“She wasn’t hard on me,” I said after a beat. “Though I’m not sure I’m as athletically trained as she is. I had trouble keeping up.”
He laughed. “No one is as athletically trained as she is. She was almost an Olympic gymnast at sixteen, then decided the event trivialized the sport. She’s a tough girl to get ahead of. On anything.”
“I can see that.”
I grabbed the bottle of water Natalia had given me an hour ago and drained the rest of it, crumpling the plastic when I was finished. “So now what?” Inside, I prayed the training was over. I didn’t have anything left to give.
“Now you eat something and go to bed, and you do it again tomorrow.”
“Until when?” I called, following him out of the gym. “When are you going to tell me what I’m doing here? What’s the point of all this?”
“When you’re ready,” he answered, and disappeared down the hall.
* * *
Connor wasn’t lying about the training. I trained with Natalia every day. Occasionally, I’d get the afternoon off, but that was only to go to the lab to have more blood work done, more physical exams. I had a few mental evaluations too, but no one told me whether or not I passed.
I still hadn’t had the chance to escape into town to find a phone to call Anna. Her absence in my life was starting to get to me. Some mornings, I’d wake up, and the first thing I did was hurry to my bedroom door, planning to go see Anna, or make her something for breakfast. And then I’d remember. She wasn’t here. She was a hundred miles away in that crappy house, with our crappy parents, alone.
I needed to talk to her soon.
I saw Sam twice more the next week but only briefly. Once in the lounge, just as I finished my breakfast, and again in the lab. Sometimes, I’d knock on his door to see if he wanted to watch TV or work out together, but he never answered, and the door was always locked.
I started to wonder if he was a ghost, if maybe his room was always empty. I began treating it like a game, like a child checking his father’s desk drawer to see if it was unlocked, to see what he hid inside.
Before breakfast, I knocked. After dinner, I knocked. I did this for a few days until he finally answered.
At first, I was so shocked to actually see him inside, to have the door actually open, that I just stood there staring at my raised knocking first as if I were dreaming. Or hallucinating.
“Hi,” I said, and let my arm drop. “You answered.”
He smirked. “Well, you wouldn’t stop knocking. I got tired of hearing it.”
“Sorry. It’s just…”
I’m lonely.
I didn’t say it out loud, but I wanted to. I rarely talked to anyone other than Connor and Natalia. I still hadn’t seen that goddamn Fox since the day he brought me here. He was always out or gone or unavailable.
It was painful for me to admit to anyone that I needed them, but I figured if anyone could relate to the loneliness that came with living here, it was Sam.
“I’m going crazy here,” I said, and looked at the floor, then back up again. “Come eat breakfast with me?”
He thought for a second and then nodded. “Lead the way.”
Breakfast was cheesy eggs, bacon, and oranges. Sam told me about his first days in the building. He told me about his training sessions with Natalia and how she kicked his ass a lot. We laughed about the way she shook her head when we screwed up and made this tsk-tsk sound, as if she couldn’t bear to waste words on our incompetence.
After that day, Sam and I had breakfast every morning. He told me a lot about his mom and his dad. About where he grew up. He told me about his dream of owning a ranch in Montana someday.
But the morning ritual lasted only a week. The following Monday, Sam wasn’t there. And his absence in my routine had an effect through the rest of the day. I got through my training with Natalia by some miracle or act of God, but Connor noticed right away that something was wrong.
“You seem off today,” he said as he walked with me after the training session. He’d been sitting in on them a lot, and I always worked harder when he was present. Today, I could only muster the bare minimum.
“I’m restless,” I answered. It wasn’t exactly the truth but close enough. “I’m stuck in this building with no one to talk to, nowhere to go. I’m starting to feel like a caged animal. And…” I trailed off.
I miss my sister, I thought.
When I agreed to come here, the Fox hadn’t said anything about cutting off communication with Anna. I’d never gone a day without her before now.
