Author : Ken McGrath

I roll off her and onto my back, panting, satisfied and with the sweat already drying into my chest. My head sinks into the pillow and I smile. Turning to look at her it slides, like water, right off my face.

Her façade is starting to flicker and fade into an electric blue haze, allowing me to see her true metallic shape underneath. I’m guessing my 30 minutes with the woman of my dreams are coming to an end.

“That was so good,” she pants, dragging out the o in so as only a lusty human should.

I sit up quickly, throwing the thin, stained, bedcover off me. I feel dirty and wrong. A deep-seated sense of Christian guilt bubbling up inside of me.

The Simul-Form leans across the bed, reaching out a hand and brushing my naked back. It’s cold, not familiar warm flesh and I shudder moving off the bed completely, turning away from her.

“I… uh, I’ve got to go,” I mumble pulling on my jeans. Behind me I can hear her moving about on the motel bed. As I bend to pick up my shirt I catch a glimpse of her, no… of it, reflected in the cracked, grubby window. I see her for what she really is.

Through the crackling blue glow that surrounds her like an electric cloud I see her change – hair originally short, now long, blonde then red, changing facial features from soft to hard, full lips, sharp nose, wide eyed then narrow. Every single one of them the look of desire and sex. She reels through these female images like someone flicking the pages of a porno magazine, revealing a fleeting glimpse of temptation and want, before moving onto the next.

The lingering flash of skin and nipple, pursed lips, tongue protruding slightly between teeth and slowly spreading thighs. Hair cascading in thick, black ringlets over her shoulders, then angular, spiked and blonde. I turn and she pauses as a smouldering brunette with big, smoking eyes, the sheets wrapped loosely around her doing more to draw attention to those curves than to hide them.

“Why don’t you stick around?” she purrs, stepping slowly off the bed, pulling the covers with her. My eyes follow her toes as they touch the floor, all the way up her long legs, across her covered body and I feel myself getting hard at the sight of her lips, drowning in her eyes. “I can be whoever you want me to be.”

My mind fights to be heard, that she’s a machine, a Simul-Form, able to take any shape, able to fulfil every sexual desire, but that she’s not human. Surprisingly it wins.

I’m wringing knots in the shirt, twisting it in my sweating palms. I struggle into it and button it up wrong as I force my body towards the door.

“Money… your money’s on the table. Over, uh,” I indicate, “there. Thanks.”

Shit, why did I say that? I curse myself as I step out into the harsh judging sunlight.

“See you later cowboy,” she drawls seductively as the door closes, finally forming a barrier between us.

Why do I always feel like the one who’s been used, all dirty and sorry after sex? I squint into the washed out afternoon as cars screech by on the road beyond the battered chain-link fence and sigh. I need a shower.