long time. Jack sputters and coughs, wiping her nose and chin off on the back of her wrist, still laughing at Izzy’s stupid joke.
Once she’s settled back on the bar, shaking her head with another smile as she takes another sip of beer Izzy asks. “What do you do, Jack?”
“What's it tell you?” Jack nods, eyes passing over Izzy’s artificial eye for just a moment, skating over the shining black X against the matte black of her implant that makes her a walking advertisement for the company.
“Mechanic.” Izzy answers.
“Almost.” Jack shrugs. “We’re supposed to work on cars if the business license has anything to say about it but-”
“Nobody drives anymore.” Izzy speaks at the same time Jack does and the two of them share a laugh. Jack clinks the bottom of her beer against Izzy’s glass. Warnings that were flashing in the corner of her vision about her blood pressure and elevated heart rate drop off one by one as she relaxes into Jack’s company.
“It’s all those stupid fucking scooters! I’d rather be caught dead than floating on one of those down Second and Main.” Jack says.
“Yeah.” Izzy agrees. She doesn’t mention that she’d rented a scooter that's parked outside right now to get here tonight.
“What do you do?” Jack turns around to lean forward on the bartop.
“Odd jobs.” Izzy traces a silicon fingertip along the rim of her glass. “When I can get them.” Nobody wants to hire cyborgs. Something about whatever political party is in power now campaigning about giving humans the human jobs since robots are taking over everything else. At the thought of it, another warning flashes across Izzy’s vision, a really concerned smiley face asking her to take a few deep breaths. She blinks it away as soon as it flashes.
“Know what you mean.” Jack nods. “Like I said, nobody drives anymore.”
The two of them sit for a moment, silence stretching between them as one song fades into the next, another slow ballad for the couples intertwined as they sway around the bar.
Finally, Jack speaks. Izzy gets the feeling that she doesn’t like staying quiet for long. “Do you mind if I ask what happened?”
She means the accident. Izzy knows. It’s the first thing everyone asks. Jack had just had the dignity to flirt with her a bit before she sated her own sick curiousity.
"Did it on purpose.” Izzy lets her mouth lift into another, small smile before looking sideways at Jack. She doesn’t seem satisfied with that answer. “Tragic rental scooter accident. Surprised you didn’t see it on the news. Big explosion, mass casualties.”
“Alright.” Jack shrugs again, taking another pull from her beer. “I get it. You don’t want to talk about it.”
Izzy lifts her glass in a salute, tilting her head back to knock the rest of the contents to the back of her throat, crunching on the half melted remains of an ice cube.
“Let me get you another one of those.” Jack says.
Before Izzy can stop her, Jack is waving down the bar bot and placing an order. “Another one of these.” she wiggles the dregs at the bottom of her beer bottle. “And another-”
“Whiskey and cola.” Izzy says. “Thanks.”
“No problemo.” Jack’s grin is a quick flash of white. The order flashes on the bot’s facial screen and Jack waves the chip on the heel of her hand over the sensor in the bot’s palm with a happy chime. It rolls away to prepare their drinks and the two of them sit in almost awkward silence as they wait, Jack nodding her head gently to the rhythm of the music that had finally lifted into something more upbeat.
When the bot slides another short glass across the counter, Izzy lifts it to her lips and takes a few swallows without so much as a wince.
“That weak, huh?” Jack asks. “I can tell just by looking at him he’s been modded to water shit down.” Jack nods her head to the bot who’s at the other end of the bar, happily humming an 8-bit tune as he sanitizes a glass with a beam of UV light shot from a projector in his chest.
“Can’t taste it anyway.” Izzy turns in her stool, facing the rest of the bar the same way Jack is.
“Oh?”
“Not since the-” Izzy gestures to her face, as if that can explain away anything. “Haven’t been able to since.”
“Shit, Iz. That sucks.” the shortening of her name makes Izzy’s mostly mechanical heart do a silly sort of flip behind her sternum. A warning flashes in the corner of her vision and she quickly blinks it away. No one had called her Iz in a long time.