When we reached the hallway of my floor, Connor pulled me to a stop outside my room. I looked down at his hand, his fingers gently wrapped around my wrist, thumb touching index finger. He had nice hands. His fingers weren’t too thin or knobby. The veins running through his knuckles were just present enough to be sexy in a way that was decidedly male.
He stepped closer to me, and my stomach pinwheeled. I pressed into the wall, and he mirrored my movements, putting only an inch or two of space between us.
I swallowed the rush of excitement trying to burst out of my throat, tried to put out the heat climbing up my legs.
If this was some kind of game he was playing, I had the feeling he’d set his trap and I was already caught in it.
He leaned into me and let go of my wrist, running his hand up my waist, sending gooseflesh down my spine. I nearly vibrated beneath his touch.
“Don’t give up, please. I know it’s rough,” he said.
“I feel like I don’t belong here.” I glanced away. “Like I’m not cut out for this.”
“You are.”
I buried the urge to snort, knowing how extremely unattractive it would be in this moment. “I don’t know about that. Your sister thinks I’m weak.”
“Natalia thinks everyone is weak.”
I met his eyes again. “What do you think?”
He pushed a stray lock of hair away from my face and stared at it, trapped in his fingers, for too long. “I think this place needs someone like you.”
He took a step back, smoothed down his oxford shirt and started for the elevator. As I watched him go, I repeated his last words in my head, over and over again until they sounded a lot like, I think I need someone like you.
* * *
Dinner that night was spaghetti. My favorite. But the table had only one place setting again, and Sam didn’t answer his door when I knocked.
I went back to the lounge, got comfortable at the table, and dug into the food. The spaghetti was delicious. The sauce was definitely homemade and had all the right herbs and spices.
I finished it off in record time, downed the small cup of applesauce they’d given me, and turned lastly to the lump of tinfoil on my tray. It looked like garlic bread, but when I unfolded the foil, I found a cell phone inside and a note tied to it.
My chest felt light and fuzzy with something close to gratitude. Something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I undid the twine, and unfolded the note. Call Anna, it said, and was signed C.
Connor.
I clutched the phone to my chest and smiled.
* * *
I took care of my dinner dishes in a rush and hurried back to my room. I paced the floor, trying to decide if it was safe to call Anna here. No one ever visited my room except for Connor, and he’d been the one to give me the phone, so chances were I wouldn’t get in trouble.
Furthermore, wasn’t Connor my supervisor? If he’d given me permission, then I assumed it was okay.
I dialed our home phone and sat on the edge of the bed as it rang on the other end.
It rang and rang.
Pick up, damn it.
Finally, the line clicked open.
“Hello?” came my mother’s voice, small and unsure.
“It’s me. Let me talk to Anna.”
There was a pause, an intake of breath. “Hold on,” she said.
No, How are you doing? or I miss you. Par for the course with my mother. Showing emotion was like pulling teeth for her.
A moment later, little Anna’s voice filled the line, and I squeezed my eyes shut before I started bawling.
“Hey, bird,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Dani!” she said. “I miss you!”
“I miss you, too. I’m sorry I haven’t called, but there aren’t many phones here.”
“It’s okay,” she said quietly, but I could tell it wasn’t. Anna had a knack for downplaying how she really felt. Learned most likely from our mother. Maybe we were both more like her than I wanted to admit.
“How are you?” I asked.
I could almost hear her shrug through the phone. “I’m okay. I’ve been drawing you pictures since you left. I told Mom I wanted to mail them to you, but she said she doesn’t know the address.”
“That’s okay. Save them for when I get home, and then I’ll have a ton to look at all at once.”
She giggled. “Okay. When are you coming home?”
I looked out the expanse of windows at Lake Michigan beyond. It was called a lake, but it didn’t look like one. It looked as endless as an ocean. “I don’t know. Hopefully soon.”
“Are you having fun?”
I grunted. “Not really. I’m tired. A lot. And it’s boring here without you.”
“It’s boring here, too.”
“Is Mom being nice to you?”
“Yeah” was all she said.
