*****
We had been fantasizing about each other. A lot, over the years. That is the only reasonable explanation I've ever come up with. How else would they have known to bring us together?
*****
I was with her in a room so brilliantly sterile white that it would be blinding if it weren't somehow a soft light. I could barely make out the corners of the room. It was maybe twenty feet across either way, but there wasn't any discernable ceiling--the corners quickly faded away into soft, luminous whiteness. Nothing else in the room. Just me and Sharon, both naked.
But the room was comfortable enough. It was almost warm and humid enough to make you sweat, but not enough to be uncomfortable. The floors and walls seemed firm, but not hard. Almost intangible to the touch. There was a porcelain-white font of water in the corner to my left, and a bowl-like depression in the opposite corner. A drinking fountain and a lavatory? Neither seemed to have a spigot or drain, so it was hard to be sure.
Sharon sat curled in the opposite corner of the room, trying not to expose herself. She had apparently given up on asking into the air, "What do you want with me?", or the occasional simple "Hello?"
I had given up of believing that this was just some strange, incredibly lucid dream. Granted, the last thing I remembered was drifting off to sleep. I had come home late from work, and my folks were already in bed. My pre-sleep thoughts had, for some reason, drifted to her. The next thing I knew, here I was.
I hadn't actually seen Sharon for a very long time. We hadn't gone to the same high school, and I didn't even know what college she was planning on going to. For what little I could see, she still looked very much like I remembered--a lithe but healthy build, slightly tan skin tone, brilliant green eyes, and long, dark hair, wavy almost to the point of being curly. She had always had such a beautiful face. Full lips, what you might call "pouty."
I remembered her from all the way back in elementary school. Puppy love. I was too shy and awkward back then to realize it. Toward the beginning, she would sometimes gather her friends and they would follow me around, teasing me, just to see how I would react. But they were smiling the whole time. Later on, she would ask to borrow my crayons. And if someone else volunteered theirs, she refused--she only wanted mine. If only I had taken the hint.
The years had gone by into middle school, and my shyness and awkwardness continued. I never could summon up the nerve to ask her to dance at one of the school dances, or really to talk to her in any meaningful way (or any other girl, for that matter). But she had always been at the center of my very most intense adolescent fantasies.
But this situation was quite different. Wherever we were, whatever this was...maybe I'd never be leaving this place. What was really at risk?
"Sharon?"
She raised her head slightly at the sound of her name. Then she met and held my gaze with haunted eyes, staring as if seeing me for the first time. There was a long pause.
"Jason, what is going on? What are we doing here? Do you know anything about this?"
She spoke in a hushed tone, but with a quiver in her soft voice.
I just shook my head, searching for words. What could I say about all of this?
"Did you see what happened?" she asked, looked about as if asking out loud might reveal something.
I shook my head. "I was asleep, I think."
"Me too."
*****
That was the extent of our first conversation. I couldn't really think of anything more to say, at least not of any importance.
The ambient white light had given no indication of the passage of time or even the time of day. Eventually it came to the point where I really had to take a leak.
Out of the corner of my eye, I had seen Sharon glance toward that corner with the shallow, bowl-like depression as well. How long had we been here? Hours? A day or more?
This was ridiculous—the situation was not going to change. I stood up and walked over to the bowl. I could see Sharon watching out of the corner of her eye as I did.
Fortunately, I wasn't one to suffer from 'stage fright.' I exhaled deeply as I emptied my bladder. At last.
There was no lever to 'flush.' Nor was there even a drain evident.
But when I turned around to return to my corner I heard a momentary hum from the bowl behind me, like when you turn on an old TV set. I turned around again, and the bowl was empty. But that was only the beginning of the oddities of this place.
After some span of time, the monotony of the place began to give way errant thoughts. How could I make any plans when I didn't know where I was, or even what I was in? How much could I second-guess what I had done to get myself in this situation, when all I had done was to fall asleep?
