It took me the better part of the first two weeks to enter all of the appointments electronically, with all of my other duties. By then, he'd missed two meetings and chastised me for it.
Mr. Katz stopped by to see me as he sometimes did. It didn't improve Andrew's mood to see him. When my boss finished yelling and went back into his office, Mr. Katz whispered, "Don't let him fool you. Most weeks he's lucky to make half of his appointments. Just missing two is an improvement for him."
"Maddie!" Andrew barked from his office. "I don't pay you to socialize."
"Sorry, Sir," I called back.
"Sorry," Mr. Katz whispered, looking sheepish.
When we got home that night, after Andrew's second missed appointment, he didn't even invite me to his room; he dragged me there by my upper arm. We didn't make it inside the apartment. He fucked me against the outside of the door with our clothes still on. "Stop flirting with John Katz," he growled through gritted teeth. "You're mine."
I didn't answer. I wasn't flirting with anyone. The last thing I needed was another man in my life. And I wasn't Andrew's; I was rented. But, I didn't see how pointing that out would improve my situation.
"Say it, Maddie," he ordered in that strained tone. He pounded me harder. It almost hurt.
I stayed quiet.
He held my face so I had to look at him, sweat running down his face. "Say it," he ordered.
"I'm not yours," I whispered. He stopped moving. "I'm not going to lie to you."
He withdrew from me and pushed me away from him. We both panted like we had just finished running. He looked hurt and it made me feel bad. "I'm not flirting with Mr. Katz, either," I said, hoping that improved the situation. "He talks to me. I can't ignore him."
He looked at me a moment. "I don't want you fucking anyone else," he finally said. "I know that isn't part of the agreement but I don't want you to."
I just blinked at him. "I don't know where you think I would find the time or energy."
He looked me up and down, grinned, and gestured for me to come into his apartment with him. The rest of the night he was much gentler. He also used my implants to make me come. His face lit up like a little boy when he had control of my arms, like I was the best toy he had ever played with. His eyes glowed as he watched me come, so I considered the night a success. I tried not to remind myself that I was really only two weeks into my indentured servitude.
#
Managing Andrew's tension was my biggest challenge.
I started each morning by getting him two cups of coffee--the first one virgin, the second one laced with whiskey. About twenty minutes after his second cup of coffee, I came into his office to go over his appointments and meetings with him, something that put him in a very grumpy mood. With the whisky, though, he didn't yell.
It didn't take me long to figure out why he hated the meetings and appointments. He wasn't very social and he wasn't particularly liked. However, he was the genius behind everything the company did. My sensory implants could be placed in any part of the body; the neural connector let the paralyzed control a robot as their avatar using just thoughts, the electronic eyes for the blind. He did all of this work on his own. The meetings were a way for the rest of the company to have a say in the things he invented and to figure out how to market them.
Mr. Katz was an engineer, so he at least understood Andrew's drawings. He was also the only person that Andrew would discuss his inventions with or take advice from. Once I heard Mr. Katz say, "I know it's a better conductor, Andy. But nobody is going to buy the unit if it costs twenty thousand credits." I thought Andrew would lose his temper, but instead he nodded in a resigned way and returned to his drawings. And another day, "You can't implant something the size of a ring box into someone's abdomen. I don't care if it's a failsafe mood stabilizer. You have to make it smaller." They argued, but Andrew returned to his plans without submitting them to anyone for approval.
When the board told Andy that he should stop making plans for a robotic sexual companion, he lost his temper in a way I could hear from my desk. He yelled. The board members yelled back. He said it was something that would help millions of men. They said that it would turn them from a respectable company to something associated with pornography.
"There's a thriving prostitution market, Andy," Mr. Katz said, soothing him as he walked out. "People need medical devices, not more avenues for sex."
"Sometimes sex is medicinal," he muttered.