I wanted to press, I wanted her to elaborate, but knew it wasn’t right to ask. Anna didn’t really know how terrible our parents were, or maybe she did in an abstract sense, and I wanted to keep it that way. The more I asked, the more suspicious she’d become. And I didn’t want her frightened while I was away.
“Well, I should probably get going. I don’t get long on the phone. I’ll call you again soon.”
“Tomorrow?” she asked.
“I’ll try. I love you, bird.”
She laughed through the line. “I love you, too.”
When we hung up, I lay back on the bed for a long time, trying not to cry.
* * *
I decided to skip breakfast the next morning. Sam wasn’t there again, and he wasn’t answering his door, and that left me annoyed and sad and miserable. I just wanted to start training to get my mind off everything.
I went straight into the elevator, jamming my finger into the button for below-ground level two.
When I arrived, I stepped into the hall just as a door on the left opened and a young man stepped out.
I slowed.
He froze.
Immediately, I recognized the look on his face. Caught.
He shut the door behind him and walked toward me, determined. Each step calculated, precise.
He was taller than me by several inches, bigger too. Nothing at all like Sam. This guy was cut. Veins ran through his knuckles, up his forearms, bulging beneath the skin. Strips of muscle stood out from each other like braided rope before turning into defined biceps, before disappearing beneath the sleeves of his black T-shirt.
I caught myself daydreaming about what he looked like without that shirt, maybe without the jeans, too, and quickly banished the thought.
The boy gazed down at me as he passed, eyes guarded and wild, and I looked up at him, unable to tear my eyes away.
The air crackled with awareness, as if he knew exactly who I was, as if he held the secrets to all of the things I’d been dying to know.
He stepped inside the still-open elevator, and I didn’t realize until he looked back at me that I’d come to a complete stop in the middle of the hallway to stare.
“Who are you?” I asked, even though several yards stretched between us now.
He leaned into the back wall of the elevator, hands propped on the edges of the railing as the doors slid closed.
* * *
Natalia kicked my ass in training that day. She knew right away I was distracted.
He laughed. “No one is as athletically trained as she is. She was almost an Olympic gymnast at sixteen, then decided the event trivialized the sport. She’s a tough girl to get ahead of. On anything.”
“I can see that.”
I grabbed the bottle of water Natalia had given me an hour ago and drained the rest of it, crumpling the plastic when I was finished. “So now what?” Inside, I prayed the training was over. I didn’t have anything left to give.
“Now you eat something and go to bed, and you do it again tomorrow.”
“Until when?” I called, following him out of the gym. “When are you going to tell me what I’m doing here? What’s the point of all this?”
“When you’re ready,” he answered, and disappeared down the hall.
* * *
Connor wasn’t lying about the training. I trained with Natalia every day. Occasionally, I’d get the afternoon off, but that was only to go to the lab to have more blood work done, more physical exams. I had a few mental evaluations too, but no one told me whether or not I passed.
I still hadn’t had the chance to escape into town to find a phone to call Anna. Her absence in my life was starting to get to me. Some mornings, I’d wake up, and the first thing I did was hurry to my bedroom door, planning to go see Anna, or make her something for breakfast. And then I’d remember. She wasn’t here. She was a hundred miles away in that crappy house, with our crappy parents, alone.
I needed to talk to her soon.
I saw Sam twice more the next week but only briefly. Once in the lounge, just as I finished my breakfast, and again in the lab. Sometimes, I’d knock on his door to see if he wanted to watch TV or work out together, but he never answered, and the door was always locked.
I started to wonder if he was a ghost, if maybe his room was always empty. I began treating it like a game, like a child checking his father’s desk drawer to see if it was unlocked, to see what he hid inside.
Before breakfast, I knocked. After dinner, I knocked. I did this for a few days until he finally answered.
At first, I was so shocked to actually see him inside, to have the door actually open, that I just stood there staring at my raised knocking first as if I were dreaming. Or hallucinating.
