Okay, okay…

Because she was a nurse, Lilli tended to be prepared. She was the kind of person who checked and rechecked patient charts before stepping into their rooms. The kind of professional who double-checked orders before starting the chemo lines. The kind of forward thinker who laid out an ovulation kit, so her future self would not only remember to use it, but do everything in proper order no matter how tired she was when she sat down for her morning pee.

However, even if a hospital review board had been present and pressing her for answers, she’d never be able to explain what happened that morning. Back in Japan, No had been a generous lover, a dominator in reverse, completely in control of both her and himself. During sex No was like a hawk, hunting down his prey without heat or urgency, turning Lilli into a pet he liked to toy with before he struck.

But here in America, the only way Lilli could explain it to herself was that his anger had awakened some kind of dragon inside him…

There were several intense sessions of baby sex that morning, followed by a rather impractical session of bathtub sex. Until finally, they retired to their separate rooms and Lilli found just enough energy to change the bedsheets, and open the French doors on a room that now reeked of sex, before settling back into the freshly made bed for a short nap. Just a little doze until Ruby got home from school, she told herself, only to be awoken by the feel of a hand shaking her shoulder.

“Dinner is ready,” Ruby told her with a perfunctory bow. “I taught Nakamura-sensei how to order Chinese food, and Dallas went to pick it up.”

So somehow Lilli ended up at the long kitchen counter that night, eating family style with not only Ruby and No, but also Dallas, who regaled them with a story about how he’d decided to just go ‘head and call Uta at work.

“But how did you know where she worked?” Lilli asked.

“I didn’t get into security work for nothing. I got my ways,” he answered with a cocky smile. Only to then admit, “But she surprised the hell out of me when she actually said yes. You guys got any ideas about where I should take her?”

“A movie maybe,” Lilli suggested, at the same time No said, “Dinner is your best option. I will have my assistant make a reservation for you at an impressive place,” and Ruby insisted. “Iie!! Take her arcade! Take her arcade!”

“Here is my assistant’s card,” No said, presenting a small, white square to Ruby. “You will call her tomorrow and tell her to coordinate your schedule, so you can begin working with an English tutor.”

To Lilli’s shock, Ruby didn’t take offense. Just responded in Japanese, something that sounded like an agreeable, but long and involved, thank you.

And things only got stranger from there. No didn’t make any references to a change in their relationship status, and even retired to his office to do work shortly after their cozy dinner.

The hawk was back, and he was so distant, it was enough to make Lilli wonder if the dragon sex had been a one-off. Until it wasn’t.

After she finished saying goodnight to Ruby on the landing, she opened her door to find No in the act of tugging off the hoodie and suit he’d donned, for appearances it would seem, with Ruby and Dallas.

They both paused in mid-action. Each taking the other in.

“I would like for you to close the door now, please,” he said, his voice cool.

So she did, and then she turned back to watch with wide eyes as he shed the rest of his clothes.

After six months of mostly clothed intimacy, she found it hard to imagine ever actually getting used to the sight of him undressing. And her eyes stayed glued on him as he finished pulling the hoodie over his head, along with the simple black t-shirt he wore underneath. He shook off his shoes, then came flashes of his intricate tattoo as he pushed down his pants, finally revealing…his manhood, magnificent and long.

Only when he was fully naked did his eyes meet hers again. And that was when she could clearly see…the hawk had disappeared, and the dragon was back.

He crossed the room in an instant, all but inhaling her mouth as he swept her up into his arms.

And that was how it went…

They both returned to work the next day. And they soon settled into a routine of Lilli being driven into Seattle most mornings with Ruby, and No either flying into Portland or going to the Seattle Fisher’s home office in a separate car.

When Lilli realized how close the Fishers office was to her hospital, she suggested they start sharing a car on his Seattle days or maybe meet up for lunch or something…

“That would not be a good idea,” he answered before she could even finish her pitch.

Yeah, not a good idea, she agreed silently. Kind of like how having real sex to conceive your hypothetical revenge baby isn’t a great idea.

Those were the kind of thoughts she had during the day when he didn’t drop so much as a hint that they were in any kind of relationship. But damn if she could figure out how to deny him at night…or how to deny herself.

