And then, I stopped dead. My feet turned to stone, cementing me to the ground as a twenty-seven-year-old—real and not some fantasy version—Woodrow stepped around the corner from the kitchen.
He stood directly in my view, wearing nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants that hung low around his Adonis belt. He had me staring in awe and shock.
He didn't look exactly as I pictured him; he wasn't covered in prison tattoos. From the neck down, he was scarred by flames. His marred frame wasn't skinny. He looked so much better, so much healthier, slender yet muscly.
He took his first and last spoonful of cereal, crunching and swallowing them without an issue as he held the cold bowl to his chest.
His square jaw lifted and his pretty silver eyes landed on me.
The bowl fell from his hands, the spoon, too. Pieces of china and hundreds of sugared hoops flew across the floor.
A“What the fuck?”came from the kitchen, along with some rustling in a nearby bedroom.
“Woodrow. . .” I didn't wait for him to answer. His stare alone had broken the binding spell on my feet.
I raced forward, diving on him as I lurched into his waiting arms. He'd stepped over the broken shards of the bowl to prevent any pain to my feet. His long fingers moved over me, feeling every inch before settling on my back. He squeezed me tightly, no doubt feeling my protruding spine. I touched him, too, my hands gently moving over all his scars.
The man from the kitchen rushed to see us, but he didn't invade our space.
Olivier pulled open his bedroom door and froze in the doorway.
We ignored them both, focusing solely on each other. On the moment when nothing around us existed.
I sloped backwards in Woodrow's arms, getting a better look at the details of his older face. His lips lifted, perfect teeth appearing in the opening of his mouth.
“You’re real.” I felt over the dark stubble on his face, my other hand weaving through his bedhead hair. “You’re alive. I can’t believe you’re alive.”
He leaned into my touch—something he’d never been able to do, and as a result, my eyes scanned down his face to his throat, watching as he swallowed without the pain of his swelling. The mass pushing out his Adam's Apple was gone, replaced by a permanent hole. My fingers left his stubbled cheek, trailing down to the new feature embedded in his scars.
Tears welled in my eyes, distorting my view of him. I blinked and they fell, rolling down my face onto his naked chest. Another droplet clawed from my eyes, and he wiped it away with a delicate thumbpad.
I was careful not to hurt him as my fingers brushed his throat.
“I don't understand how you're here. I don’t even know where here is,” I said, but I didn't wait for an answer. He looked at me like he wondered how I was here, too. “Are you okay?” I asked, and he blinked twice in response, squeezing me lovingly again.
“Can you talk?” I quizzed, my eyes showing compassion to him because I already knew the answer.
His non-dominant hand left my body, tapping at his empty pocket in search of something. . .
“He has an electrolarynx,” Olivier finally chirped. “It's a small device he can put to his neck and sound words.”
“Does it sound like him?” I wondered.
“Fuck, no,” the other man said between sips of coffee and insensitive chuckles. “It's much less irritating.”
Olivier gave him a pointed glare, and he shut up, aside from slurping the last of his too-hot drink. The man licked away his liquid moustache, then disappeared to refill his cup, feeding his coffee addiction.
“It doesn't sound like him. In time, we'll get one that does. We’ve found some recordings of his voice from past audio messages that can be used to replicate it. As soon as I’m out of the sales, it’ll be the first thing I take care of.”
I knew exactly what Olivier meant by sales, without asking. He meant human sales. . . and he was getting out.
“He'll have his voice back.” Ollie's eyes moved to Woodrow, and he breathed in his silent question. “You're wondering where I found her?”
Woodrow blinked twice, and Ollie, like me and the other man here, who had returned with his second cup of coffee, understood.
“I found her around three months ago—”
“Oh, boy. Here we go,” Mr. Nameless quipped again.
