"Why are you so surprised about all this?" Ratthi asked me. I'd confronted him over breakfast in the mall, where he had been cheerfully enjoying his meal in the company of Gurathin. My threat assessment had spiked about a person who had left Ratthi's quarters the previous night. I was pretty sure they'd had sex, but the individual was also exhibiting signs of assault. And sure enough, Ratthi had some light bruising.
The bad part was that I'd then had to endure an explanation of why, which had caused me to delete said explanation, just as I was already planning to delete this entire interaction as soon as it ended. Gurathin's skin had reddened through this whole thing. He was keeping his head down, pretending great interest in his food. Ratthi, though, was perfectly, painfully (for me) transparent about what had happened.
"Why wouldn't I be surprised?" I said defensively. How could I know I was wandering into some weird intimacy-hobby minefield? "This isn't normative behavior." Not that I'm judging. All involved were consenting adults and the dangers (or so I hoped, I'd deleted that part) were minimal. I wouldn't have deleted it if they weren't minimal.
But then Ratthi dropped this bomb: "But I told you all about this just two weeks ago when you said Nyda was a security risk and I had to explain about the scenario we'd scripted. We went through it – you and I. You even suggested a better method of restraints."
Gurathin coughed lightly, which made me wonder if he'd been party that conversation as well.
"What?" I was frantically examining my logs from two weeks ago, where I noticed a suspicious gap. Had someone altered my fucking memory? I panicked until I realized the obvious culprit was me. Fuck. Just when I thought this couldn't get more embarrassing.
"It's fine, though," Ratthi offered innocently. "If you want to know more, I'll gladly-"
"No! No." I should have said something else, anything else, but I couldn't bring anything appropriate to mind. Instead, I about-faced and walked away, trying to work out how to remove this from my memory without removing it from my memory. That was going to be tough.