"How about this one, Dee?" Sue posed in a sundress patterned in swirls of various greens.
"It's lovely, Sue, but I really do think you're thinking this through far too seriously." Deanna was Sue's sister. "He's your husband."
"A husband who last saw me when I was twenty four, Dee!"
No one seemed to understand how she felt. Sue's husband Bobby had been an agent of United States intelligence and had been kidnapped on a mission somewhere south of the border and held prisoner for twenty years. It was a long time, and a lot had changed.
Sue had learned to live on her own again after four years of intensely intimate marriage. She had been told time and time again to assume that Bobby had passed away. She had never done that. She had never really moved on. She was still married to her one love. She lived in a different house, though, in a different town, and had had no contact with Bobby's family for at least a decade. She had gone back to school and gotten a degree in communications, and now worked writing advertising for a local cable company. She had a dog and a cat, and she had become a Catholic.
Not only home, but the world had changed. There was no trace of a cold war. There was an internet. There was a black president. There was no Johnny Carson. There was no real Guns'n'Roses, but there was a Lady Gaga. The Olympics were every two years, alternating, not every four years. There had been 9-11 and a Tsunami and a Hurricane Katrina. The world was not the same, and Bobby wouldn't even have the shelter of a familiar home to curl up in and learn to cope.
There were probably a lot more serious concerns, but Sue couldn't stop fretting over the fact that Bobby must still think of her as she had been at twenty-four. He'd never seen her at forty-four. She wasn't the same hot plaything she might have once been. She had put on some weight, and while she wasn't fat and saggy, she wasn't thin and perfectly tight anymore either. She wore glasses most of the time. Her hair was shorter and curly. Her complexion was still naturally olive, but she didn't tan. She thought she was a pretty good looking forty-four year-old, but she knew she had once been far closer to the smoking hot end of the spectrum.
When they had still been married . . . Or rather, before he had been kidnapped . . . They had been almost addicted to their bedroom, and had gotten quite nimble and expert at pleasing one another's bodies. She hadn't had sex since he'd left, and she wasn't entirely sure her body would remember how to do it.
She had masturbated quite a bit. For a long time, she only thought of Bobby, but as his memory became more distant, it became more difficult to keep out the stray celebrity or man-on-the-street who drifted into her mind. Those eventually moved on from drifting into her mind to drifting onto her computer screen. They had then morphed into porn, which she had at first found very uncomfortable and somewhat disgusting, but her body had responded to some of it, and as she learned the difference between good porn and bad porn, she became a habitual viewer of the good porn.
That had led to erotic chat, and shared masturbation experiences watching the same porn, which had led to cyber sex and role-playing, which had led to phone sex. A couple of times she had even done cam-to-cam masturbation with men from the chat site. They had certainly not disapproved of her body, but they had never seen the younger her -- and they, frankly, were as lonely and hard up as she was, and she meant barely a sixth of the compliments she gave them, so she assumed it was probably the same the other direction.
That had all ended when she had found out about Bobby being rescued. He'd been in a secure hospital for about six weeks since. She hadn't even masturbated during that time.
And now, he was coming home. To her. And she desperately wanted to look beautiful for him. But her sister was being absolutely no help. "Dee, you are terrible at this."
Her sister laughed. "Sue, he loves you. He hasn't seen you for years. He will be happy to see you in whatever you want to wear."
"But I want him to break it to him slowly."
"Break what to him slowly?"
"That I'm not as sexy as I used to be."
"Sue, you know Michael's friends all have crushes on you." Michael was Deanna's son.
"That's hardly the same!"
"You look great, Sue! The point is, you look great!"
"You're no help," Sue mumbled. She went to change into another outfit. This time she went very casual. Tight jeans and a tight white-shirt. As long as she was curvier, maybe what she should do is show off those curves in a flattering way.
She didn't have a chance to ask Deanna for her opinion. Almost the moment she was dressed, the doorbell rang. Steeling herself with a deep breath, Sue opened the door.
It was him.
She gasped. Bobby was so much skinnier than he had ever been. He had lost almost all of his muscle bulk. His face showed the character of surviving a hard two decades. There was grey at his temples and a few odd stands of it scattered through his much thinner sandy hair. He was so beautiful to look at.
Sue clutched at him, embracing him so hard he had no chance of getting kidnapped again. She hadn't meant to, but she cried, her face against his chest. Bobby put one arm around her waist and caressed the back of of her head. It was so comfortable and familiar. It was almost like they hadn't been apart.
"Hi, Dee," he said softly over Sue's shoulder.
"Hi, Bobby." Sue could hear the tears in her sister's voice. They had always been close. "I'll leave you guys alone, but I wanted to see you come home. And I will bring dinner tomorrow."
"Thanks, Dee, it's good to see you again."
"It's good to see you too, Bob. I can't wait for the kids to meet their uncle."
"Kids?"
"I'll fill you in tomorrow."
"Sounds good."
After Deanna had left, Sue finally let go of Bobby so that he could step all the way into the house. Wordlessly, they walked to the kitchen, and she poured some coffee. They sat at the kitchen table and just looked at each other. Twenty years. They had started dating when they'd been fifteen. They'd married as soon as he'd graduated college at twenty-one. They had had three years of marriage. They had known each other fewer than ten years. And now twenty years had passed.
The time hung heavy between them.
And Sue was scared. Terrified. She'd been concerned about how she had changed, but she wondered how he had changed. Had he fallen in love with someone else? A fellow captive? A female guard? A prostitute? Had he given up on love altogether? There was no accounting for how much could change in twenty years, and Sue would not blame him or hate him for any of those changes.
"Sue . . . " he finally said, sounding uncertain of what he was preparing to say.
"Yes?"
"Sue, you look so beautiful."
Tears formed in Sue's eyes. "You always were a nice guy."
"I mean it, Sue." There were tears in his eyes, too. "I've missed you so much. I won't lie, Sue, I didn't think I was ever getting out of there, and I tried to make myself fall in love with a female journalist who they had, too. But I couldn't. You were in my heart. There wasn't room for a journalist. Even though I knew you might have remarried, and that would have been fine . . . That didn't change my own love." He was crying, but he grinned. His smile was misshapen by a scar that twisted the left corner of his mouth, but it was a dazzling smile just then. "And to find out you hadn't remarried, and now seeing you, seeing that you're just as beautiful as when I left . . . Sue, it's crazy."
"I love you, Bobby, and so much has changed, but my love for you never changed."
"Please don't think I'm a pervert, Sue, but all those other changes . . . we can deal with those later. Can we . . .?"
"You mean . . .?"