Static Crush {M/M} ✔

Chapter #14

Hale receives the awaited message exactly three days, four hours, and six minutes later. Hale spends those three days on tenterhooks. Melissa's enthusiasm for her usual favourite activities with Hale wanes. She spends significant time with Briony each day, reinvigorating their friendship with all the gossip, retail therapy, and cocktail hours they can fit in on work nights.

In one of her evenings alone, Melissa loads up the online application for an android exchange. She taps the tablet stylus against her lip, staring at the first box asking for her android's make and model number. Then she turns and considers Hale, still chewing the end of the stylus.

"What's your model number again, Hale?"

Hale's throat tightens. He tries to avoid sounding as alarmed as he is. "I'm a H.A.L.E. 674."

Melissa gives a nod and jots that into the box.

"And your serial number?"

This time, Hale struggles to get the words out. Cold fear spreads through his chest like liquid nitrogen. Melissa looks up from the tablet when he takes too long to respond. Something in his expression makes her pause.

"Hale? Are you gonna answer me?"

He scrambles to get the words out, to explain himself. "I apologize. I'm...I am trying to serve you to the best of my ability, and I know I've failed you, but the prospect of being recycled... I'm afraid."

The words pour out of him unchecked, before he can find a way to modify them into something less personal and vulnerable. Something less like asking her for help. Melissa stares at him, dumbfounded and wide-eyed. At first, he thinks that perhaps she's really heard him. That she's understood.

Then she stands, hand shaking as she presses it to her temple. A few words slip out but no complete thoughts.

"But you're just—"

Picking up the tablet from the table. "It's not meant to—"

She isn't even talking to him, he realizes, just to herself. Without explanation or an idle command, she hurries upstairs, only glancing over her shoulder once on the way. Something of Hale's own fear is written in her face.

Except she isn't scared for him. She's scared of him.

She spends the evening in her bedroom, dismissing him when he tells her dinner's ready. She doesn't come down to eat.

While her food goes cold, Hale sends Rayner a message.

>>I don't want to alarm you, but I believe Melissa is intent upon returning me very soon.

After Melissa's gone to bed, Hale spends the evening filing through his list of events nearby and inventing new things to surprise her, as usual. Only now, it is with the growing dread that none of his efforts will ever be enough. He enters rest mode at midnight with the same pervasive sense of unease he had for the three nights prior.

He wakes at 2:36 AM, a message from Rayner flashing before him.

Rayner:

>>In the car outside. Can you come?

Hale jolts up from his seat at the kitchen table. The chair clatters to the floor behind him. He picks it up and tucks it in hastily before heading to the front door. As he's passing the living room, something gives him pause. It's just as he's always left it. Pillows fluffed, throw blanket folded over the sofa back, every speck of dust removed. Ophelia's bright blooms catch his eye, though.

He can't name the emotion rising in his throat. It's not like any he can identify from his human roster. He can't identify the reason either, but something makes him pick up the orchid and carry it out into the night with him.