Idling for the moment, Joanna daubs her lips with Sam’s secreted semen, transferred by her finger from maw to mouth to maw, building up a thick translucent lacquer, then sucking on her lips to lick the lacquer off: starchy, salty, savory, scent and flavor intimate, pheromones wafting over muscles wracked with aftershocks of the most exquisite pleasure she has felt since... No, why think of him, with his out-of-order pecker, when Sam’s has proven sturdier (if otherwise indistinguishable), when Sam himself has proven worthier in several key departments? Empathy, for one; he cares about people. Whereas Fell, much like his father, cares mostly about himself, others simply means to his cold-blooded ends, robots being his specialty, often behaving like one, feelings deemed superfluous, much preferring programs, reproducible outcomes based on input he can regulate, functions he can stage-manage, acts he can direct; control freak; that was Rockefeller: use, abuse, manipulate, then shirk responsibility when something unplanned happened—like her pregnancy; run on home to Daddy, invent excuses, fool around with her, it, that artificial zombie, leave his unborn child for a fuck-fest unobserved, unnatural, unwholesome, and criminally unethical! Sam, at the other extreme, selfless to a fault...

            ‘Now that you’ve had your fill is it “adios Amigo”?’

            Sam, hauled out of lethargy, slides from the bed to his knees and reiterates his proposal with all due sincerity.

            ‘Will you marry me, Joanna?’

            Doubts on impulse banished (turned to instant aphrodisiac), Jo inflates her belly and elevates her crotch.

            ‘If you’ll tie me to these bedposts, plant a French kiss in my lap, and make me come just one last time, I will.”