One night became two. And even though No had already paid the medical concierge service’s rather expensive fee, the only person who ever called Uta was Dallas—who, after much debate during the now nightly dinners they shared together, ended up taking the German nurse to a pho and banh mi restaurant on Pike street for a low-pressure lunch date.

Which only opened up a whole ‘nother can of worms that night.

“She said she wanted to go out with me again,” Dallas announced at dinner. They’d all decided to order Indian takeout and eat together again, since Mrs. Santos didn’t work on the weekends. Neither did Dallas, technically, but apparently he needed more advice. “Where you guys think I should take her next?”

“The nurses at my hospital love those paint-and-sip nights,” Lilli told him.

“There are many Japanese gardens in Seattle,” No suggested. “You could walk and speak together more to see if you are a suitable match.”

“Ooh! Ooh! Take her to Lat City Lorroargirl game!” Ruby said, practically bouncing in her seat with the idea.

It took the adults a moment to work out that she was talking about the Rat City Rollergirls, Seattle’s all-women roller derby league. But once that was sorted out, they agreed this would probably make for a really fun date. Interesting for Dallas, and perhaps a tentative walk on the wild side for Uta.

But all the Uta talk made Lilli realize…

“It’s been over seventy-two hours since I got a happy face,” she told No later that night, sneaking into his home office after Ruby went to bed. “So I guess there’s no reason for us to keep having sex,”.

“Hai, if you could close the door, I have been meaning to give this research to you,” he answered.

Lilli did as he asked, and he patted the seat beside him, turning his laptop toward her to present her with an article, translated from the Japanese, about how couples should have sex as much as possible while trying to get pregnant, even post-ovulation.

Lilli squinted at the screen. It was almost as if he’d been waiting for her to suggest they stop having sex so he could whip out his “research.” However, she’d been working in pediatrics far too long not to have a few questions about this so-called study. Test size, methodology, the efficacy of Google Translate…you know, stuff like that.

But somehow all those questions disappeared when instead of letting her read through the article in detail, he leaned across the laptop and captured her lips in a sizzling kiss.

They ended finishing the discussion in a horizontal position on the couch, with Lilli never getting around to verifying the research he’d presented her with.

After that they settled back into the routine they’d established over the last seventy-two hours.

Sex every night in her bed. A bath, and then sleeping off what they’d done in his bed, with her sneaking back into her room after No disappeared downstairs for what he and Ruby simply referred to as their “morning training.”

Lilli still wasn’t exactly clear on what this training involved, but they both seemed to take it way more seriously than any exercise program she’d ever seen. They had two-hour workouts in the morning, then after school Ruby came home and did physical therapy exercises on her temporary leg while practicing what she’d learned that morning with No.

Lilli had once tried to watch one of Ruby’s afternoon workouts, but then had to retreat upstairs when Ruby took a sword off the weapons wall. She could see all the ways the “training” was benefitting her niece, causing a sea change in her personality overnight from an entitled and unbearable girl to confident and respectful young lady. However, Lilli was still a nurse, and watching a thirteen-year-old wield a sharp sword was simply not a sight she could bear.

But the Wednesday after she and No first started hooking up, Ruby met Lilli at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in the hemp karate pants and a GoNoRobo hoodie—pretty much the same outfit she’d taken to wearing all the time these days. However, this morning she was practically jumping up and down, instead of waiting by the door with her hands jammed in the hoodie pockets as she usually did when Lilli was running late for their morning ride.

“Aunt Ana! Aunt Ana! Nakamura-sensei say he going to let me go with him to Portland Friday! He say he talked with engineers at GoBotics SocietyLab, and they want design leg for me! Can you believe it?!”

Ruby threw her arms around Lilli’s neck and then out-right screamed at that blood-curdling register only available to teenage girls. It was as if No had told her he was going to introduce her to the members of her favorite K-Pop boy band.

Despite her ringing ears, Lilli hugged her niece back, even though she wasn’t remotely experiencing anything near Ruby’s unfettered joy. Friday—that was the same day as her appointment with Uta who’d be coming over to administer the blood test that would tell them if Lilli was pregnant.

