I’d undressed Sydney enough to know her size and bought her some basic clothes and toiletries. At a neighboring deli, I opted for turkey sandwiches and a variety of small snacks, hoping that’d be bland enough after whatever her stomach had been through. I cut myself off there, since I still needed money for poker stakes. The whole round trip took about twenty minutes, but when I got back to the hotel, Sydney wasn’t in the suite’s living room or bedroom. My heart stopped. I felt like someone in a fairy tale, who’d just woken up to realize everything he thought he’d won was just a dream, falling apart to stardust before his eyes.
I noticed then that the bathroom door wasn’t quite closed and that the light was on. I hesitated outside. “Sydney?”
“Come in,” she said.
I opened the door and was nearly knocked over with the cloying scent of jasmine. Sydney was in the tub, nearly up to her neck in bubbles, and the room felt like a sauna. “How hot is that bath?” I asked, eyeing the steam hovering in the air.
She laughed. “As hot as I could make it. You don’t know how long it’s been since I was really, truly warm.” A slender arm reached out and picked up a small plastic bottle with the hotel’s logo on it. “Or just smelled something … pretty. Everything was so sterile in re-education, almost medicinal smelling. I kind of went crazy with this stuff and used the whole bottle.”
“We’ll have them send up more if you like it that much.” I lifted up the bottle and read the label. It was just a cheap bath gel. “Or get you some real jasmine perfume when I have my poker winnings in hand.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, sinking a little deeper into the suds. “After what I’ve been through … this stuff is the height of luxury. I don’t need anything fancier.”
“Maybe we could talk about what you’ve been through,” I suggested. “You can help me understand.”
“Another time,” she said evasively. “If you brought food back, I’d rather have that right now.”
“And leave your boiling cauldron behind?”
“There’ll be more baths,” she said simply. “And I already managed to shave my legs, which was half my goal. Four months. Ugh.”
She then stood up without warning, treating me to a view of her body, naked except for a few clinging suds and wisps of steam. It warmed my heart—and my blood—that things had stayed the same enough for her to not feel self-conscious around me. I had to work to keep my shock off my face, though. I had noticed she’d lost weight when we got her out of the facility, but I hadn’t realized the extent of it until now. I could practically count her ribs, and even she, with her history of obsessive weight control, had to know that she’d far exceeded healthy limitations.
“Not what you expected, huh?” she asked in a sad voice.
I wrapped a towel around her and drew her close to me. “I expected to see the most beautiful woman in the world, to feel my heart skip a beat in her presence, and to want to carry her off to bed for a night neither of us will forget. So to answer your question, I got exactly what I expected.”
A smile split her face, and she leaned into me. “Oh, Adrian.”
In the other room, I showed her my purchases, and she laughed as she sifted through them, pausing to lift up a fuchsia T-shirt. “Have you ever seen me wear this color?”
“No,” I said. “And it’s about time, especially after those.” I pointed at the pile of khakis on the floor. “Which we’re going to burn.”
She laughed again, and it was the most exquisite sound I’d ever heard. She went with the fuchsia shirt and a pair of white shorts. “You’re the best,” she told me.
I soon found out I wasn’t the only one in her heart, however, when we settled down to eat our dinner. She summoned Hopper out of his inert state, and tears spilled from her eyes when he transformed from a rigid glittering statue to a dull-scaled, weak little creature that was nearly as skinny as she was. She cradled him to her chest and rocked him, telling him the kinds of nonsensical things people do to comfort pets and small children. She told him over and over that everything would be okay now, and I almost wondered if she were comforting herself as much as him. She kept breaking off little bites of her turkey sandwich for him and was halfway through when I finally realized what was happening.
“Hey, hey,” I said. “Save some for yourself.”
“He’s so hungry,” she said. “He can’t even make that little pathetic mewling sound he usually does when he wants food.”
“And that extra-small T-shirt is still too big on you. Finish your sandwich, and he can have my crusts.”
She reluctantly handed him over, and I swore Hopper glared at me for depriving him of her attention. I loved the little guy too, but there was no way he was getting preferential treatment over Sydney. She ate the rest of her sandwich under my watchful eye but wouldn’t touch any of the assorted candy bars I’d bought, no matter my urging. I honestly would’ve liked to have seen her eat them all but knew better than to point out how much she needed sugar and fat.
Hopper fell asleep after that, and I thought Sydney would too. Instead, she invited me to the bedroom and drew me on to the bed with her. “You sure you don’t need some rest?” I asked.
She wrapped her arms around my neck. “I need you.”
Our lips met in our first real kiss since she’d been taken away. It set me aflame, reminding me just how agonizingly much I’d missed her. I’d meant what I told her: It didn’t matter how thin she’d become. She was still the most beautiful woman in the world to me, and there was no one else I wanted more. Not only that, there was no one else whose presence I felt more right in. Even in the midst of our escape from Death Valley and getting situated in these uncertain conditions, there was a comfortable certainty that just in being with her, there was nothing that couldn’t be accomplished.
I trailed kisses down her neck and mentally took back what I’d said about the bath gel being cheap. The jasmine mingled with her own natural scent was intoxicating, far better than any perfume I’d ever gotten her. Her legs felt like silk under my touch, and I was astonished at how quickly my desire ramped up—even more astonished at how hers did too. I worried it might be too much too soon, but when I tried to dissuade her again, she only pulled me closer.
“You don’t understand,” she murmured, running one of her hands through my hair. “You don’t understand how much I need this, how much I need you and to remember I’m alive and in love. They try to take that from you in that place, but I never forgot. I never forgot you, Adrian, and now that you’re here, I …”
She couldn’t finish, and she didn’t have to. I knew exactly what she meant. We kissed again, the kind of kiss that bound us in way that was so much more than physical. I was trying to pull her shirt off when she suddenly paused and asked breathlessly, “You did get something at the store, right?”
My brain was too addled with lust and thoughts of her to fully process what she was saying. “Huh? I got lots of things.”
“Protection,” she said meaningfully. “Wasn’t there a drugstore across the street? Bigger selection there than the other place.”
“I—oh. That kind of thing. Uh, no, I didn’t. I guess I forgot.”
Before Sydney had been taken, she’d been on the pill, and I’d never really had to think about birth control. I think she preferred it that way, not really trusting anyone but herself to handle such important matters. I sighed.
“Don’t I get points for being more concerned about feeding you and dressing you in bright colors than I was about getting you into bed?”
She placed a light kiss against my lips and smiled. “You get lots of points. But unfortunately, you don’t get this.”