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She felt as if she’d been lost in a wilderness of ignorance and was slowly beginning to find her way out. Nothing made sense, but order was beginning to assert itself; she wasn’t as panicked now and she could think logically.
She had walked in the doors hell-bent on getting a prepaid cell phone that she didn’t need, but getting one would send an alert to the mysterious “They,” which was what she wanted to avoid. A true burner was one a third party had picked up and passed on, so it wasn’t linked to her. She didn’t know how she knew this little detail, but she did, and it wasn’t giving her a headache, either. Yay for her.
She left the store without buying anything, not even OTC meds for headaches and nausea. She obviously didn’t have any kind of virus, because what bug could be stopped by concentrating on songs or other trivial stuff? No, both symptoms were obviously triggered by surfacing memories from the missing two years.
Something had happened to her, something catastrophic and maybe even sinister, though she had no evidence of the latter. Instead she seemed to have been set adrift in a new life, and left to her own devices.
Maybe she’d had some kind of weird reaction to anesthesia whenever she’d had the facial surgery. Maybe it was nothing more than that, and all these suspicions about bugged cell phones and being watched were by-products of movies she’d watched in the past.
She’d be careful because she didn’t know for certain what was going on, she thought as she drove to her cell service provider to get a new phone, but she wouldn’t let this drive her crazy.
That was the smart thing to do—right?
For the rest of the day and evening, things were normal enough, at least on the surface. Lizette did what she routinely did, ate soup for dinner, fielded another call from Diana and reported that she was feeling a little shaky but overall much better. She watched TV. She read—or tried to read. The whole time, she was thinking about the creepy-crawly feeling that her house had been bugged—not just the phone, not just her car, but the house, too. If someone really was going to all that trouble, not bugging the house would leave a big hole in the electronic fence, and she simply couldn’t see that.
But how in hell could she check her house for bugs? She could look at all the lighting fixtures, all the lamps, but wouldn’t that be a dead giveaway if there really were bugs there? Besides that, she’d changed all the bulbs in all the fixtures several times while she’d been living here, and she’d never noticed anything unusual. A really good bugging job would be in the electrical outlets, and she wouldn’t be able to find out for sure unless she had a meter to measure amperage—
Whoa. Headache. She hummed a little, made it go away. She was getting damned tired of these stupid headaches. What if she had one at a critical time, say, when she was driving? She could plow right into a semi, or a van full of kids, or any number of awful things.
Okay, nothing she could do about bugs. She’d be better off going to bed and trying to get some sleep, so she could recover from the roller-coaster ride of pain, nausea, and jangly nerves she’d been on for most of the day. The problem with that was, those jangly nerves were still with her. Her face still wasn’t the face she remembered, at least two years were completely missing from her life, and she couldn’t shake the bone-deep sensation that some unknown, malevolent they—whoever they were—were behind the whole thing, not only in stealing part of her life but keeping her in the dark and standing guard to make certain she stayed there.
That really pissed her off. Why her? What had she done? Was it nothing more than chance, or had she agreed to be a part of a medical study that had gone awry—big understatement there—and this was the result? No, that didn’t explain the new face. Nothing did.
Until she found out exactly what was going on, she figured jangly nerves would become her new norm, and she’d have to learn how to deal with them. Take that guy in Walgreens today; she’d panicked over nothing, which was embarrassing, but at least he was a stranger and she hadn’t done something stupid like start screaming because he asked her a question about shampoo.
Thinking about him was a welcome distraction. For a few minutes she allowed herself to wallow in pure female pleasure as she remembered the impact he’d had on her senses. Was he a walking testament to the truth about pheromones, or what? She’d been both turned on and scared at the same time, which was an exhilarating kind of rush all on its own.
If she hadn’t been such a wienie, maybe he’d have asked for her number. The next big question was, would she have been brave enough to give it to him?
He wasn’t safe. She knew it instinctively. Even though there hadn’t been anything outwardly threatening about him, she knew he didn’t fit into the mold of a safe, normal, everyday type of man.
Strange that she could remember his face so clearly. It was those dark, dangerous, intense eyes that stood out the most. A man like him—
No, she was letting her hormone-driven imagination run away with her, which fit right in with the rest of the day she’d had. She had to laugh at herself. At least thinking about a hot guy was better than worrying about the house being bugged.
Eventually she wound down enough that she thought she might sleep, and dragged herself off to bed. She was restless, though, and her subconscious went over and over the day’s events, trying to make sense of them, trying to solve the puzzle. Then—finally—she slept.
And she dreamed. She knew it was a dream, the way she sometimes did when she had almost surfaced enough to wake up, but not quite. Her surroundings looked real enough, and she was herself in this dream, which was a relief, because after the day she’d had she didn’t want to dream about being someone else.
She’d dreamed about houses before: houses with hidden rooms and steep staircases, other houses she could almost remember as being from the real world, such as the house she’d grown up in; her fifth-grade best friend’s house; even this very house, though with hidden doors and underground rooms that she actually kind of enjoyed, because there was something magical about it. But this … this was a new house, sprawling and meandering, with room after room after room, all white, all airy and strangely peaceful even though as she looked around, she knew she was lost. How the hell was she supposed to get out of here? Every time she thought she’d found the way to the front door, she’d find herself in some other part of the house. She’d
look out a window and see the front door off to the left, or the right, but she could never find it.
Then she realized that he was here—somewhere, lost in the big house the same way she was. He was looking for her and she was looking for him, but walls and doors got in the way. She didn’t feel worried about it, though, just annoyed at the delay. She’d find him, or he’d find her. He always did.
She should have asked what his name was, when he’d bumped into her at Walgreens. She didn’t normally strike up conversations with strange men, especially men like him, but he’d started it, so she could have kept it going. How hard would it have been? While they’d been talking about shampoo—or had it been deodorant?—she could have said, “I’m Lizette. Who are you?”
Instead, he didn’t have a name. She supposed she could always call her mystery man Mr. X, which was better than nothing. She even kind of liked it.
She kept circling through the house, trying to find him. For some reason her path kept going through the largest room of all, a huge room with white walls, white couches and chairs, white billowing curtains. The fourth time she found herself in that big room she got really pissed, and in a fit of temper pushed through a door she hadn’t noticed before—and there he was, in the one room of the house that wasn’t all white. There was color here, reds and blues and greens and browns, like nature itself. There was texture, and smell, as if it were real. He was real enough, just as he’d been in the pharmacy, big and hard and unexpectedly appealing. What a dope she’d been, to have been afraid of him for even a minute. She should have looked into his dark eyes and allowed herself to fall in; she should have trusted him.
No—wait. She didn’t trust anyone, not anymore.
Lizette wanted to tell X that she’d missed him, but her voice wouldn’t work. Crap. It was her dream, she should be able to say whatever she wanted, but for some reason she was mute. All she could do was look at him and wonder how he’d look naked.
She hadn’t had a sex life in the past three years. Maybe longer. Okay, that was real life. Beyond that … she knew she wasn’t a virgin, but she couldn’t remember ever wanting anyone the way she wanted X. There was an aching emptiness between her legs, a clawing, almost desperate need to have him inside her.
It wasn’t love, wasn’t a niggling need for a little sexual release. She needed him the way she needed air, inside her, over her, under her…
