He’s the most beautiful male I’ve ever seen. Ever. Anywhere. George Clooney and Johnny Depp and Justin Timberlake and all of them, all of them, would be cast as Adam’s less attractive best friend.

I wonder, can he speak anything more than my name?

Although even that’s great. I liked hearing him say my name. I’d like him to do it again.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he says.

“Unh?” I respond brilliantly.

“Your mother sent me to find you.”

It’s obviously true, and the honesty of it surprises me. “Are you supposed to tell me that?”

“I don’t know.”

He doesn’t shrug or smile or duck his head. I realize he has no affectations. He’s acquired no little tics or habits.

The strangeness of seeing him leaves me speechless. He’s a creature from a dream. He’s something I doodled on a sketch pad, brought to life, fully formed.

I want to touch him. To ensure that he’s real and not some weird trick of my tired mind.

I also just want to touch him. Because … just because.

And I believe I can touch him. I believe he will allow me. I believe this because he is, in some impossible way, mine. Does he know that?

“Do you know who I am?” I ask. I’m not just asking if he knows my name. I’m asking if he knows who I am, what I am. I’m asking if he knows my importance.

It’s the kind of thing I’ve heard coming from my mother on more than one occasion: Do you know who I am? With italics on the “who” and a rising, incredulous tone on the “am.”

I don’t say it that way. But I mean it that way.

It’s insane to even think like this, but despite the magnificence of this boy, he is in some sense mine. And I want him to know it.

You are mine, Adam.

Where the hell does that kind of thinking even come from?

“You are the one who designed me,” Adam says. “I am your perfect match. Your soul mate.”

“You know about all that?”

The first hesitation. He isn’t being coy. He’s considering. “I don’t think I know all of anything, Evening.”

I want to tell him to stop using my name because every time he does it sends a shiver through me. I don’t want a shiver. I don’t want him to make me weak in the knees.

I stay silent and he continues. “I have been given some information. It’s a crude technique, I understand, so all I know is parts of things. I’m still being formed mentally. I have knowledge but no experience.”

“That won’t make you so different from most guys,” I say. It’s a smart-ass remark. A joke. Does he have a sense of humor? I gave him one. At least, I included the codes that would tend to allow him to develop a sense of humor, but does he have the experience to know a joke when he hears one?

“You made me different from most guys,” he says.

That might be a semi-witty comeback. I’m prepared to accept it as such because I don’t think I could ever have a relationship with a guy who has no sense of humor.

Relationship?

Back up there, girl.

Back right up against that … Okay, no. I’m now arguing with myself. Chiding myself. I’m in charge here, right? I shouldn’t even be thinking about him as anything other than a very interesting experiment. He’s my A-plus science project.

Some rational part of my brain points out that this—this person, this creation, whatever Adam is—is a walking crime. Real or unreal, living or fabricated, it doesn’t matter. Adam shouldn’t be here. Someone breathed life into him and sent him out into the world, and that was wrong.

But try as I might, I can’t stand here two feet away from him and not react. I don’t think there’s a person of any gender, or no gender, for that matter, who could stand here and not react to him.

He is a work of art.

If I do say so myself.

“Okay,” I say, mostly just to have something to say, because otherwise I’m just looking him up and down and up and down and it’s impolite to stare. “What did my mother tell you to do once you found me?”

“She wants me to ask you to come back.”

“That’s it? No excuses or explanations? Just ‘come back’? She didn’t say anything else?”

“She said some things which I don’t believe she wanted me to say to you. They were more in the nature of observations.”

Poor guy, he seems to think I’d leave that alone. “Observations?”

“Statements.”

I tilt my head quizzically. He starts to do the same, then stops himself. I inhibited his willingness to be influenced. I gave him that individualistic streak.

“Do you remember any of those statements? Her statements?”

“Yes. They were among the first things I ever heard.”

“Please tell me.”

“Okay.” He frowns slightly with the effort of recall. “She’s a headstrong little bitch, okay, well, so am I, she got that from me. She doesn’t think she owes me anything, she doesn’t think I gave her anything, it was always about her father. Well, too bad, honey, because he’s dead and I’m all that’s left. And now she’s off with Solo, that snake in the grass, I should have known better. I did, didn’t I? I knew I had to keep them separated and then like an idiot I let them meet. I will destroy that little monster, I swear, after all I’ve done for him, taking him in when his backstabbing, criminal parents … and who does Evening think cost her her father?”