“Used to it by now.” it's her turn to shrug.
Jack hops onto the barstool she’d been lazily kicking and slowly spins for a moment, feet kicking her around in a slow circle before she finally takes a breath to speak. “What's your make a model?”
“Oh, right to the personal questions.” Izzy teases.
“Please, it’s not like it’s not flashing right in front of you right now. I know my way around parts.” Jack takes a pull of her beer.
Her information is indeed flashing in a wall of text down the center of her vision. Izzy reads it off as Jack nods approvingly.
“Huh.” Jack says as Izzy reaches the list of her personal serial numbers before reading them aloud. She places her beer on the countertop, picks it up to pick at the peeling label with her thumbnail before seeing it down again. “Do you mind if- I think- Here. Turn around for me?” she gestures for Izzy to turn in her stool. When she doesn’t, when she just blinks up at Jack like she’s stupid, Jack does it for her, moving the spinning top of Izzy’s stool so that Izzy’s back is to her.
One of her hands pushes the hair off the back of Izzy’s neck, draping it in a dark curtain over her shoulder.
“Ah. Damn.” Jack taps her fingernail against an access panel near the right side of Izzy’s neck. “Fucking little screws. I don’t have my kit on me. Fuck. Oh!” Swiftly, she reaches over and plucks the stir straw out of Izzy’s drink and wipes it on her coveralls before pinching the end closed to resemble the end of a small, flathead screwdriver. It takes some fiddling, but she’s able to work the screw into turning until the panel flips open on a flap of synthetic skin.
“Fuck yeah. Now we’re cookin’.” she leans in, breath ruffling the hair on the back of Izzy’s neck into standing on end. Somewhere near her left ear, a fan kicks on to cool her down. “Gotta get cozy for a sec. Is that okay? Mind holding a light for me?” She tries to hand Izzy her phone with the flashlight illuminated.
Izzy waves it away and twists the end of her mechanical index finger until a bright white LED clicks on, light pouring through every crack and crevice in Izzy’s artificial hand like holding a flashlight up to your hand to see the veins.
“Cool mod.” Izzy can hear the smile in Jack’s voice.
“Comes in handy.” Izzy wiggles her fingers.
Jack laughs way too hard at the stupid joke, just like she had before and Izzy’s heart does another, stupid swoopy thing. She blinks away more warning messages.
“Alright. Hold still for me, babe.” Jack wraps one hand around Izzy’s shoulder to hold her in place as she leans in, peering through the small access port. “Let's take a look-see.”
There's a slight, tickling pressure of Jack’s fingers fidgeting through the wires and circuits. She hears it more than she feels it, like there’s a bug stuck in her ear, fluttering and crawling way too deep inside her to be comfortable. She shivers and Jack’s hand on her shoulder squeezes sympathetically.
Jack works diligently for long enough to make Izzy want to squirm. She taps her fingers against her legs, eyes flitting around the bar in search of anything to pass the time. She ends up watching the ancient, analog clock stuck to the wall tick away, matching the timing to the time indicated in the upper left hand of her vision. The clock was doing the best it could, but it lagged a few milliseconds behind. Just as that was about to irritate Izzy into slamming her fist into the countertop, Jack speaks.
“Son of a bitch! Okay. Think I got it.” she presses something into something and finally, there's a click and a small chime from a speaker Izzy didn’t even know she had right up next to her vocal chords. “That should do the trick. Take a sip for me?”
Doubtful, but thankful to have been given something to do with her free hand, Izzy lifts her glass to her mouth and takes a long pull.
She tastes corn from the whiskey. Burnt sugar and chemicals and the acrid carbonation of the dark soda. Artificial plum and caramel and lemon and fermentation and the smell of the city mixed in with the ice slowly melting into the concoction. Her mouth pulls down into a grimace as she forces herself to swallow, the taste sliding down her throat and into her stomach where she can still taste it.
The smoke in the air of the bar leaves a greasy layer over her tongue and she can taste the coolant in the air conditioned at the back of her throat. She smacks her lips together before taking another sip of her drink, deepening her frown even further.
