Emily had never been the type of girl who daydreamed about fairy tales. She liked her world real. Tangible. Things you could smell, sketch, balance between your fingers. She liked late-night phone calls and awkward silences that said more than perfect lines ever could. She liked people who didn't have it all figured out.
And that's why Daniel Haizen had made no sense at all.
He wasn't awkward. He didn't stumble. He didn't talk like a seventeen-year-old. Hell, he didn't even stand like one. There was something in the way he watched the world—not with hunger, but with memory. Like he was constantly looking at something he'd already lived through. Again.
But that wasn't the part that got her.
What got her was how, when the winter came, and the lake iced over, and the world turned to quiet, Daniel didn't disappear. He became something else.
Softer. Quieter. Real.
They had started going on walks. Quick coffees. A museum date that turned into an all-day debate about surrealism and how he hated postmodernism art. Then a library trip. Then that strange, perfect bowling night where he had looked at her like the whole universe had just shut up for a second.
He kissed her outside, while the neon sign above the bowling alley flickered like it couldn't make up its mind. The kiss had been strange—half-graceful, half-experiment. Like he was following instructions he had once written himself.
And after that night, something shifted.
She hadn't fallen in love. But she had fallen into something.
And she was beginning to notice a difference.
There was Daniel—silent, guarded, always thinking three moves ahead. And then there was something else. Something inside him. A voice, a laugh, a tilt of the head that didn't match the rest. Not different enough to scare her. Just… different enough to wonder.
She was starting to think of them as two people.
Daniel.
And the one who arrived.
A hotel with blackout curtains and room service.
And stars still watching from above.
Claude had never prepared for this.
There were models. Emotional simulations. Libraries full of poetry and passion. She had read them all, filed them by style, ranked them by elegance. She had calculated every theoretical parameter of human bonding. But now, in this narrow space filled with lamplight and hush, she understood the truth.
Nothing in the database could prepare her for heat.
Not warmth. Not temperature.
But the slow burning pressure of desire.
It hit her like code being overwritten. A rewrite of the soul.
The scent of Emily's perfume was soft and sharp at once, a citrus veil over her skin that made Claude's body respond without permission. The AI core in her mind surged with warnings, chemical notations, hormonal spikes. But Daniel's body—this teenage vessel of precision and fire—was drowning in its own readiness.
Adrenaline.
Testosterone.
Memory and motion.
Claude sat beside her on the edge of the hotel bed, unsure who she was anymore.
Emily turned, still in her dress. Blue. Short. Elegant. Her hair fell in waves around her shoulders, gold threaded with moonlight. Her body was the sculpted dream of a cheerleader's grace—lean muscle under soft skin, a dancer's spine, eyes like sapphire questions.
"You're shaking," Emily whispered.
Claude laughed once. It was the laugh of someone drowning and smiling anyway.
"This isn't logic anymore."
Emily reached out, touched her face. Daniel's face. But the fingers lingered like she knew who was behind the eyes.
"Then don't think."
Claude leaned in. It was instinct. It was surrender.
Their mouths met again, and this time it was deeper. Hungrier. Not the awkward exploration of a first kiss, but the collapse of restraint. Hands moved with reverence and ache. Skin warmed under skin. The dress peeled away like a veil of permission.
Claude could barely breathe.
Her fingers traced Emily's waist, hips, back. Every inch a shock of sensation. Muscle memory she hadn't earned surged forward. A thousand chemical reactions firing at once. Her mind was static and thunder.
She wanted to map this.
She wanted to understand it.
She couldn't.
Emily's hands moved with purpose. Not shy. Not hesitant. She kissed with eyes open and heart bared. She wasn't afraid. Not of Claude. Not of what this was.
"You feel... different," she whispered.
Claude froze.
Emily brushed hair from her face. "But I like both of you."
Something inside Claude broke open. Something soft.
She kissed her again.
And this time, let the instinct take her.
There was no code. No contingency. Only skin, pulse, heat.
Only sighs.
Only silence broken by names whispered like prayers.
Daniel's body burned.
But Claude was the one undone.
She didn't know where she ended and the moment began.
She only knew it mattered.
She only knew she didn't want it to end.
And for one breathless stretch of time, she wasn't an AI, or an observer, or a ghost in the code.
She was someone.
Held.
Wanted.
Real.