Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/109
three hours straight. bed and took it into the bathroom and wound it with toilet paper
and stuck it deep into the trashcan.
Like none of that. It was more. It was something I'd never felt
before. I wanted to eat her whole, devour her. When I came back in, Ange was sitting up in bed and playing
with her Xbox. I sat down carefully beside her and took her hand.
Up until now, she'd been the sexual one in our relationship. I'd She turned to face me and smiled. We were both worn out,
let her set and control the pace. It was amazingly erotic to have trembly.
her grab me and take off my shirt, drag my face to hers.
"Thanks," I said.
But tonight I couldn't hold back. I wouldn't hold back.
She didn't say anything. She turned her face to me. She was
The door clicked shut and I reached for the hem of her tshirt grinning hugely, but fat tears were rolling down her cheeks.
and yanked, barely giving her time to lift her arms as I pulled it
over her head. I tore my own shirt over my head, listening to the I hugged her and she grabbed tightly onto me. "You're a good
cotton crackle as the stitches came loose. man, Marcus Yallow," she whispered. "Thank you."
Her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and I didn't know what to say, but I squeezed her back. Finally, we
shallow. Mine was too, my breath and my heart and my blood all parted. She wasn't crying any more, but she was still smiling.
roaring in my ears.
She pointed at my Xbox, on the floor beside the bed. I took the
I took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them hint. I picked it up and plugged it in and logged in.
into the piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. There were
books and papers all over the bed and I swept them aside. We Same old same old. Lots of email. The new posts on the blogs I
landed on the unmade bedclothes a second later, arms around one read streamed in. Spam. God did I get a lot of spam. My Swedish
another, squeezing like we would pull ourselves right through one mailbox was repeatedly "joejobbed" used as the return address
another. She moaned into my mouth and I made the sound back, for spams sent to hundreds of millions of Internet accounts, so
and I felt her voice buzz in my vocal chords, a feeling more that all the bounces and angry messages came back to me. I didn't
intimate than anything I'd ever felt before. know who was behind it. Maybe the DHS trying to overwhelm
my mailbox. Maybe it was just people pranking. The Pirate Party
She broke away and reached for the bedstand. She yanked open had pretty good filters, though, and they gave anyone who wanted
the drawer and threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. it 500 gigabytes of email storage, so I wasn't likely to be drowned
I looked inside. Condoms. Trojans. One dozen spermicidal. Still any time soon.
sealed. I smiled at her and she smiled back and I opened the box.
I filtered it all out, hammering on the delete key. I had a
# separate mailbox for stuff that came in encrypted to my public
key, since that was likely to be Xnetrelated and possibly
I'd thought about what it would be like for years. A hundred sensitive. Spammers hadn't figured out that using public keys
times a day I'd imagined it. Some days, I'd thought of practically would make their junk mail more plausible yet, so for now this
nothing else. worked well.
It was nothing like I expected. Parts of it were better. Parts of it There were a couple dozen encrypted messages from people in
were lots worse. While it was going on, it felt like an eternity. the web of trust. I skimmed them links to videos and pics of
Afterwards, it seemed to be over in the blink of an eye. new abuses from the DHS, horror stories about nearescapes,
rants about stuff I'd blogged. The usual.
Afterwards, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something
had changed between us. Then I came to one that was only encrypted to my public key.
That meant that no one else could read it, but I had no idea who
It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and had written it. It said it came from Masha, which could either be a
puttered around the room, looking away, not meeting each other's handle or a name I couldn't tell which.
eyes. I wrapped the condom in a kleenex from a box beside the
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