Coming Together: With Pride (17 page)

"Oh yeah? Then prove it," I demanded, pressing up against him. "Kiss me."

"What?"

I ground my hips against Gabe, enjoying the way my cock grew hard as I rubbed against him.

"I said kiss me. Come on, you say you love me? Then do it. Just kiss me. Christ kissed Mary Magdalene. You can kiss me."

"I—I can't."

"What do you mean you can't?" I laughed. I was taking no small amount of wicked joy in having Gabe at such a disadvantage. "Just pucker up. You don't even have to kiss me on the mouth. A quick, non-sexual peck on the cheek will do it."

"No. My programming forbids it!"

"And you can't change that programming, can you?" I said, finally backing away. "Well guess what? I can't change my programming either, no matter how badly you or anyone else might want me to. I'm gay. End of story."

Gabriel got to his feet, shaking, and stumbled out of the chapel. I think it was the only time in my life I ever watched
him
run away from
m
e.

****

"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned..."

I lay on my childhood bed, staring at the ceiling as I spoke to the empty air. There was no vid phone in this room, no means for me to call Father Raphe. That was okay, though. I wasn't prepared to talk to him about this.

It was late afternoon. The house was quiet. Sometime earlier that day, a handful of my mother's Minority friends had come to the church for the funeral service. They buried her in the cemetery at the foot of the mountain. I didn't even bother to watch from the window. Father Raphe had been right about me needing to come home and settle my accounts here. But it wasn't my mother that I had needed to settle with.

It was Gabe.

Father Raphe wasn't usually wrong about these things, but then he didn't know about Gabe. I'd never worked up the courage to tell him. It was one thing for me to admit I was gay, given my messed up family history. It was another thing entirely for me to confess that I still had sexual fantasies about one of the two people who had abused me.

Not that Gabe meant to abuse me. It was just the way he was programmed. Nothing he could do about it, the bastard.

I rolled onto my side, curling up into a fetal position. A chair stood next to the bed. Gabe's chair. He used to sit in it every night and watch me while I slept. If ever I cried out, if ever I grew aroused in my sleep, Gabe would wake me up and reprimand me.

"God and your mother will not be pleased," he'd say, pointing to the stained sheets.

It hadn't helped that Gabe was so beautiful. I couldn't escape his face even when I closed my eyes. It was no accident that I chose a confessor who looked just like him. I knew the first time I saw Father Raphe that I needed to be intimate with him, at least on an emotional level. I had fully expected him to reject me, too; to tell me that I was filthy and disgusting for thinking about him the way I did. But he didn't. Hell, he didn't really even seem to mind when I jerked off during Confession. It wasn't the point of Confession, as he often pointed out, but I guess he understood how badly I needed the release.

"Sexuality is part of the human experience," he told me when I first confessed my arousal to him. "We are meant to touch and enjoy one another. That is the way God made us."

I wondered why his God had never set my mother's God straight on that particular point. A knock at the door brought me back to the present.

"Yeah?" I called.

Gabe entered, carrying a tray of food. "You should eat. Your mother would not want you to starve."

"Oh, who the hell cares what she would've wanted?" I muttered, but I took the tray from him anyway.

Gabe settled in his chair, watching me tear into the food. "I have missed looking after you."

I stuffed half a sandwich into my mouth. "Oh, yeah? I didn't realize I was so entertaining. I guess you didn't have much to do after I left, huh?"

"I tried to take care of your mother, but she was a good Christian woman, secure in her beliefs. She did not need a guardian angel to watch over her."

"Why'd she keep you around then?"

"She hoped someday you would come back."

"Well, I did, but I don't need your services either, pal."

Gabe didn't respond. For a long time, he just sat there and watched me eat. Then finally, he said, "Did you really hurt yourself because of what your mother and I did... or tried to do?"

I nodded, finishing off an apple. "Yeah, pretty much. You two made me feel like I was the most vile, unlovable creature on earth."

"Because we tried to change your programming?"

"Yeah." I gave a bitter laugh. "You guys pretty much succeeded, too."

"How so?"

"I can't touch anybody. Not even to shake hands. I've tried, but I get scared of what might happen." I settled back on the bed. "There's this guy I know, a priest of the New Catholic Church. He looks a lot like you, except older. I mean, he's aged, which you can't do, not like humans do at least. Anyway, I love this guy. He's been really good to me. He talks to me, helps me out when I have a problem, listens to me when I'm hurt or angry. I even dream about him at night, at least when I'm not dreaming about you. But I can't touch him. I can't even speak to him face to face. I have to call him on a vid phone, and even then, I use a privacy screen because I'm just too damned scared to look him in the eye."

"And does this cause you to hurt?"

I nodded. "All the time, Gabe. All the damn time."

He stirred on his chair, like a bird unsettled by a strange noise. "What do you dream about, when you dream of me?"