She glanced over Ruby’s shoulder at No who stood in the kitchen’s entry way. If she was pregnant, he’d be leaving soon. Moving back to Portland to be closer to his start up. All of this, including his purchase of the Seattle Fishers, had merely been part of an over-arching revenge plan. One that would be fully automated and no longer require his oversight once she became pregnant.

It’s just sex—revenge baby sex, Lilli reminded herself when her heart began to ache at just the thought of No leaving after Friday.

Still, she hadn’t seen Ruby this happy in…well, ever. So she forced a smile to her face.

“That’s great!” she told her niece, putting extra effort into keeping her voice light and happy, even as she glanced nervously at No.

The smartwatches No had brought home for Ruby and her after Monday’s trip to Portland lit up on both their wrists.

“We must go. Dallas is here,” Ruby told No. Then she asked, “You home for dinner? Maybe we can look at gymnastics coaches together, like we talk about.”

“I must work late tonight,” he answered. “But compile a list of your top coaches and we will discuss them tomorrow morning after our training.”

“Tell Dallas to hold up for a sec,” Lilli told her niece. “I just need to go over a couple of things with your sensei, then I’ll be right out.”

Ruby nodded and dashed off, her gait a lot less buffered than it had been just a few weeks ago.

Lilli had to admit Ruby had been right about the athletic prosthetic. She was way more committed to continuing with her gymnastics career than Lilli had initially given her credit for. And Lilli was beginning to see what a difference an extra twenty grand and a team of robotic engineers could make in the quality of her next prosthesis.

Speaking of which…

“A prosthesis appointment with Go’s non-profit company and a gymnastics coach. That’s very kind of you,” she said to the man also dressed in karate pants and a GoNoRobo hoodie.

No shook his head. “She has earned it,” he answered.

“Okay, it’s just that I’m a little worried about what happens next week. How disappointed she’ll be when you move back to Portland...”

No went still in that hawkish way of his before saying, “She knows I will be leaving. You would wish for me not to fulfill my promises to her before I do?”

“That’s not what I meant. I just want you to think about the repercussions of giving her everything she wants, and then disappearing on her next week,” Lilli returned.

“Adults have lives of their own. Often they go away for reasons we cannot fully understand.” A bitter shadow clouded over No’s face as he said, This is a lesson she will eventually have to learn. Either now, or on her own.”

Ugh. Okay, she realized they were culturally very different. But Jesus, was he serious about this?

“First of all, I think she already knows adults have lives of their own and often go away. Remember, she lost both her parents with a relatively short span of each other.” Dipping her head, she leveled with him. “Ruby seems tough, I know, but she’s been through a lot, No. A whole lot. I want to make sure you understand and respect that.”

Another cold hawk blink. Then: “I will take your concerns under advisement. However, you are still not permitted to call me that.”

“What? I can’t call you No? But you don’t seem to have an issue with it when we are…”

Lilli broke off, cheeks burning.

And No answered, voice quiet as a hawk’s swoop, “We are no longer in that place,” before disappearing down the sub-basement stairs, and leaving Lilli behind with a whole bunch of bad questions she suspected had no kind of good answer.

Fucking bad patterns.

Sitting beside Ruby in the car on their way into Seattle, Lilli could have kicked herself. Why had she allowed herself to believe No was anything more than he claimed to be? Why did she insist on thinking of him as a human being with feelings, as opposed to an hawkish robot with a revenge plan?

That afternoon, Lilli didn’t look for Anitra on her lunch hour like she usually did (despite her increasingly nosy questions into the status of Lilli’s love life with the Japanese billionaire). Instead, she walked the few blocks to a pharmacy where she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be seen by someone she knew making a certain purchase.

After that, it was busy, busy, busy in the way only a children’s oncology center could get. Sometimes the workload could be overwhelming, but it did make the hours of her shift pass super fast, and Lilli wasn’t surprised when her watch vibrated with the app that told her Dallas had arrived with the car before she was ready to go.

However, after she got down to the lobby, she realized it was his and not her mistake when she saw the time on the huge digital clock above the hospital entrance’s front doors.

“I’m assuming you’re rushing me out of here because you have another date with Uta,” she said, slipping into the back of the car. “Either way, give me a little warning please before the next time you decide to get here almost an hour—”

She stopped, the “early” dying on her tongue. Because the person in the driver’s seat wasn’t Dallas Montana. Not even kind of.