“Hi,” I said, and let my arm drop. “You answered.”
He smirked. “Well, you wouldn’t stop knocking. I got tired of hearing it.”
“Sorry. It’s just…”
I’m lonely.
I didn’t say it out loud, but I wanted to. I rarely talked to anyone other than Connor and Natalia. I still hadn’t seen that goddamn Fox since the day he brought me here. He was always out or gone or unavailable.
It was painful for me to admit to anyone that I needed them, but I figured if anyone could relate to the loneliness that came with living here, it was Sam.
“I’m going crazy here,” I said, and looked at the floor, then back up again. “Come eat breakfast with me?”
He thought for a second and then nodded. “Lead the way.”
Breakfast was cheesy eggs, bacon, and oranges. Sam told me about his first days in the building. He told me about his training sessions with Natalia and how she kicked his ass a lot. We laughed about the way she shook her head when we screwed up and made this tsk-tsk sound, as if she couldn’t bear to waste words on our incompetence.
After that day, Sam and I had breakfast every morning. He told me a lot about his mom and his dad. About where he grew up. He told me about his dream of owning a ranch in Montana someday.
But the morning ritual lasted only a week. The following Monday, Sam wasn’t there. And his absence in my routine had an effect through the rest of the day. I got through my training with Natalia by some miracle or act of God, but Connor noticed right away that something was wrong.
“You seem off today,” he said as he walked with me after the training session. He’d been sitting in on them a lot, and I always worked harder when he was present. Today, I could only muster the bare minimum.
“I’m restless,” I answered. It wasn’t exactly the truth but close enough. “I’m stuck in this building with no one to talk to, nowhere to go. I’m starting to feel like a caged animal. And…” I trailed off.
I miss my sister, I thought.
When I agreed to come here, the Fox hadn’t said anything about cutting off communication with Anna. I’d never gone a day without her before now.
When we reached the hallway of my floor, Connor pulled me to a stop outside my room. I looked down at his hand, his fingers gently wrapped around my wrist, thumb touching index finger. He had nice hands. His fingers weren’t too thin or knobby. The veins running through his knuckles were just present enough to be sexy in a way that was decidedly male.
He stepped closer to me, and my stomach pinwheeled. I pressed into the wall, and he mirrored my movements, putting only an inch or two of space between us.
I swallowed the rush of excitement trying to burst out of my throat, tried to put out the heat climbing up my legs.
If this was some kind of game he was playing, I had the feeling he’d set his trap and I was already caught in it.
He leaned into me and let go of my wrist, running his hand up my waist, sending gooseflesh down my spine. I nearly vibrated beneath his touch.
“Don’t give up, please. I know it’s rough,” he said.
“I feel like I don’t belong here.” I glanced away. “Like I’m not cut out for this.”
“You are.”
I buried the urge to snort, knowing how extremely unattractive it would be in this moment. “I don’t know about that. Your sister thinks I’m weak.”
“Natalia thinks everyone is weak.”
I met his eyes again. “What do you think?”
He pushed a stray lock of hair away from my face and stared at it, trapped in his fingers, for too long. “I think this place needs someone like you.”
He took a step back, smoothed down his oxford shirt and started for the elevator. As I watched him go, I repeated his last words in my head, over and over again until they sounded a lot like, I think I need someone like you.
* * *
Dinner that night was spaghetti. My favorite. But the table had only one place setting again, and Sam didn’t answer his door when I knocked.
I went back to the lounge, got comfortable at the table, and dug into the food. The spaghetti was delicious. The sauce was definitely homemade and had all the right herbs and spices.
I finished it off in record time, downed the small cup of applesauce they’d given me, and turned lastly to the lump of tinfoil on my tray. It looked like garlic bread, but when I unfolded the foil, I found a cell phone inside and a note tied to it.
My chest felt light and fuzzy with something close to gratitude. Something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I undid the twine, and unfolded the note. Call Anna, it said, and was signed C.
Connor.
I clutched the phone to my chest and smiled.
