Not a stitch of their clothing could be seen.
“Albert?”
He was staring at her there amid the statues, her naked breasts accented by gravity, her nipples erect from the chill, her bare buttocks up in the air, her whole body covered in gooseflesh, and again he was stricken with that bizarre and fierce arousal, that animal lust.
He closed his eyes, squeezing them hard against the strange urges he felt, and in just a moment he felt himself calming. What the hell was wrong with him?
“Albert, is that you?”
Again he opened his eyes. Brandy was getting to her feet now, modestly covering her breasts but not that other part. That part of her was fair and golden, a small tuft of lovely blonde, a place forbidden to his eyes, but unlocked in a moment of strange lust. Suddenly he was aroused again, as stiff as the last pair of sentinels in the previous room.
He turned and bolted from the doorway, turning away from Brandy and the room entirely.
“Albert!” She began to cry again, utterly terrified, and Albert felt sick to have left her in the dark like that. “Albert! Don’t leave me!”
“It’s okay. I’m right here.”
“Come back!”
“Come to me!”
“Albert, please!”
“I can’t!” He growled with frustration. He wanted to go to her, but he couldn’t, and he didn’t even know why. “What the fuck!”
“Where are you?” She was getting closer now.
“I’m right outside the door.” He shined the light at the door, not looking at it. “You can see the light, right?”
“Yeah. Sort of. But I can’t see anything else. My glasses.”
Albert looked down at her glasses. He was still holding them in his hand. “I’ve got your glasses. Come to me, okay Brandy?”
“Okay.” She sounded pitiful. “I’m coming.”
He could hear her footsteps. She was just inside the door, but moving slowly, likely feeling her way around the statues that had bruised him up a good deal on his way out.
At last she stepped through the doorway. Her arms were still crossed over her breasts, as though unaware that her bottom half was showing as well. She spotted Albert and flung herself into his arms. “What the fuck is going on?”
“I don’t know.” He held her that way for a long time, letting her weep against his bare shoulder, trying not to think that she was naked or about what they’d done together. He kept his ears open and watched both the doorway behind and the tunnels ahead, keeping an eye out for whoever or whatever had moved their stuff.
“Why did we do that?” Her words were nearly inaudible, muffled against his shoulder and by her own sobs.
“I don’t know. It was that room. Something about it.”
Brandy pulled away from his embrace and covered herself again, this time covering all of her, useless as it was. “Where are my clothes?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see them.” He gave her back her glasses and she revealed her body long enough to slip them onto her face, both hands trembling so badly that he was afraid she might poke herself in the eye with one of the earpieces.
“Fucking hell!” She leaned back against the hard stone wall. “I couldn’t control myself in there.” She growled with a self-hatred that nearly broke Albert’s heart.
“I’m sorry.”
“Good,” she spat. “You’re sorry. Wonderful. Like that changes anything.”
“I guess it doesn’t.” Albert turned and walked to the tunnel he had not taken before.
“Where are you going?”
“Just looking.”
Albert stood with his back to her now. He was afraid he was going to cry and he did not want that. If it happened he certainly did not want her to see it. He could think of much worse things that could happen to them than a freak humping. Being mauled by whatever took their clothes was not last on that list. Nevertheless, he felt a deep shame at having lured her into such a thing, and an even deeper hurt at the thought that she may never forgive him for it.
There was no movement ahead of them in either of the tunnels. Everything was as he’d left it. Of course, whatever was in here with them probably possessed enough sense to stay well away from the light. In many of the passages they’d traveled, their flashlights did not nearly reach the other end. Anything could have stood right out in the open and watched their every move, completely unobserved.
“Where’s our clothes?”
Albert wanted to lie, but there was no way around it. “I don’t know. They’re gone.”
“How the fuck are they gone?”
“Somebody was in there with us while we were…whatever it was we were doing.”
“We were fucking!” she spat. “God damn it! What was that place?”
“I don’t know.”
Brandy made a noise that was half whimper and half groan and cursed.
Without turning back to her, Albert said, “I saw something when we were…” he started to avoid it, but saw no point in it, “…fucking. I couldn’t do anything. I was out of control.”
“Yeah, no kidding.”
Albert bit his lip and closed his eyes. After a moment, he went on. “When I woke up it was dark, I followed the light through that tunnel over there. I found your glasses just a little ways up and the flashlight was farther ahead.”
“I didn’t see anybody.”
Albert turned and looked at her. She was sitting on the floor with her back to the wall now, hugging her knees in front of her and shivering. She was terrified and ashamed, he could see that in her face, but there was something else there as well, something much colder. “What?”
“I didn’t see anybody. I woke up and you were gone.”
He wanted to argue that logic, but he honestly could not. “I don’t—”
“Why did you want me to come down here with you?” she asked, cutting him off.
Albert stared at her. He knew she didn’t fully trust him, but now that he was under the gun, he could hardly believe it. “Because this is half yours,” He replied cautiously. “It’s your key.”
But her cold eyes never left his.
“Do you think I could come up with something like that?” he asked suddenly, lifting a finger toward the doorway of the sex room. “I’m a fucking Computer Science major! Last I checked that didn’t include fucking with people’s heads!”
Brandy flinched with each word that he spoke. “I didn’t say you made it,” she said, her voice shakier than before.
Albert’s anger was sudden and furious, but it melted away as he saw the fear in her eyes. In a calmer voice he said, “You think I led you here on purpose.”
She said nothing. She only stared at him with those same cold eyes she’d fixed on him in the second floor lounge of Lumey, except this time those eyes were wet with tears.
He backed up against the wall and closed his eyes. “I didn’t know anything about this. If I had, I wouldn’t have come like this. I’d… I don’t know. I’d have found another way.”
Brandy stared at him. None of this made any sense to her, but she did know that he was right. There was no way he could have made something like that. That didn’t mean, however, that he hadn’t discovered it before.
Albert sighed. “What do you want me to do?”
“What?”
“Tell me what you want me to do. I can’t make you trust me. You have no reason to. I fucked up, probably ruined your life. I might as well have raped you. So it’s your game now. What do you want me to do?”
Brandy stared at him and said nothing.
He held the flashlight out to her. “You want the flashlight? You can be in charge. You can just go if you want, leave me here.”
“Leave you here?”