What Lovers Do(95)

“That’s it!” I pointed a stiff finger at him. “I’m not going to stand here and take this.” My stubborn personality grasped for a phantom shred of dignity. Pivoting, I returned to my apartment with as much confidence as an amputee wearing Angry Bird boxers could have.

“Hope this isn’t your way of playing hard to get, Stick. It’s not happening between us. You’re not my type.”

The nerve of him …

“I’m not playing hard to get, and I never implied I wanted anything to happen.” I may have thought about his tip, but nothing beyond that. “It’s very arrogant of you to assume I thought something was going to happen between us. AND I don’t have a stick up my ass!”

I slammed my door and opened it again two seconds later. “And just to be clear … why exactly am I not your type?”

He finished the last of the blood drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “ ’Cause you’re a skinny-as-a-stick white girl without a damn thing to hold on to.”

I slammed the door again.





I landed a dream job two years ago—a dream job because when I had two complete legs I never would have dreamed of being a “subject” or “tester” of prosthetic legs. However, using the label “prosthetic leg” around my boss was off limits.

A designer in England made me several pretty legs with painted nails. They looked freakishly real. My boss hated them. He said they were as ‘fucking impractical as a pair of high-heeled shoes.’ Those legs were ‘prosthetics,’ and wearing them only revealed my vanity. He designed robotic legs, and comparing them to the average prosthesis was the ultimate insult.

“Hey love, tell me about my baby.” Thaddeus “Thad” Westbrook wasn’t British, but he always called me love. Why? No idea. I was not his baby, but I think his baby ranked higher than his love. The “smart limb” aka my bionic leg was his baby. I had a lot of his babies, yet we’d never had sex.

Thad was my first date from a matchmaking site. And for the record, he was not one of the “ones.” We should have had sex. He took me to the brink of an orgasm, yet he had no clue what he did to me. I was open about my disability on the dating site, he was not. Thad lost one hand and two fingers from his other hand in a farm equipment accident when he was twelve.

He invited himself into my apartment after dinner, and then he removed my leg. It wasn’t exactly a first-base move, but as his hands skimmed over my flesh, inspecting my residual limb. I shivered, heart racing. At first it tickled my knee, but then it shot tingling goose bumps up along my skin while the much neglected area between my thighs screamed, YES! But, no—we never happened.

I put him on speaker phone and combed through my wet hair after a long run and a shower. “I like her … a lot. In fact, I think I’m keeping her. She’s not sexy, but she’s smooth. No limp, not even when taking the stairs. I got caught in the rain the other day and worried about the sensory electrode shorting out, but—”

“She’s waterproof, love.”

“Yeah, where have I heard that before? Oh that’s right, with your last baby that shorted out and nearly set my pants on fire. That shit would never happen with a prosthetic leg.”

“My smart limbs are made to mimic a human’s movement in every way, only better. But much like the human body, sometimes there can be a few glitches. That’s why I have you.”

“The guinea—”

“My test subject, not guinea pig, love.”

“Whatever, so why’d you call?”

My memories of Thad were surreal. People just didn’t meet like that. I had an official paying job by the end of our first and only date. I also fingered myself into a sweaty mess that night in bed, but it was a small sacrifice. Thad admitted he was looking for a “subject” to join his geek team experts in prosthetics, robotics, machine learning, and biomechanics—geek being my word not his—to “test the future of robotics that would make physical disabilities obsolete.” He also confessed that his attraction to me was unplanned and not going to work out if I took the job. Thad was a stickler on not mixing business and pleasure.

Job versus male-induced orgasm—I mean boyfriend. It was a toughie, but in the end, I made the right decision. Thanks to Thad and his ingenious team of geeks, I felt like a superhero, not a young woman with a disability. Thanks to Thad, my disability was non-existent.

“I already booked your flight and hotel,” he said with his usual passive voice. Always multi-tasking. The guy could do brain surgery while practicing his golf swing and reciting Pi to infinity.

“For?” I stopped mid-comb and stared at my phone.

“Beijing. Next Wednesday. You’ll be there about a week or so.”

I rolled my eyes. “Jerry Chu. I was up half the night video chatting with him. I showed him our latest baby, and he needs to tweak his before I give it a go.”

“Yes, love, I know. I just got off the phone with him, and he needs you there for the tweaking. It’s supposed to be the best one yet for rock climbing. Besides, half the parts of my baby that you have were designed by Jerry.”

“I hate flying to China.”

“You told me you love Beijing.”

“I do. I hate getting there. Fourteen hours on a plane. I get restless.”