The Wonders Read Online Free

me, Leon. You three are all different, and all magnificent.”
    Leon dropped his shoulders. The shirt slid down his arms, and he caught it with the fingertips of his left hand as it drifted toward the rug. Cool air flowed through his chest.
    â€œWhat the feck!” Kathryn used the arms of the low chair to push herself up. “Oh my god. Oh my feckin’ god. Now that is a proper spectacle. Can I come closer?”
    He nodded. She lowered her woolly scalp to Leon’s breast. The backs of her naked ears were pale and shot through with faint blue like old pen markings. A fragrance drifted up from her, a grandmothery cozy scent that Leon realized must be lanolin.
    â€œDo you ever touch it?” She raised her eyes to him, still bent toward his chest.
    â€œYou can touch it if you want.” He had never said that to anyone before. He hoped she would say the same to him and that he would be permitted to cup the tight black curly wool cropped close to her skull. Or the breast. He willed himself not to think about the breast. “I mean, you can touch the metal part. Be careful of the joins.”
    He released the clasp that held the titanium rib section in place across the fist-sized hole in his chest, and swung open the door of silver bones. Kathryn peered into the cavity.
    â€œHoly shite, I can’t believe I can see right through you! The scarring in the hole looks so ancient, like bog-man skin.” She shifted to see from a different angle. “So that’s your blood going through the tubes out of the heart. And the struts—”
    â€œCeramic, to hold the heart in place,” Leon interrupted, not pleased to be called a bog man. He was having second thoughts. He didn’t want anyone touching the heart, possibly knocking out a synthetic artery or dislodging a strut.
    â€œMay I touch it too?” Christos asked. “I also have mechanical devices in me. It is vexing that I can’t see them without a series of opposing mirrors or examine them properly with my fingers. You are a lucky man.”
    The absurdity of that statement struck them all at the same time. Kathryn guffawed.
    â€œLet’s talk about what’s going to happen now.” Rhona intercepted the possibility of Leon’s heart being handled by passing out electronic schedules. She was shaking her head and muttering about discreet coverings for Kathryn.
    â€œThe trouble with this new style is that it’s revealing when you move a certain way. We could have a camouflaged G-string thing made for you. No one would even know it was there.”
    â€œOh, great. Underpants, the ones monkeys wear in the circus. I could get big striped bloomers. Do you want me to wear a matching pillbox hat too? Should I have a little organ strapped to me that I can grind while you take the hat around?”
    When Rhona had described Kathryn and Christos to Leon, she had mentioned that Kathryn was a little spiky. In their months together before Leon and Christos arrived, Rhona said, she and Kathryn had settled into a pattern of communication where Rhona, by nature the excitable one, would back down in the face of Kathryn’s withering commentary and wait for the fury to fizz out of her in odd interjections and mutterings before the conversation could continue. “It’s her way back,” Rhona had told him. “Her way back to herself.”
    â€œI know.” Kathryn was talking rapidly. Her Irish accent was much stronger now. “What about a bikini, then? Hot pink withspangles, maybe. And a costume I can rip off like a stripper. Pasties for my nipples, right?”
    Leon directed his gaze resolutely at Rhona. Anywhere but at Kathryn. Occasionally he would glance at Christos or Yuri and widen his smile to indicate amusement or agreement as if he was engaged in the conversation. It was imperative that he not look at Kathryn’s nipples.
    In high school this kind of thing had happened to him every day. The