“That’s fucking rank. ” she says.
Jack laughs, fingers still deep in Izzy’s neck. She readjusts Izzy’s hand, shining her light deeper through the hatch as she continues working. “Coulda told you that. This is a really shitty bar.”
Izzy reaches into the bucket holding a mound of roasted peanuts and crushes one open between her fingers. The nut is salty and earthy as she chews. She can almost taste the green of the plant it grew on. It chases the gross taste of her drink down the back of her throat. She takes another peanut and sticks the whole thing in her mouth, tongue lathing around the saly coating the thin shell.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Jack laughs again. “I have it on good authority that they don’t wash those things.”
“Don’t care.” She doesn’t. She’s too busy rolling her eyes at the overwhelming taste of salt. She hadn’t realized how badly she fucking missed salt.
“Actually, theres a fuck ton fo shit in here thats corroded or knocked loose. How long’s it been since you’ve gone in for a tuneup, doll?”
“Uh.” Izzy doesn’t want to answer. She pops another peanut past her lips when she’d sucked all the salt off of the first.
She’d tried. She’d made a few appointments at the prompting of her interface. But every time she set foot into the lobby of her mech-doctor’s office she felt itchy and too heavy where her machinery hit the coldness of the tile floor.
Months of pain. Years of physical therapy to learn how to hold her new heavier-on-one-side body without falling over. Flashbacks of her accident. It would all crowd into her skull, pushing out every other thought until she bolted. So what if she couldn’t taste or get drunk or feel anything from the waist down?
“Babe?” Jack presses.
“Oh, fuck off. I function just fine.” Izzy spits the peanut onto the bartop. “Close me up. Now.”
“Christ Alive. Sor-ry.” Jack pops the small hatch closed and Izzy shakes the light in her finger tip off. She uses both hands to fidget with another peanut, breaking the shell before popping two nuts into her mouth. “You’re welcome, by the way.” Jack’s fingers trace along the seam of flesh and metal coated in matte black artificial skin. It makes Izzy shiver again.
“Nothing to it, baby.” Jack replaces the screw with the end of Izzy’s straw. Her lips are too close to Izzy’s ear when she speaks again. “Wanna taste anything else? I can think of a few things I wanna get my mouth on.”
Izzy turns her head and Jack is there. The freckles spattered across her cheeks and over the narrow bridge of her nose are tan against the pink flush of her cheeks. And yeah, maybe Izzy does want to know how she tastes because when Jack leans in, she parts her lips and lets Jack kiss her just once. Chaste and quick. She lets herself slide off her barstool and crowds between Jack’s lips, wrapping her mechanical hand up tight into the back of Jack’s hair before bringing their mouths together again.
Jack melts into her with a sigh and drapes her arms low around Izzy’s waist, her hand pressed into the small of her back to lift her into the kiss. Izzy can taste the hops in Jack’s beer. Can taste the onions and garlic from whatever Jack had for her last meal. She tastes years and years of cigarette smoke scared into the back of her throat. Jack’s tongue is the first in play, gently probing at Izzy’s bottom lip before slipping past with a wet slide against the inside of Izzy’s teeth.
Izzy’s heart flips again and she shuts her eyes against the flashing warning to tug at Jack’s hair, tilting her head back to lick further into her mouth. She hopes to whatever god is listening that she’s the only one the fans kicking on to cool her rapidly heating body. She hadn’t kissed anyone in decades. It feels like a lifetime as Jack tightened her strong arms around her, pressing her even closer. Izzy stands on her toes, biting into the meat of Jack’s bottom lip for a moment before letting it go with a snap as she settles back flat on the ground.
“Fuck, sugar.” one of Jack’s hands comes up cradle her head, her thumb tracing over the X on her cheek. “How’s that taste?”
Izzy presses two more kisses as if she needed a few more tastes to be sure. She settles on, “Like beer.”
Like beer and sweat and salt and gasoline and humanity and something that Izzy can’t place that can only be Jack.
