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“Other than chocolate,” he said, “and turkey and Swiss sandwiches with a bag of chips and a can of orange soda, wasn’t it? What else do you like to eat?”

Every single thing in me went still at that. My mind went straight back to that day in the store. Because that wasn’t just a guess. It wasn’t some lucky stab at a sandwich. No, it was the exact thing I had put on a checkout belt four hundred miles from here, in a pair of men’s coveralls, with grease on my face.

“How did you…” he didn’t let me finish the question.

“You were very good, little bird,” he said, and there was something underneath it now that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Something with an edge on it and if I had to give it a name, I would call it bitter resentment.

“Ninety seconds behind a curtain, and then you walked out of that building through a door he had not thought to watch, past a man I pay a great deal of money to, and he never so much as lifted his head in your direction.” I sucked in a quick breath at this, then muttered,

“You watched the footage.”

“I watched all of it and enough times that I could walk you through every second of it, including telling you which register you paid at.” My mouth dropped open yet again. Jesus, who the fuck was this guy, seriously?

“Now…” he said and he was back to being perfectly pleasant again, as though none of the last thirty seconds had happened, before he went on to say,

“…Back to the question.”

“It’s a very strange question,” I replied, and again, I thought I heard the pull of material as he shrugged his shoulders like last time.

“It’s a perfectly ordinary question, Anna. You are the only one making it strange.” I guess he was right. What I should have said was that it sounded strange coming from him. Instead, I gave him what he wanted and answered,

“Pizza.”

He chuckled at that and said,

“You have to give me more than that. Be more specific.”

“Deep dish.” And I heard my own voice go warm about it, which should have been embarrassing but strangely it wasn’t. “Proper deep dish. Not the flat stuff people pretend is pizza. The kind you have to eat with a fork, where the cheese goes down first and the sauce goes on top, and it takes forty-five minutes to come out… I am telling you, it’s worth every second of the wait,” I said, actually getting excited about sharing something of my past life and feeling relaxed about it for once.

“Mm, sounds delicious.” He agreed.

“There was a place I used to go on…” I stopped myself before I could give too much away and he noticed, trying to sound casual when he asked,

“And where was that?”

“Nice try,” I said mockingly, and he laughed out loud, as if genuinely delighted.

“It was worth the attempt,” he admitted, making me grumble,

“Not a very good one.”

“No, perhaps not,” he agreed, and then I heard the bed creak. I looked up at the panel without meaning to and I could see about a third of him, lying down on that low mattress with one arm across his eyes.

“You look tired,” I commented. But his reply wasn’t what I expected, and it was the next thing to make my breath hitch.

“Six weeks, Anna.”

“What?”

“Six weeks of looking for you.” He said it without any weight at all, as though it were a fact about the weather. “There was not a great deal of sleeping happening.” Something landed in my chest at that, but I was too scared to give it a name.

“You should sleep then,” I offered, and I would be lying if I said his reply didn’t make my belly flip,

“I would rather hear your voice.”

It was in that moment that it suddenly occurred to me, sitting there with a locked door between us, that this was the nicest afternoon I had spent with anybody in three years.

I chose not to examine that too closely for obvious reasons. Not when I still had the man’s cum gone dry on my skin.