Delete Me
"She edits memories for a living. He wants her to delete his obsession with her. She can't—because she's felt it from inside his mind."
Session forty-seven.
The neural link hums at my temples, a frequency I've come to crave more than sleep. Dr. Vivienne Cross sits across from me, eyes closed, her consciousness threading through mine like light through water.
She's in my memories again. The boardroom. The screams.
But we both know that's not why I keep coming back.
The trauma work finished weeks ago.
The screams are quieter now—background noise instead of a constant howl. I can sleep through the night most times. I can look at a conference room without my hands shaking. Eleven months of sessions, and Dr. Cross has done what she promised: made the past survivable.
What she didn't promise was this.
Her.
I first noticed it around session twenty. The way her breath would catch when she surfaced from a particularly intense memory. The slight flush on her cheeks. The way she'd avoid my eyes while she made her clinical notes.
I know what she sees in there. I know because I've stopped trying to hide it.
Every memory she enters, I'm thinking about her. The way she tilts her head when she's listening. The curve of her neck. The impossible gentleness of her hands when she adjusts the neural sensors. I've built a cathedral to her in my mind, and every session, she walks through it.
She knows how I feel.
What took me longer to realize is that the link goes both ways.
"Session forty-seven," she says, her voice professional, controlled. "How are we feeling today, Marcus?"
We. She always says we. Clinical distance dressed up as partnership.
"Better," I say. "The nightmares have stopped."
"That's excellent progress." She's looking at her tablet, not at me. "We should discuss transitioning to a maintenance schedule. Perhaps monthly check-ins instead of weekly."
She's trying to end this.
I've been waiting for her to try.
"Vivienne."
Her stylus stops moving. In eleven months, I've never used her first name.
"Mr. Webb, I think—"
"I know you feel it too."
The silence is absolute. The neural link pulses between us, still active, still connecting her mind to mine.
"I don't know what you're—"
"Yes, you do." I lean forward. "The link goes both ways. You feel my memories from inside. But I feel you feeling them. I feel your reaction. Your heart rate when you see yourself through my eyes. The way your breath changes when you touch a memory of me wanting you."
She's pale now. Frozen.
"That's not—the link doesn't—"
"It does. I've felt it for months." I hold her gaze. "I've felt you wanting me back. I've felt you hating yourself for it. I've felt you trying to stay professional while your whole body lights up every time you're in my head."
"Marcus—"
"Tell me I'm wrong."
She doesn't.
She should disconnect.
I can see her thinking it—the clinical part of her brain running through protocols, liability, professional consequences. She should terminate the session, refer me to a colleague, report the breach.
Instead, she says: "Show me."
The link is still active. I understand what she's asking.
I close my eyes and think about her. Not a memory this time. Now. What I feel right now, in this moment, looking at her. The ache that's lived in my chest for months. The way her voice sounds when she thinks I'm not listening. The curve of her wrist. The desperate, consuming need to know what she sounds like when she stops being careful.
I feel her receive it.
Through the link, I feel her feel me.
And then—God—I feel her feel herself. Her reaction to my wanting. The heat that floods through her. The professional walls cracking, crumbling, collapsing under the weight of eleven months of pretending.
She gasps. Her hand flies to her mouth.
"Vivienne."
Her eyes open. They're wet.
"I'm going to lose my license," she whispers.
"I don't care."
"I'll face criminal charges. Patient exploitation. They'll—"
"I don't care."
She stares at me. Through the link, I feel her fear, her desire, her desperate calculation. I feel the moment she stops fighting.
She stands up. Walks to the door. Engages the lock.
"One night," she says, turning back to me. "We have one night. Then I have to fix this."
I understand what she means. What she'll have to do to protect herself.
"One night," I agree.
It's not enough. It will never be enough.
But I'll take what she can give me.
She kisses me first.
I've imagined this moment in a thousand variations, built it and rebuilt it in memories she's walked through. The reality is better—messier, more desperate. She tastes like the green tea she drinks between sessions, and her hands shake when they find my face.
"I've felt this so many times," she breathes against my mouth. "Felt you imagining it. I thought I was going insane."
"You're not insane." I pull her closer, onto my lap in the therapy chair. "You're feeling what I feel. You always have been."
The neural link is still active. I can feel her arousal like an echo of my own—a feedback loop building between us. When I kiss her neck, I feel the sensation twice: once through my lips, once through her nerve endings.
"Oh God," she gasps. "The link—I can feel—"
"I know." I find the zipper at the back of her dress. "I feel everything you feel. You feel everything I feel. No hiding anymore."
"No hiding," she repeats, and something breaks open in her voice. Relief. Terror. Surrender.
We use the therapy couch.
Fitting, I suppose. The place where I've laid myself bare for eleven months, finally serving its real purpose.
She's beautiful in ways I'd only imagined. The freckle on her collarbone. The scar on her hip from some accident she's never mentioned. The sounds she makes when I touch her—soft, surprised, like she'd forgotten her body could feel this way.
Through the link, I feel her experiencing me. The breadth of my shoulders under her hands. The roughness of my jaw against her thighs. The weight of me pressing her into the leather.
It's overwhelming. Every sensation doubled, reflected, amplified. When I enter her, I feel it from both sides—the stretch and fullness from her perspective, the tight heat from mine. We gasp together, move together, exist in a space where the boundaries between us dissolve completely.
"I felt you," she says, nails digging into my back. "Every session. Felt you wanting this. Wanting me."