He worked feverishly every morning. It was his most productive time of day. If he hadn't mentioned lunch to me by eleven, I ordered him something and brought it to him. On good mornings--ones where he worked out some tricky problem or come up with some new idea--his passion for me and the invention seemed intertwined. He would work through the afternoon, playful in the way he spoke to me, and keep me in his apartment late after work. On mornings where he was unhappy with his progress, he scolded me for some misdemeanor all afternoon and left me to myself in the evenings.
It took me that whole first six weeks to have a system for everything: his appointments, his notes on his inventions, his favorite meals, his correspondence (which until now had gone largely unanswered), and his contacts, which he expected me to know after one quick description of who the person was and what department they worked in. I traveled with a small electronic notebook in my jacket pocket to take down things he said.
By the end of the second month I was seeing more to his personal needs. I kept extra liquor in my desk for bad days. There was a spare umbrella hidden in the closet, since he always forgot his and liked to walk around outside alone if his work wasn't going well. I ordered his car to go home or, rarely, out to a business dinner. If it wasn't for me, he probably would have only eaten dinner and maybe not even that. Alcohol inched into the places where meals should be.
Even when he was drunk, he wanted me. I might even say that he wanted me more, but in a different way. He held me when he was drunk, calling me to his lap, opening my blouse, and pressing his cheek against my bare breast. He spent long minutes just kissing me and touching me, making a show of taking me to his bed. He took my clothes off slowly, like he was unwrapping a gift. When we fucked, it wasn't fucking exactly. It was something gentler. Sober, he was all about getting to his orgasm. Drunk, he was about the experience. I'll admit that there were advantages to both. In spite of myself, I felt myself growing warm towards Andrew Mueller.
In the third month, I had almost settled into this new life. Andrew was a vigorous but not inattentive lover. I came with him more often than I had any right to expect. He, on the other hand, got off more than any man I had ever been around. Everything I did seemed to arouse him. I started to wonder if he had some sort of electronic implant in his cock that kept him ever at the ready. But, as time wore on, I realized that sex, with a confirmed and ready partner, was his outlet for everything: lust, frustration, anger, loneliness, business success...everything.
I also learned, through office gossip, that most people believed Andrew to be gay. The intent wasn't malicious; it was just that nobody had ever seen him with a woman. Of course, he had been spending much of his free time at the brothel, where anonymity was assured and personal relationships were not built. And now he was having his appetite satisfied by sex with me on the sly at least twice most work nights and the better part of a Saturday or Sunday. And this was a slower pace than he was keeping a month earlier.
#
In the fourth month that I worked for Andrew, a catastrophe happened. The robot designed to serve as a companion for paraplegic people failed its motor skills test. The unit was less than six weeks from shipment and it wasn't functional. It couldn't button a shirt or tie a tie--or do any task involving fine control. If this couldn't be rectified, shipments would be delayed. Contracts would be breached. There would be lots of lost money, though there was plenty of money to lose, in my opinion.
Andrew's mood was abysmal and his work day never ended. We stayed until nine or ten. I brought him food that he barely touched while he scanned the plans for the robotic hands and arms he had created and searched for the flaw. He drank more and more, starting at lunch. I supported his weight from the car to his apartment every night. At first he asked me in, so drunk he could do little more than fondle me until he passed out. After a week of this, he started waving me away at the door to his apartment. One night, after I dropped him off I heard breaking glass. It sounded like he hurled a drinking glass at the wall. I must have stared at his door for twenty minutes trying to figure out what to do. Eventually, I went back to my room.
Things continued to be tense for about six weeks. Then, one evening at work, about three weeks from the end of our agreement, a reasonably sober Andrew came to my desk. "I think I've figured something out but I need your help."
"Me?"
"Your implants. I'm more familiar with yours than anything I have on hand to test the neural connection. The robot is modeled after the muscular element of your model."
I didn't understand a word of what he was saying, but if it put him in a better mood, I was willing to try. "Okay." I stood and followed him into his office.
