That evening Jaime was in Steve's room eating dinner with him. She looked at her bionic hand and then watched Steve use his bionic hand to feed himself. "Our hands are really incredible, aren't they?"
"What?" Steve asked with his mouth full.
"Our hands," Jaime repeated, lifting her bionic hand up and wiggling her fingers. "I mean, they can crush this glass like it was nothing or gently pick it up so that we can drink from it." She picked up her glass of water and took a sip.
Steve smiled. "Yeah, Rudy's a genius."
"But do you ever get used to the tingling?"
"The what?"
"The tingling. That tingling feeling when we touch something."
Steve loathed when people asked him what bionics felt like or how it felt when he touched something. He hated being the subject of medical curiosity. But with Jaime, he could talk freely about it because they shared the bond of being bionic. "I guess I'm so used to it that I don't really notice it anymore. Does it bother you?"
"Sometimes. I mean, it was such a strange sensation to get used to at first and it's definitely not as noticeable as it used to be, but every once in a while I'll find myself just focusing on the sensation for like an entire day. It's very distracting."
"Yeah, I would get that sometimes too, but by the third year it went away. Give it time," he assured her.
Jaime smiled. "I'm so glad I have you to talk bionics with, Steve. Nobody else in the world knows what it feels like to be bionic."
They continued to chat as they ate dinner. After dinner, Jaime brought out a deck of cards, sat on his bed, and they played poker on Steve's overbed table for a couple of hours before calling it a night.