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Sydney’s nose wrinkles, and I notice a few more freckles dot her face. Maybe the Texas sun is good for something.
“He seems too nice to do anything bad,” she tells me, looking out the large windows to the fields.
“Some people are just like that.”
We settle into a peaceful silence as we take a moment to just be. Sydney has been cooped up in the compound for almost 2 weeks, barely making it out, and I’ve been to work and back in order to spend time with her.
I’m not sure when I turned to mush.
The feelings I have for Sydney are still foreign, and I still don’t want to put a name to them just yet. We’ve done this backward: getting married and then almost… dating? If you could call it that.
But it feels too soon. To society’s standards, it really does. But we live in a pressure cooker, and feelings of any kind develop so much faster within it.
Sydney is the first woman who’s ever caught my attention, and I promised myself that I would keep it professional.
Yet here we are.
The giant rock on her finger, the one that’s glistening in the sunlight right now, means something so much more than it did that first night I gave it to her.
And it makes me want to get her a new one. One from me. One to actually slip on her finger myself.
“I’ve been thinking,” Sydney says, interrupting our quiet.
“Yeah? That’s almost never good,” I joke, and her eyes sparkle when they look at me, almost as green as the trees outside, lit by the sun high in the sky.
“I talked to Jerry about what happens if, well, if I want to stay.”
“Stay?” I ask, pretending to not understand what she’s saying. My heart races a little faster. I’ve thought about this, too. I’ve thought about it a lot.
Stay with me.
“What would need to happen?”
I take a deep breath, not sure if this is going to chase her off. “You’d need to talk to our handler, Veronica. She’s been great. Works with a couple of other compounds around the country, too. From there, she’d put you in touch with someone at the Agency, who would come by and do a thorough interview. They want to make sure that you’re sane, pretty much,” I chuckle because I’m not sure any of us are really sane.
“Then you’d just have to go through the different testing stages they have for everyone. To make sure you’re healthy, to see if you need anything. That one is fairly simple. I don’t think they’d require your memory to be wiped if they didn’t require Sydney’s to be. They usually use that for those whom they’ve saved to be in the Project. After that,” I pause, looking at her across from me. She looks serious about this, but this is the part that I’m not sure about. “They’d probably require you to get a hysterectomy.”
She pauses. “Jerry told me about that,” she says, shrugging. “I don’t think I want to have kids anyway,”
Now, it’s my turn to be curious. Not that I wanted them either. “Why not?”
Sydney crosses her left leg over her right, leaning against the right side of the chair. “I don’t know. I’ve just seen too much ugly in the world. I haven’t gotten proper help to process everything that’s happened in my life, and I don’t want to pass my instability to my kids, you know?”
I swallow roughly. It’s starting to sound like she’s really considering this.
“We can talk about it later if you’d like. Further down the line. When all of this is done.”
She smiles at me, and the sight of it takes my breath away.
There’s nothing I want more.
Sitting up, I slap my thighs. “Alright, you ready to get dinner?”
* * *
Sydney and I climb into one of the new Challengers the Texas compound provides. They’re slick and black, looking almost exactly like the cop cars around the city. It’s honestly a really good idea.
“Do you think you’re going to get the car back?” Sydney says suddenly.