"I'll have to put the connection to your implants on the network temporarily, so I can access them though my neural device."
"I don't know what that means."
"I'm going to be thinking what I want you to do."
"Oh. Weird."
He wasn't listening. He worked at his computer, which was half buried in papers. "Ready?" he asked me.
"Yep." The feeling left my arms.
He fastened a blinking sensor to his temple and came around to stand in front of me. I watched my arms reach out in front of me. My hands fisted and unfisted. He spread my fingers and relaxed them. "Everything looks good here," he said. "I'm going to see if you can open the drawer on my desk."
I stood in front of it. My arm reached out and my hand touched the handle but dropped before it gripped. "There it is." I reached again and didn't grab the handle. "Ok, one more time," he said, seemingly to himself. This time, I reached slower, my hand opened, I did grip the handle, and I pulled the drawer open.
"The neural receiver isn't interpreting the thought fast enough." He took the device off of his temple and opened it. He held it under a magnifier and waved a glowing tool over it. Then he reapplied it and looked at me again. A second later, my arm reached out faster, my hand missed the handle, and then I gestured like I was opening a drawer in thin air.
"Now, it's misaligned," he muttered, pulling the device off and waving the glowing tool over it again.
He attached it to his temple again and looked at me. I reached out easily and opened the drawer. "Let me see if it can go finer," he said. My hand reached for a pencil and I bent over so that I could reach it. Then, my hand wrote--in shaky but legible handwriting--'Andrew Mueller'.
The first grin in weeks played on his lips. A hot, excited look came into his eyes, too. So far, he had been completely professional with me at the office but I sensed he wasn't thinking professional thoughts at this moment. Success tended to do that to him.
"Let's see how fine the control is," he purred, walking over to me. I unbuttoned the top two buttons of my own blouse, smoothly and without a stutter. "Very nice."
"Did you fix the problem?" I asked.
"I think I did." He leaned into me and kissed my neck, inhaling as his lips moved down, past my collar, into the open V of my blouse.
"Andy!"
Mr. Katz stood in the doorway, red-faced and distressed looking. Andrew jumped back from me, glanced at Mr. Katz, and then hurried to the computer to send the feeling back into my arms. "We were working on the dexterity error," he said. It even sounded like a bad excuse to me.
"Maddie is your assistant," he scolded. "What you were doing is against a company policy that you set."
I buttoned up my blouse quickly. "Would you excuse me, please?" I said and slipped out of the room. That didn't save me from hearing much of the ensuing lecture from Mr. Katz, delivered with a good man's righteous indignation. When he stormed out of Andrew's office, he stopped at my desk.
"Are you all right, Maddie?" he asked.
"I'm fine."
"If you choose to report this--"
"No. I'm fine."
Mr. Katz gave me a long, hard look and started to walk away.
I stood. "Look, Mr. Katz, I have implants."
He stopped and turned.
"To control my arms remotely," I added. "Mr. Mueller was using them to figure out what's wrong with your robots. He got a little over-excited when he fixed your problem. That's it. It wasn't anything."
"Andy fixed the problem?"
"You should go back and ask him."
He narrowed his eyes at me. "Why do you have implants? It wasn't to get this job, was it?"
"No," I said quickly. "It was for my last one."
"What did you do?"
I was such a suck-ass liar, I wasn't even going to try to make something up. I just looked at this nice man and pinched my lips together. "I'd rather not say," I told him.
He gave me a long look. "If you'd rather not."
I glanced at the door to Andrew's office. "You really should ask him about the robots," I told him.
He gave me another long look but he finally did as I said. The door closed behind him and I didn't hear anything--including yelling, which was good. They were in there for more than three hours and when they came out they were both drunk.
I ordered a car for each man and helped Andrew into his. Then I helped him up to his penthouse. I thought he was going to pull me after him into his place, but he didn't. Instead, he looked me up and down.
