smoother, older smell of colored paint. Blue star. Yellow circle. Red hexagon.
Faster.
Green cross. Black square. Purple triangle.
Faster.
The wooden pieces fit themselves into place with small, clattering thumps and thuds as they rolled across the desk.
When all the pieces had returned to the base, the vibration in the desk ceased and he opened his eyes. He put his fingertips on the edge of the table again and touched the puzzle with his gaze and nothing more. He’d done this forty-seven times already tonight, and would keep doing it until the lights went off when he was supposed to be sleeping—but of course he didn’t sleep. He hardly ever did, never more than an hour or two at a time, anyway.
He closed his eyes.
Faster.
Faster.
He could do this another three times, if he was quick, before it was time for Samantha to bring him his meds. He’d have to be finished before she got here. She had no idea what he was, what he could do. But out of all the people who’d worked here over the years, all the doctors, nurses and orderlies, all the guards, hundreds of people who’d taken care of him—Samantha was the only one who’d made it seem like it mattered. How she saw him. What she thought of him. She was the first person since he’d been sent here to make Jed care about anything.
A scant few seconds before he heard the click of the door lock, Jed had finished his last round of the puzzle and pushed it aside. He was already on his feet, standing behind the red line painted on the floor well away from the door. He smoothed his hair, suddenly self-conscious. He should have quit the puzzle sooner. Brushed his hair, his teeth. Changed his shirt, as if any of the four he owned were not identical.
“Hi, Jed.” Samantha’s grin urged his own. “How’s it going?”
“Good, good. You?” He always sounded such like an idiot when he spoke to her, but she never seemed to notice.
“Oh, I’m dandy.” She waited for the door to lock behind her before stepping toward him.
In the past eight years, Jed had never once moved over the red line before that solid click. In eight years, never given anyone reason to fear him. For a brief period of time when he was a teenager, they’d upped his meds to keep him from trying to escape, testing him over and over again to see if he could do with the door lock what he could do with the puzzle, but he’d always failed. It was the type of metal, they said amongst themselves. They had no idea that it wasn’t anything to do with that all, but the simple fact that Jed wanted them to stop drugging him.
Not so he could get out. That, he could’ve done at any time, despite the drugs and the special metal in the locks. His memories of what life had been before had never faded, even through the distortion of childhood. He never wanted to go back to the life he’d known before coming here. If that meant spending his life in this room, so be it. No, he’d simply hated the fuzzy way the meds made him feel. Slow and thick and stupid.
“Is it getting cold outside?” he asked her suddenly, regretting the stupid words the moment they flew out of his mouth.
Samantha frowned and gave him a sideways glance, then another at the corner of the ceiling where the hidden camera lurked. “You know I’m not allowed to talk about that, Jed.”
“Right, right. I know.” Did they really think he didn’t remember there was a world outside these walls? Sometimes, Jed thought, they must. He’d allowed them to think of him as simple for so long, he must’ve convinced them he was also stupid. “I just wondered.”
“Can you sit down, please?” She gestured, and when he had complied, as he always did, always, never disobedient, she made a show of pulling out her stethoscope but leaned over him as she placed the round part of it against his chest. “The leaves are changing. The air smells like snow.”
That whisper sent an electric jolt all through him. So did her touch on his wrist as she counted the too-many and too-fast beats of his heart. Samantha looked into his eyes, so close he could see the white specks surrounding the blackness of her pupil. She gave him a small, secret smile and waited a moment or so before she officially took his pulse. Giving him time to relax.
She knew him.
She’d never commented on the embarrassing way his body reacted to her standard routine. Not when she used gentle fingers to press his neck and throat to check his lymph nodes and his heartbeat again raced, and not when she had him lift his arms to his sides so she could pass her hands along his body and he shifted against the rise in his pants. She noticed it. She had to. There was no way to hide the heat of his skin. But she always managed to be standing at an angle to block it from the camera, and she always took her time to make it possible for him to calm down before she stepped back.
Today (it was really close to midnight, though they wanted him to think it was more like noon) she lingered with the exam. Stood a little closer than usual. She dropped her stylus, a soft-tipped rubber utensil that should not have been able to cause any harm, should he decide to take it from her and shove it into a vulnerable spot. It was a sensible precaution, though he wondered why nobody had ever seemed to consider the fact he’d need no weapon if he really wanted to hurt someone.
And they thought he was the stupid one.
She smelled so fresh, so clean, that all he could do was close his eyes and breathe her in. He wanted to cover himself in her scent, to wash away the stink of this room. Of all the years...
“Jed,” she said. Warning. “No touching.”
He hadn’t meant to. The gentle pressure of his fingers against the inside of her elbow had been involuntary. He didn’t move them away. Staring into her eyes, Jed let his fingers trace a small circle on her bare skin.
Her lips parted on a small sigh. She blinked rapidly. At the tiniest hint of her tongue pressed to her upper lip, another rush of electricity jolted through him. He was so hard now there’d be no way she could keep up the pretense of this exam long enough for him to hide it from whoever it was that got their jollies watching.
She should move away from, he thought a little incoherently. She had to know what was happening. He should stop touching her, but he couldn’t make himself. Another infinitesimal stroke of his fingertips on her skin had her eyes going wide. Dark.
Her smell changed from fresh air to something his brain told him was flowers, though it had been twenty years since he’d even seen a flower; the taste of her like golden honey, sweet syrup, flooded him through the continuing touch. Every muscle in him tensed, straining, though neither of them so much as moved more than the constant, steady motion of her hands as she made a show of checking his vitals.
Pulse. Temperature. One-handed, not moving so he could keep his fingertips on the inside of her elbow, Samantha kept up a running commentary on what she was doing—for the benefit of the observing camera, maybe. Or for him. For herself, Jed thought irrationally as the steady drone of her voice cracked and dipped for a second before she recovered.
He had never kissed a woman. Never made love. They’d started giving him porn when he hit adolescence—an outlet, they thought, so any pent-up desires could be dissolved. Preventing him from what, from violence? From yearning? It had worked, to a point, he thought now, but you couldn’t replace human touch with paper pages or digital images. You couldn’t replace making love to a woman with your own hand.
He wanted to kiss Samantha. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to make her shiver and shake, not the way the women in those movies did, but from deep inside her core. For real. He wanted to hear her say his name while her body tightened around him...
Samantha put her hand over his, her eyes closing. Her body tensed. She shook, but so briefly there could be no way anyone but Jed would notice. A small moan slipped out of her, covered up so fast by a cough as she turned her head that again, nobody but he could’ve possibly heard it.
“You have to stop.” Her lips moved, in silence he understood, anyway.