“Yeah?” Jack presses her lips into Izzy’s again, sliding her tongue over the seam of her lips in a quick stripe.
“I like beer.” Izzy says.
“Got beer back at mine.” Jack pushes her hair back from her face and then plants another light kiss on the corner of Izzy’s mouth. “Diagnostic equipment too. Could hook you up. See what makes you tick.”
“Is that how you get all the loose cyborgs to come home with you?” Izzy smiles.
“Oh, hell yeah.” Jack returns her grin, resting their foreheads together for a moment. “Is it working?”
“Yeah.” Izzy says. She breaks from Jack’s grasp to toss the rest of her drink back. The taste is more watery now, cold as it slides down the back of her throat. “It is. Let's go.”
—✦—
It turns out that Jack lives above the shop. Izzy had fully expected to be whisked up the stairs, shedding her clothes like loose skin as they giggled and chased each other to Jack’s bed. She was excited, constantly having to blink and shake away pressing notifications about her blood pressure or rising body temperature. Jack kicked the door closed behind them and flicked on the lights to reveal a garage with oil stained concrete floors and cinder block walls lined with work tables and all kinds of tools hooked onto pegboards. She all but scooped up Izzy, throwing her over her shoulder to deposit her on the edge of a worktable where a pink and glitter sign read JACK in big block letters.
“Right here?” Izzy asks as Jack slides between her spread legs. She knocks the bandana off of Jack’s head in favor of running her fingers through her thick hair, yanking to watch as Jack’s pupils blow wide, her lips spreading into a grin.
“Yeah, babe.” Jack pressed a kiss to Izzy’s jaw and then her neck and then Izzy felt a click as Jack connected a cable to a port on the side of her throat. The monitor on the wall flickers to life, a simplified map of Izzy’s mechanics and artificial nervous system displayed in burnt orange against the black screen. “We’ll let this load for a sec.”
Jack sits on a rolling stool like at a doctors office before tip-toeing across the shop to locate tobacco and papers in one of the drawers along the wall. She rolls herself a cigarette with nimble fingers, places it in the corner of her mouth and rolls back across the shop, settling with her arms draped over Izzy’s thighs.
Sick curiosity settles around Izzy like a wet blanket as she watches codes and messages pop along the shape of her body on the screen. The urge to bolt is there, but dim somehow. Like the weight of Jack leaning on her legs is keeping her grounded.
The progress bar at the top of the screen blinks into a 100% and error messages begin to blink into existence one by one, filling the screen with flashing codes and text boxes packed with data. Jack’s jaw goes slack enough that the cigarette almost falls right out, only hanging on by the moisture on the inside of her lip. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ. Izzy, this is bad. How long have you been living like this?”
Izzy has to swallow before she can answer, years of her own neglect flashing before her very eyes. “A while.” she answers. Decades. Longer.
“I don’t even know where to start.” Jack rakes a hand through her hair, sucking on her cigarette and then exhaling a plume of sweet smoke into the air with a sigh. She stands to look closer at the map, squinting her eyes at the codes and text. “Holy shit. You can’t-” she taps at something on the screen, her finger pressing into the touchscreen to bring up a small box of more detail in print too small for Izzy to make out. “Holy shit. You can’t feel your pussy at all, can you?”
A fan whirs behind Izzy’s ears as her blood rushes to her cheeks. “Thats none of your fucking business.”
“Woulda been my business if we were fucking right now like you thought we would be.” Jack exhales another plume of smoke before knocking a column of ash off into an old porcelain plate with char marks dotted along the inside on the edge of the worktable. She taps at the screen again, widening her fingers around the box of text to increase the size. “I see it right here. You poor- Holy fuck, Izzy. How long have you been like this?” she asks again.
Panic finally settles into Izzy’s bones as she feels herself heating from the inside out. The skin of her one good cheek is burning and a fan is whirring so loud somewhere inside her it sounds like a jet engine in her ears. “Fuck you, Jack. I’m out of here.” she makes to hop off the table. The damn thing is so high that her feet were kicking through the air.
