RENTED FEELINGS [MM ROMANCE]

Tow City woke up the same way it always did, with neon light sliding across wet pavement and the soft hum of neural transit pods gliding overhead.

Parketh Morb walked through the MindLend lobby at 8:00 AM, badge pressed to the scanner, coffee in hand. The receptionist waved him through without looking up. He'd worked here for 5 years now, long enough that the building barely registered as strange anymore, even though most of Orata still treated memory rental like something a little bit taboo, a little bit indulgent.

His office sat on the 14th floor, glass walls, a single chair, and a curator rig that looked more like a dentist's tool than anything related to feelings. He sat down and pulled up his queue.

12 requests waited for him. Most were simple. A woman wanted to relive her daughter's first steps because her own memory of it had blurred with age. A man wanted 10 minutes of standing on a beach he'd never actually visited, just to feel sand under his feet once in his life. Parketh scrolled past those. He could build them in his sleep.

Then he saw the flagged one, marked custom, priority client.

He tapped it open, there was no name attached, just a client ID number and a request written in plain text.

I want to feel like someone chose me, not out of duty or out of habit. Like someone looked at me and decided, out of everyone, it was going to be me.

Parketh read it twice. Requests like this weren't rare, people wanted love, wanted to feel wanted, that was half of MindLend's business whether the company admitted it publicly or not but something about the wording sat strange in his chest.

He pulled up the donor archive and started searching for fragments that fit. A donor's memory of a first kiss in the rain. Another donor's memory of someone's hand finding theirs under a table during a nervous dinner. He layered them, trimmed them, softened the transitions the way he'd been trained to do a hundred times before.

It should have taken him 2 hours. It took him 20 minutes.

The details came too easily. He found himself adding things the request never asked for, a specific laugh, low and a little rough at the edges. A habit of tracing circles on the inside of a wrist with a thumb. He didn't remember pulling those details from any donor file. He just knew them, the way a person knows their own address without thinking about it.

He sat back and looked at what he'd built. It felt finished before he'd meant to finish it.

"You're here early."

Parketh looked up. Lucas Hale stood in the doorway, holding his own coffee, hair still damp from a shower he clearly hadn't had time to properly finish.

"I couldn't sleep," Parketh said. "Figured I'd get ahead on requests."

Lucas walked in and glanced at the screen before Parketh could close it. "Custom romance build. Those usually take you all morning."

"This one didn't."

Lucas raised an eyebrow but didn't push. That was one of the things Parketh liked about him. He noticed things, but he gave people room before he asked too many questions.

"Elena wants a status meeting at 10," Lucas said instead. "Something about donor file audits."

Parketh nodded. "I'll be there."

Lucas lingered a second longer, like he wanted to say something else, then just shrugged and left. Parketh turned back to the screen and stared at the memory he'd built. He should have submitted it and moved on to the next request. Instead he sat there a moment longer, feeling uneasy in a way he couldn't explain.

He closed the file and sent it through review.

By 11:00 AM, Parketh had almost forgotten about it.

He was walking back from the audit meeting, half listening to Lucas complain about outdated archive software, when he saw a small group gathered near the main lobby. Investors did site visits sometimes, mostly for show, mostly to remind clients that MindLend had serious money behind it.

Parketh wasn't paying much attention until Elena Torres pulled him aside.

"Parketh, I need you to run an observation session," she said. "One of our silent partners wants to see the curator process firsthand."

"Now?"

"Now."

He didn't have much choice in the matter. Elena wasn't the kind of person who took no for an answer, not from anyone below her, and definitely not from a senior curator who still had 2 years left on his contract renewal.

"Fine," he said. "Who am I walking through it?"

Elena gestured toward the small group by the window. "Sebastian Duke. He's been a partner since the early research phase. Try not to bore him."

Parketh turned, and that was when he saw him.

Sebastian Duke stood near the window, tall, broad-shouldered, dark wavy hair that looked like it had been styled and then deliberately messed up again. His gray eyes moved around the lobby like he was cataloging every detail of it, calm and unreadable, the kind of calm that came from years of practice rather than actual ease.

Something in Parketh's heart did something the moment their eyes met. It wasn't an attraction exactly, or not only that. It felt closer to recognition, the kind you get when you hear a song halfway through and know every lyric that comes next without remembering ever learning it.

He shook it off and walked over, hand extended. "Mr. Duke. I'm Parketh Morb, senior curator. I'll be walking you through the process today."

Sebastian took his hand. His grip was steady, warm, a little longer than a normal handshake should last.

"Parketh," Sebastian said, like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth. "Good to meet you."

"You too."

Parketh pulled his hand back first, more abruptly than he meant to. Sebastian noticed. Of course he noticed.

"Right this way," Parketh said, already walking toward the observation room, grateful for an excuse to move.

The session itself was routine. Parketh explained the curator process in the same measured tone he used for every tour, how donor fragments got scanned and archived, how requests were matched to compatible emotional profiles, how nothing was ever taken without consent and everything was reviewed for ethical compliance before release.

Sebastian listened closely, asked vital questions, the kind that suggested he already understood more about the technology than most silent partners bothered to learn.

"And custom builds," Sebastian said. "How does that process work exactly?"

Parketh hesitated for half a second. "Curators blend multiple donor fragments into a single cohesive memory based on the client's request. It takes skill to make it feel natural instead of stitched together."

"Does it ever feel too natural?" Sebastian asked. "Like the curator's pulling from somewhere they shouldn't be?"

Parketh looked at him. The question landed strange and specific, too close to the thought he'd had that morning and dismissed.

"No," Parketh said carefully. "It's all sourced from verified donor archives. Nothing personal gets mixed in."

Sebastian held his gaze a moment too long before nodding. "Good to know."

Parketh wasn't sure why, but he didn't fully believe his own answer as he said it.

The tour ended a little after noon. Sebastian thanked him, shook his hand again, let it linger again, and left with the rest of the investor group. Parketh stood in the empty observation room for a moment, unsettled in a way he couldn't explain to himself, let alone to anyone else.

Back at his desk, a notification blinked on his screen. The custom romance build he'd submitted that morning had been requested again, for the third time this month.

He frowned and pulled up the usage log. Same client ID every time. No name attached, just numbers and a payment method flagged private.

"Popular one," Lucas said, walking past and glancing at the screen. "What'd you build?"

"Nothing special," Parketh said. "Just a first-love memory. People like those."

Lucas shrugged and kept walking, already distracted by something else on his tablet.

Parketh stared at the request log a moment longer before closing it. He told himself it didn't matter, that plenty of memories got requested multiple times, that there was nothing unusual about someone wanting to feel the same warmth over and over again.

That night, in an apartment on the top floor of a building inTow City, Sebastian Duke sat alone in the dark with a neural cable resting against the port at the back of his neck. Rain streaked the windows outside, catching the city lights in long, colored lines.

He closed his eyes and let the memory play.

A laugh, low and a little rough at the edges. A thumb tracing slow circles against the inside of a wrist. A voice saying his name like it meant something.

Sebastian's jaw tightened. His hands curled into fists at his sides, not from anger, but from the effort of holding himself together.

He knew this memory. He had lived this memory, once, a long time ago, before it was taken from both of them.

"You don't even know what you built today," he said quietly to the empty room. "But I do."