* * *
I took care of my dinner dishes in a rush and hurried back to my room. I paced the floor, trying to decide if it was safe to call Anna here. No one ever visited my room except for Connor, and he’d been the one to give me the phone, so chances were I wouldn’t get in trouble.
Furthermore, wasn’t Connor my supervisor? If he’d given me permission, then I assumed it was okay.
I dialed our home phone and sat on the edge of the bed as it rang on the other end.
It rang and rang.
Pick up, damn it.
Finally, the line clicked open.
“Hello?” came my mother’s voice, small and unsure.
“It’s me. Let me talk to Anna.”
There was a pause, an intake of breath. “Hold on,” she said.
No, How are you doing? or I miss you. Par for the course with my mother. Showing emotion was like pulling teeth for her.
A moment later, little Anna’s voice filled the line, and I squeezed my eyes shut before I started bawling.
“Hey, bird,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Dani!” she said. “I miss you!”
“I miss you, too. I’m sorry I haven’t called, but there aren’t many phones here.”
“It’s okay,” she said quietly, but I could tell it wasn’t. Anna had a knack for downplaying how she really felt. Learned most likely from our mother. Maybe we were both more like her than I wanted to admit.
“How are you?” I asked.
I could almost hear her shrug through the phone. “I’m okay. I’ve been drawing you pictures since you left. I told Mom I wanted to mail them to you, but she said she doesn’t know the address.”
“That’s okay. Save them for when I get home, and then I’ll have a ton to look at all at once.”
She giggled. “Okay. When are you coming home?”
I looked out the expanse of windows at Lake Michigan beyond. It was called a lake, but it didn’t look like one. It looked as endless as an ocean. “I don’t know. Hopefully soon.”
“Are you having fun?”
I grunted. “Not really. I’m tired. A lot. And it’s boring here without you.”
“It’s boring here, too.”
“Is Mom being nice to you?”
“Yeah” was all she said.
I wanted to press, I wanted her to elaborate, but knew it wasn’t right to ask. Anna didn’t really know how terrible our parents were, or maybe she did in an abstract sense, and I wanted to keep it that way. The more I asked, the more suspicious she’d become. And I didn’t want her frightened while I was away.
“Well, I should probably get going. I don’t get long on the phone. I’ll call you again soon.”
“Tomorrow?” she asked.
“I’ll try. I love you, bird.”
She laughed through the line. “I love you, too.”
When we hung up, I lay back on the bed for a long time, trying not to cry.
* * *
I decided to skip breakfast the next morning. Sam wasn’t there again, and he wasn’t answering his door, and that left me annoyed and sad and miserable. I just wanted to start training to get my mind off everything.
I went straight into the elevator, jamming my finger into the button for below-ground level two.
When I arrived, I stepped into the hall just as a door on the left opened and a young man stepped out.
I slowed.
He froze.
Immediately, I recognized the look on his face. Caught.
He shut the door behind him and walked toward me, determined. Each step calculated, precise.
He was taller than me by several inches, bigger too. Nothing at all like Sam. This guy was cut. Veins ran through his knuckles, up his forearms, bulging beneath the skin. Strips of muscle stood out from each other like braided rope before turning into defined biceps, before disappearing beneath the sleeves of his black T-shirt.
I caught myself daydreaming about what he looked like without that shirt, maybe without the jeans, too, and quickly banished the thought.
The boy gazed down at me as he passed, eyes guarded and wild, and I looked up at him, unable to tear my eyes away.
The air crackled with awareness, as if he knew exactly who I was, as if he held the secrets to all of the things I’d been dying to know.
He stepped inside the still-open elevator, and I didn’t realize until he looked back at me that I’d come to a complete stop in the middle of the hallway to stare.
“Who are you?” I asked, even though several yards stretched between us now.
He leaned into the back wall of the elevator, hands propped on the edges of the railing as the doors slid closed.
* * *
Natalia kicked my ass in training that day. She knew right away I was distracted.