“Hey, hey hey.” Jack presses a hand on her shoulder. “Wait. Chill a second, baby girl.” she takes one last puff of her cigarette before stubbing the thing out on the charred plate. “I can fix this. Let me do that for you, at least.”
“Fuck no. Let me go, Jack.”
“Oh, but you would’ve let me finger you right here and now anyway if you weren’t hooked up to anything, right? That's what you came here for” Jack’s in her face with her eyebrow cocked, looking up into Izzy’s eyes. “It's a crying shame that someone as pretty as you can’t feel something as simple as flicking the bean every now and then. Jesus, how do you ever relieve any tension? I can’t even-”
“Not everything in fucking life revolves around getting your rocks off.” Izzy spits.
“Sure it does, sugar.” Jack darts forward to press another kiss to Izzy’s mouth. It relieves some of the tension in Izzy’s shoulders and erases a few of the messages flashing in Izzy’s eyesight without her even having to blink them away. “On the house. Let me make you feel good, baby.” She runs her hands up Izzy’s thighs and kisses her again, knocking the breath from Izzy’s lungs as she licks into her mouth, the taste of smoke thick and sweet on her tongue.
“Fine.” Izzy breaks from the kiss, full of the taste of oil and tobacco and whatever makes Jack taste so much like Jack that it makes her head spin. “Fine. Get on with it.”
Jack drops back into her stool, scooting the thing between Izzy’s knees. She brings one of Izzy’s boots up onto her thigh and unlaces it before tugging it off and following suit with the other. Quickly, she unbuttons Izzy’s black jeans and slides down the zipper before yanking them down, leaving Izzy open and exposed before she can think better of it, tossing the jeans onto the floo unceremoniously. Another shiver travels up her spine as Jack’s hands press her knees open.
“Fucking beautiful.” Jack traces her fingers along the seam of Izzy’s left thigh where her mechanical leg meets her skin in a line of brutal scar tissue and incision marks. Goosebumps rise along the pale skin. Something in the mechanics installed just below Izzy's navel spins to life and clicks into action. Jack’s lips lift into a grin as she hears a fan start to whir, a vibration Izzy’s never felt before, deep in her guts making the table shake.
Jack laughs.
“Get on with it.” Izzy says again through gritted teeth, blood pounding behind her ears.
“Mind if I-” Jack starts.
“Do what you must.” Izzy cuts her off, spreading her knees wider as Jack leans down. She ghosts two fingers up Izzy’s slit so light that Izzy can’t feel the pressure. She holds her fingers up for Izzy to see, rubbing a clear fluid between her fingers and thumb. “Thanks for the lube, baby. But the access panel is up here.” She raps two fingers on a panel underneath where Izzy’s belly button used to be and the sound rings out hollow.
Jack uses a proper screwdriver to open Izzy up this time. It's a much larger panel and as Jack moves her lamp closer, Izzy can see the writhing mass of wires and tubes and whirring machinery that make up her guts as clear as day. It makes her mouth dry. Jack dives right in, fingers scooping past handfuls of artificial veins with one hand, the other one brandishing a smoking soldering iron.
Izzy feels the pressure like a mouse running around in her insides. Jack’s hands are nimble and quick, pressing into ports and rooting around like a truffle pig until Izzy can feel her fist wrap around her spine, fingers brushing a nerve that sends Izzy’s leg jerking out in a kick that almost sends her flying across the table. “Whoops. Sorry babe.” Jack moves her hand.
She keeps working, sweat beading on her brow as she’s elbow deep in Izzy. She leans forward as she works, neck arched into a C shape as she connects and disconnects wires from their ports. Izzy watches on the monitor as slowly, the error messages displayed on the map of her legs disappear. She uses the soldering iron once, warning Izzy of a sting that never comes. Then again with a burning pressure that makes Izzy’s eyes water.
