Page 2 of Lost Touch

And honest-to-God yellow sunlight flowing over all of it like honey.

Tears pricked the corners of my eyes and my vision blurred, clearing after a moment.

My rescuer’s frowning face appeared in front of me again, and now it looked like an actual face and not a watercolor smear with eyes. Largish nose, firm lips, and strong, masculine bones, all perfectly arranged and topped off with glossy dark brown bedhead. I’d been saved from my cell by a guy who belonged on a magazine cover. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it added to the unreality of everything around me and everything in my head.

“How much pain are you in?” he asked, holding out a glass of water. I tried to sit up and failed. “Fuck, you can’t answer that anyway, your throat’s too dry. Sorry, I’m a moron.”

He slipped his arm behind my shoulders and boosted me up, letting me lean against his side and holding the glass to my lips. The water tasted like nothing I’d ever even imagined, like life itself flowing into my mouth and cooling my throat and esophagus all the way down. I guzzled it like an animal, wetting my chin, drops dribbling onto his hand and running down my neck.

At last I’d emptied the glass, and he carefully settled me back down, putting it aside on the nightstand.

I licked my lips, wincing as my tongue caught on the chapped cracks in them. He could’ve been a model, and I must’ve looked like death warmed over. Only not warmed quite enough. Death lightly microwaved?

“I have pain pills for you if you need them,” he said. “Just tell me what you need. And ask me any questions you want. I know you must have a million, but I promise you, you don’t need to ask if you’re in any danger here. I swear, we got out, we got away, and you’re as safe as you’ve ever been in your life.”

We got out. We got away.My mind spun into frantic overload, my vision going all wonky again and my breath coming faster at the thought of asking all the follow-up questions he obviously expected me to ask—all the questions that should’ve been urgently trying to pour out of me.

I’d been in that cell. In those labs.

And I couldn’t remember how long I’d been there.

I couldn’t remember what had come before that.

I couldn’t fucking remember.

His voice came through like bursts of static, distant, barely audible over the pounding of my heart and the rasping of my breath and a high-pitched keening sound…that was also coming from me.

Blackness descended again. I tried to fight it and failed.

When I swam back to the surface, blinking my eyes open more easily this time around, the sunlight had moved from the windows, leaving only ambient daylight. The panic had been washed away by my impromptu nap, but it’d left me feeling drained and apathetic. So I couldn’t remember. I’d deal with it later. It felt so far away that it didn’t matter.

The magazine guy sat in a chair by my bed, a phone in his hand, frowning down at it with tension in every line of his body. I stared at him, not wanting to speak and attract his attention before I’d looked my fill. Long legs, broad shoulders, lean body. Maybe too lean, and that didn’t surprise me given that I could vaguely recall how poorly I’d been fed in that prison-place. This man’s frame was a lot bigger than mine, and he had to have a few inches of height on me, too. How had he survived on rations that had always left me feeling more than half starved?

His eyes flicked up from the phone and met mine. And held them again. I couldn’t look away, even though the intimacy of it made me want to pull the blankets up over my (probably disgusting) face and hide. His eyes were real. Safe. The first sign of safety I’d had in however many months or years. As long as I could see them, I’d know I’d been rescued and this wasn’t some horrible tease of a dream.

“Hey,” he said softly, his voice a low, soothing rumble. “Back with me?”

I managed to nod.

“Good.” He leaned forward, slipping his phone into his jeans pocket and propping his elbows on his knees. “I’m not even sure I know your name. I’ve been calling you Ash, since I think that’s what you told me when you were half-awake while we escaped. But I don’t know if I got that right, or your last name, or anything else about you. Only that we were in that place together.” A faint hitch in his voice as he said “that place” told me he hadn’t gotten out without some mental scars, too. A better man might’ve hated seeing someone else being traumatized, but it reassured me.

Empathy? Could I mentally reframe that as empathy rather than as the much less noble “misery loves company”? Anyway.

At least he’d indirectly asked one question I could actually answer.

“Ash is right,” I whispered. “Asher. For short. I mean, Ash is for short, not Asher. That’s…for long.”

Or maybe I couldn’t answer it after all, at least not without being a blithering idiot. I wrenched my gaze away and stared down at the blankets, my cheeks feeling weird.

Hot. I must be blushing.

But I couldn’t feel that properly, either.

Couldn’t those bastards have removed my ability to experience total, abject humiliation instead of my ability to feel it when I’d been injured, something that had at least been proven evolutionarily useful even though it sucked?

“I’m Drew,” he said quietly, with no trace of laughter or mockery. “It’s nice to meet you. Even though the circumstances were fucking awful.”

That pulled a helpless, wheezing laugh out of me. Fucking awful? That couldn’t possibly be a bigger understatement.

---