He finished with the thread and stood up to half height, keeping his back parallel to the floor. “I have finished this round of implants. You may prepare for sleep. I will monitor you awake, then asleep, then I will depart.”

Cora went into the bathroom, did the toothbrush and face wash rigmarole, then returned to her bedroom where her pajamas lived in a canvas IKEA box on the floor. Ampersand was still there, taking up half the room, looking at nothing in particular, standing between her and her pajamas. She sighed. How to handle this? Ask for privacy? It didn’t really matter, did it? A clothed human to him was just a natural alien with a jacket on.

Amygdalines were, even by the standards of their own species, completely asexual. With the exception of their Genomes, they were born sterile, and even their ancestors didn’t experience sexuality the way humans do, because a human will, of course, fuck anything. But more than that, she knew he’d seen her naked before, likely quite a lot. After Obelus had ripped her open, there was that period of two weeks that Ampersand had kept her to himself that she did not remember, two weeks that he’d spent doing god knows what repairing her. It was not likely that he had done so while she was clothed.

She walked right by him, removed her baggy jeans, and replaced them with even baggier pajamas right in front of him. She hadn’t weighed herself, but she’d dropped at least two sizes in the last three months, and was going on three. She just wasn’t interested in food anymore.

She put her bed back together, crawled in, and turned off the lamp on her bedside table, disappointed to see that he’d already put his soft little drone lights away. And then, he just stood there, half height, back still parallel to the floor. Staring at her.

“So I should just go to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

She waited to see if he’d back away, or move forward, or sit down, or do anything other than hover next to her bed, staring.

“Good night?”

“Good night.”

He kept staring.

Okay. She turned onto her side, back to him, but she could feel him staring. She was sure that he had some unfathomable algorithm that he was running that was mapping out the incredible complexities of this living computer, her human brain. She knew that him standing there, staring at her, was not the equivalent of a human doing the same.

But he kept just fucking staring at her.

“You are uncomfortable.”

She sighed and sat up to face him. “You standing there is uncomfortable, yes.”

“I am here to monitor you.”

“I know that, but standing next to my bed and staring at me—”

“I will sedate you.”

She huffed. “It’s still uncomfortable.”

“What would be comfortable for you?”

It struck her then, the image of the two of them in a hospital bed three months ago. She’d simply asked him to get in the bed with her because of some visceral, yearning need to be physically close to this being that was so alien. They hadn’t repeated that moment since.