"What do you think?" I let my hands slide down to my groin. I was hard, just like I always was whenever Gabe was around. "Sometimes I dream that I'm hiding in the house, masturbating, and you find me just like you always used to. Only instead of pulling my hands away and telling me 'no,' you join in." My eyes closed as my mind and heart indulged in bitter-sweet reverie. "You pull on my cock, slow and steady, and sometimes I dream that you kiss me. It feels really good. But you never finish the job. Before I can come, you always take your hands away and tell me that I'm going go Hell, and all I can think is that I'm already there, and you're the one that brought me."

Gabe's eyes followed my hands as he listened. I rubbed them over the growing bulge in my pants, not caring that he saw. Or maybe I did care. Maybe I wanted him to watch. It was like a ritual between us; me being bad, him watching me do it.

I wasn't surprised when he reached for my hands and pulled them away. I had been counting on it. It was the only way I knew how to get him to touch me. But then he did something that wasn't part of our ritual. He pushed back one of my shirt sleeves and traced the scars on my wrist with his finger tips. I shuddered at the unexpected touch.

"I am a guardian angel," Gabe said. "I was meant to protect and guide, to watch over you and keep you safe from sin. It is against my programming to cause harm to you, yet you say that is exactly what I've done."

"Not your fault," I said. The touch of his fingers on my wrist was maddening. I was going to come if he kept it up. "Mom set the parameters. You had to follow them. Like we discussed earlier, you can't change your programming."

"What if you changed it for me?"

"What?"

Gabe looked up at me, his eyes glowing in the onset of evening. "Do you know how to reprogram me?"

"Maybe. I'd have to shut you down to do it." My heart lurched in my chest. "But why?"

Gabriel touched the scars again. "I have no purpose without you. If my current programming hurts you, you will abandon me, and I will have to be reprogrammed to serve someone else anyway. But if you change my programming, then perhaps you will keep me with you." He gripped my hand tightly. "I could still watch over you. I could protect you from ever hurting yourself again. Let me be the angel you need—"

Before he could say any more, I grabbed his neck and pressed hard on a small round node at the base of his skull. Gabe collapsed. His head landed in my lap.

"Okay," I whispered. "You want it? You got it."

****

I didn't reprogram Gabe so much as I removed certain bits of code from his memory banks. When they first come out of the factory, all robots are capable of performing every sort of human behavior, including sex. They're built to be anatomically correct in case a customer wants them just for such a purpose. Not surprisingly, a lot of people do. When the Moral Minority first commissioned the Guardian Angels, they hadn't been crazy about the idea of robots with dicks, but it cost too much to have one custom built from scratch so they just settled for hacking in a few
Thou shalt nots
to prevent any robot hanky panky and left it at that.

It took me less than an hour to remove the strictures from Gabe's code. Then I spent another hour just looking at him as he lay there on my bed. Was I doing the right thing? What would removing that code actually do to Gabe? On the surface, it seemed like a stupid question. He was a robot, for Christ's sake. People reprogrammed robots all the time. But I couldn't shake the feeling that I was doing something that could never be undone. Gabe would never be the same after this night, and neither would I. I didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad one.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the house, a grandfather clock tolled out the hour, seven o'clock.

"Time to wake up, Sleeping Beauty." I pressed the power node at the base of Gabe's skull to bring him back to life.

"—the angel you desire." His head popped up, and he looked around, eyes wide. "You did it?"

"You don't feel any different?" I asked.

He sat up slowly, thought processes turned inward. "I am... not sure."

"Well, I guess there's only one way to find out."

I crawled onto the bed beside him, pushed him back against the pillows, and brought my lips to his. He didn't protest. His mouth yielded to mine, allowing our lips to lock together. I settled my hard-on against his hip and slowly rocked back and forth. After a few moments, Gabe broke off.

"I am not prevented from continuing," he said, bemused. "But neither am I programmed for this."

"Meaning, you don't know how. You're a virgin."

"Are you not a virgin, too?" he pointed out. "You have never touched anyone. How are we to proceed without programming to instruct us?"

"Why not start with what we already know?" I replied, rolling onto my back. I tugged at my fly, easing the zipper down over my throbbing cock. "I jerk off and you watch."

Gabe sat up on the bed, his eyes fixed on my groin. My face burned red hot as I eased my pants down past my hips. He had never looked at me so intently before. And to be honest, he wasn't even looking at me, but at my hands and my cock, as though he intended to study what I was about to do to myself. I felt ashamed, the naughty child caught in the act of doing something wicked, and yet I felt more aroused than ever by the thought of putting on a show for Gabe.

I started slowly, stroking my fingers along the insides of my thighs then cupping a hand around my balls. One thing I had learned from Father Raphe over the years was that it was okay to enjoy myself. If I couldn't touch anyone else, I could at least take pleasure in my own embrace. I massaged my balls gently, rolling them in my hand until they grew swollen and heavy. Meanwhile my free hand glided up the length of my rigid cock. The head was already leaking. I teased one fingertip through the wetness, spreading it around the slit. My touches were feather light. Anything more than that, and I feared I'd come on the spot. Gabe's staring put me right at the edge of orgasm.