“I’m sorry.” Jack mutters again. She’d been apologizing the entire time, heading off any sudden movement with a Sorry or a hold on. “Almost there. I think I’ve got it.” She peeks down into Izzy’s wires and then squints up at the map, her fingers toying with the frayed ends of a green wrapped cable. She angles her elbow up and Izzy feels a deep pressure for a few seconds before Jack exhales into a curse.
“I’ve gotta - from the other side.” Jack uses her free hand to gesture with two fingers. “To make sure the connection is secure. That okay, sweetheart?”
It's not like Izzy can feel it, anyway.
She nods.
Jack presses her index and middle finger slowly past the rubber elasticity of Izzy’s entrance. She feels more fans kick on and another whir as her body releases more artificial slick to help Jack ease all the way to her knuckles, hooking her fingers deep inside Izzy to press up as her other hand presses down. There's another click and another, cheerful chirp.
“Got it!” Jack whoops.
Izzy hardly hears her. She’s hit with so much sudden sensation that she almost fucking passes out, the cybernetic vision of her artificial eye wavering for a moment before flooding with flashing, beeping warning messages. Call for assistance? You are in duress. Izzy blinks it away before she does anything stupid and clenches around Jack’s fingers.
“Whoa, babe. Ease up for me.” Jack tries to move her hand to keep her fingers from getting crushed against the mechanical muscles contracting tight enough to crack her joints. Izzy slams her knees closed around Jack’s shoulders, rolling her hips into the lightning strike of Jack’s fingertips grazing a nerve deep inside of her that had lain abandoned for years.
The heel of Jack’s hand presses flat against her clit, electric and sharp and that's all it takes for Izzy to come like an electrical storm. The lights of Jack’s shop flicker overhead. Her monitor wavers before crashing into a bright blue screen with scrolling, white code. Izzy shakes apart, letting her head fall back against the wall behind her with a groan as she grinds down onto Jack’s hand and shakes apart, fireworks bursting through her interface.
“Holy fuck. You just- Did you just come on my hand? Just like that?” Izzy’s mind floats gently back to her like a feather, waving to and fro before she opens her eyes to take in Jack's absolutely delighted grin. She lets her legs fall, feet still dangling just above the floor as she goes slack. Jack carefully pulls her fingers free before shaking them out like they’d gone numb. “I knew I was good , but-” She starts.
“Fuck you.” is the only response Izzy can work past her lips, eyelids falling closed again as the bliss of coming so hard settles around her in a halo of euphoria she hadn’t felt in who knows how long.
“You can. If you want.” Jack wipes her fingers off on her coveralls before reaching for Izzy’s mechanical hand. She turns it over, palm facing the ceiling as she searches along the inside of Izzy’s wrist for a switch that she presses with the tip of her middle finger. Izzy’s first two fingers and thumb start to vibrate so hard it shakes up her bones and into her shoulder. She didn’t know she could do that .
Jack licks her lips. “I know this model. Install them all the time, actually. I’ve always wanted to take one for a ride.”
Izzy reaches her non-vibrating hand behind Jack’s head and pulls her up for another, dizzying kiss.
—✦—
Eventually, the two of them do make it up the stairs, clothes trailing behind them in an untidy line as Izzy sinks onto Jack’s mouth in the center of her bed, using the headboard made of old wooden palettes for leverage. She’d gotten Jack off downstairs through her panties, holding her vibrating fingers through the hot, soaked cotton until Jack shouted around an orgasm, grinding into Izzy’s hand.
Now, Jack’s toned arms were wrapped tight around her thighs as she drew her against her tongue. Izzy arched her back, hands instinctively going to play with her tits as Jack licked a flat stripe from her cunt to her clit, hooking the tip expertly into small, flicking circles.
“Mm. Strawberry flavor.” Jack hums into her skin, moving from Izzy’s pussy to pepper love bites along the paleness of her skin. “That just for me?”
Izzy stammers. There’s no possible way. “I- I didn’t.”
Jack chuckles, hot breath and the rumbling of her chuckles hot against Izzy’s opening. “Joking, princess. Love to get you wound up. Wanna come for me again?” she teases the point of her tongue past Izzy’s clenching entrance.