"I know."
"I tried so hard not to want you back."
"I know." I thrust deeper, and we both moan. "I felt you trying. I felt you failing."
"God, Marcus—"
"I felt you going home after sessions and thinking about me. Felt you lying awake. Felt you touching yourself and pretending it wasn't about me."
She cries out—pleasure and exposure and release all tangled together. Through the link, I feel her orgasm building like a wave, and when it breaks, it tears through both of us. I follow her over the edge, and for one perfect moment, we're not two people anymore.
We're one.
The hours disappear.
We move from the couch to the floor to the couch again. We talk between rounds—real talk, not therapy talk. She tells me about her brother who died in the Climate Wars, the one whose face she edited out of her own memories because the grief was destroying her. I tell her about my team, all eleven of them, and how I've stopped trying to forget their names.
"You were right," she says, tracing patterns on my chest. "The trauma work was done weeks ago."
"I know."
"You kept booking appointments."
"I know."
"I should have refused. Should have referred you out." She props herself up to look at me. "I couldn't."
"Because of the link."
"Because of you." She kisses me, soft and sad. "I've been in hundreds of minds, Marcus. Thousands of memories. I've never felt anything like what you feel for me. It's..." She trails off.
"Consuming."
"I was going to say terrifying." She laughs, but there are tears in her eyes. "You love me. I've felt it from inside. I know exactly how much, exactly how deep. No one's ever—" Her voice breaks. "No one's ever felt that way about me before."
I cup her face in my hands. "And you? What do you feel?"
She doesn't answer with words. She opens the link wider, lets me in, shows me.
It's not the same as mine—her love is careful, qualified, fighting itself at every turn. But it's there. Real and growing and so fragile I'm afraid to breathe on it.
"I can't lose this," I tell her.
"You have to." She pulls away, and I feel the professional mask sliding back into place. "It's almost dawn, Marcus. I have to—"
"I know."
"The audit trails will show the link anomalies. If anyone reviews my files, they'll see that something happened tonight. I'll lose my license. I'll go to prison."
"So delete me."
She flinches.
"Delete the memory," I continue, my voice steady even though my chest is caving in. "You've done it thousands of times. Edit out tonight, and no one will ever know."
"Marcus—"
"I'll remember. That's enough." It's not. It will never be enough. But I can't ask her to destroy her life for me. "Do what you have to do."
She sets up the equipment with shaking hands.
I sit in the chair beside the neural couch, watching her prepare to forget me. Every touch of the sensors, every adjustment of the settings—I memorize it all. Someone needs to remember.
"I'm leaving myself a message," she says quietly.
"What?"
She pulls up a file on her personal drive. Types three words. Shows me the screen.
Find him again.
"I might not remember tonight," she says. "But I'll know there's something I'm supposed to find. Someone I'm supposed to look for." She meets my eyes. "I'll find my way back. It might take time. But I'll find you."
"You don't know that."
"No." She lies down on the couch, presses the sensors to her own temples. "But I know myself. I know how I feel about you—I felt it through the link, remember? Even if I delete the memories, the feeling will still be there. Like a phantom limb. I'll know something's missing."
"Vivienne—"
"Wait for me." Her eyes are wet again. "However long it takes. Wait for me to figure it out."
I take her hand. Squeeze it.
"I've been waiting for eleven months," I tell her. "What's a little longer?"
She laughs—watery, broken, beautiful. Then she closes her eyes, activates the link, and begins to erase herself from herself.
Watching it is worse than the boardroom.
Through the residual connection, I feel her memories of tonight dissolving. Our first kiss—gone. The couch, the floor, the confession—erased. Everything we built in these few hours, carefully and thoroughly deleted.
When she opens her eyes, they're blank.
Professional.
Strange.
"I'm sorry," she says, sitting up with a slight frown. "Did I fall asleep? That's never happened before." She looks at me like I'm any other patient. Like the past eleven months never happened. "Mr. Webb, isn't it? I don't seem to have your file up. Do we have an appointment?"
I stand. My legs feel like someone else's.
"No," I manage. "I was just leaving."
"Oh. Well." She smiles—polite, distant, nothing like the smile she gave me an hour ago. "Have a good evening."
I walk out of her office.
I do not look back.
Three weeks later, I get a message.
An encrypted file from an anonymous sender. No text, just a location and a time. A coffee shop in the Arts District. Tomorrow. Noon.
I'm there at eleven.
She walks in at twelve fifteen, looking around with a furrowed brow like she's not sure why she came. Her eyes pass over me, pause, return. Something flickers in her expression—not recognition, not quite. But something.
"Do I know you?" she asks.
"No," I say. "But you wanted to."
She sits down across from me. Studies my face with those careful therapist's eyes.
"I found a file on my drive," she says slowly. "Three words. I don't remember writing them, but they're in my handwriting. Find him again." She tilts her head. "I've been trying to figure out what it means for weeks. And then this morning, I woke up and just... knew to come here."
"What do you feel right now?"
She's quiet for a moment. Reaches across the table, brushes her fingers against my hand.
"Like I've been missing something." Her voice catches. "Like there's a hole in my head shaped like a person. And you—" She looks at me with those wet, wondering eyes. "You feel like you might fit."
I turn my hand over. Lace my fingers through hers.
"I'm Marcus," I say. "We have a lot to talk about."
She doesn't remember me.
But she came back anyway.
That's enough to start.