Izzy moans, voice warbling into a “God, yes!” as Jack buries her tongue deeper, nose teasing along the side of Izzy’s clit as she bobs her head with ease and skill. Izzy’s hands flutter over her body, naked for the first time in front of another person in such a long time. She’s a patchwork of matte black and silver metal and pale skin crisscrossed with scars and burns but somehow, Jack finds her delicious enough to eat, feasting on Izzy’s pussy as she rolls her hips into the ministrations.
Again, it doesn’t take long. The taste of Jack’s mouth still ghosting along Izzy’s lip as she bites into it to keep from screaming, Izzy shakes apart with her knees pressed into the bed on either side of Jack’s head. Jack helps her through it, tongue gently lapping her through the aftershocks until Izzy can’t take it anymore. Her vision flashes more warnings than she can blink away fast enough as overstimulation creeps up her body, sending her heart fluttering behind her ribs.
“Okay. Okay !” she grits out, bucking out of Jack’s grasp to take herself out of reach. Jack turns her head and traces kisses along the metal of her leg, leaving smears of drool and slick in her wake.
“Never tasted robo-pussy before.” Jack swipes a hand over her mouth and chin before grinning dopily up at Izzy, her pupils blown wide with desire even in the dim light of her shitty studio apartment. “Think I could spend all night down here. You game?”
Izzy rolls her eyes before swinging her leg over Jack’s chest and settling her shorter body alongside Jack’s toned, tall frame. She pillows her head against Jack’s tits and Jack’s nimble hand finds her hair, stroking through a few tangles with careful easy precision.
“Thank you.”’ she says, after a moment of silence wrapped in the warmth of Jack’s body and messy, unmade bed. Tilts her head back, looking Jack in the eye. “I mean it.”
“No problemo,” a grin ghosts around the edges of Jack’s mouth as she repeats what she’d said at the bar earlier that night. She hooks a finger under Izzy’s chin to bring her into a soft kiss that makes Izzy’s heart do another one of those odd, dizzying flips.
Jack tastes like rubber and whatever chemical compound made up Izzy’s artificial come and smoke and beer and Jack . Izzy cups her face, tilting Jack’s chin down for a better angle to deepen the kiss, the other hand snaking down Jack’s torso, skin rippling under the coolness of her metal fingertips as she works her way down.
She’s between Jack's legs with two fingers pressed tight into her, the smooth pad of her silicone thumb swiping along her clit when she remembers her newfound ability. She finds the switch Jack had flipped on earlier and presses it down with a click that makes Jack arch a foot off the bed, her hands scrabbling for purchase on the sheets, in Izzy’s hair, gripping into Izzy’s shoulder, wherever she could find purchase as Izzy lowered her mouth to Jack’s clit, tasting her at last.
The heady scent is what hit’s Izzy first. Musky and salty with sweat and slick. She presses her fingers deep, curling and stretching past Jack’s entrance as she kitten licks over her clit, bobbing her head as Jack tightens like a bowstring underneath her for a heavy moment before letting out a ragged fuuuuck and spilling over Izzy’s tongue in a rush of dripping, clear spend that pools around her ass, soaking into the sheets.
Izzy fucks her through it, meeting Jack’s desprate canting of her hips with jabs and rolls over her vibrating fingers. When Jack is panting and pliant and whimpering underneath her she flips her switch again and works kisses up the inside of Jack’s tan thighs, over her stomach and through the valley in the part between her tits to her mouth where she sinks into Jack’s warmth, sharing the taste with her with an easy smile.
“Mmm.” Jack hums against Izzy’s mouth before leaning back, her eyes heavy and red rimmed. “Will you stay? Do you sleep?” she runs her thumb over Izzy’s chin.
“Yeah.” Izzy says. She’s not tired. And she doesn’t need to sleep. At least, not as much as she used to. Jack is just so warm and soft and pliant, the heat of her skin chasing the chill away from Izzy’s metal bones. “I’ll stay.”