I would have liked to get a better look at Sharon—after all, how often were you alone in a room with a beautiful girl. But I didn't want to get caught staring, so I tried to keep my eyes averted as best I could. I didn't even do more than glance when she scuttled over to the bowl, bent over with her arms crossed over her chest, as if she were coming out of a cold shower.
Time passed, and random thoughts began gave way to daydreaming.
My mind had wandered to the woods behind my parents' house. A low mat of weeds under a high canopy of box elder, birch, and oak trees. Rays of light breaking through. The tiny brook running through that part of the woods. I could hear the brook...
I really could hear the brook. I blinked a couple of times—everything I saw, I was actually seeing and hearing.
My realization didn't change it in any way, but what caught my eye right away was that the image bled away into pink carpet toward the halfway mark of the room. Sharon was still curled up in the corner, but it was the corner of a bedroom. All in various hues of pink except for the dresser and the brass bed posts holding up a lacy bed canopy. There was even an assortment of stuffed animals on the bed.
In excitement, I began snatching at the weeds on the forest floor. And just as quickly, I realized that it was only imagery. Instead of plants and earth, all I felt was the insubstantial firmness of my corner of the room.
I noticed Sharon smiling as she looked about the bedroom around her. Then she noticed my half of the room, and her smile began to fade. She got to her knees and made a scooping motion toward the stuffed animals on the bed, but her arms passed through the imagery.
It was at that point that I really noticed how well she had matured. Smooth curves. A long, hourglass shape. Her wavy black hair tumbled over her shoulders onto her shapely breasts—not too large, not too small, firm enough with youth to stand out nicely, with perfectly round half-dollar sized areolas. Her hips dipped in slightly from both sides on the front, just enough to emphasize the slight round of her abdomen, and the perfect triangle of thin black hair which all came together at the short line of her labia.
I felt the tiny shock at the tip of my penis as it began to elongate, and at the same time I felt my heart begin to thud and a flush of warmth over my face and head. What was I doing? I drew in my legs against my chest to cover up what was happening.
She spared me—snapped me out of it, as she crouched back down and covered her face, sobbing.
I wasn't sure what to do. I wanted to go to her. Reach out. But what would she think? I waited, and watched her for many moments as sympathy edged out desire. And then, when it seemed safe, I got up and began to walk over to her.
She looked up as I did. The distress on her face could have been a mixture of anxiety and sadness. I wasn't sure. But at least she had stopped crying. Her gaze did flicker down past my waist as I approached. If size really mattered, this was perfect timing, with me having just been partially erec—damn it! What was I thinking? We had been kidnapped, or abducted, or whatever, and here I was thinking about...well, I needed to not think about it.
I sat down beside her with my back to the wall and my legs drawn up. I thought about putting my arm around her shoulder, but settled for just gently laying my hand on her shoulder. I half expected her to jerk away from my touch, but instead her face seemed to relax a bit as she looked absently at my hand.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
She nodded slowly. "I was just hoping. For a moment."
I let my hand fall from her shoulder, but sat close enough beside her that I could feel her body heat on my right shoulder. I gestured toward the surroundings, "Your room, I'm guessing?"
She nodded again, then we sat in silence for a while. She was looking over at my side of the room with her brilliant green eyes squinted in a quizzical fashion. She tilted her head a bit as she said, "Where's that?"
"That's the woods out behind my house." It wasn't really my house, per se. But 'my parent's house' sounded too juvenile for some reason. "Whenever I ran away from home, that's always where I went."
"How long did that last?"
"Never more than a few hours. But it always felt like I had escaped, at least for a little while."
Looking more closely at the room, I noticed that the lavatory bowl and the font of water were still there, but they were camouflaged in chameleon fashion by the smear of colors where our two worlds came together. I also noticed that a small assortment of foods were arrayed around the base of the water font—bananas, pears, strawberries, carrots, peanuts and other nuts—all easy-to-eat stuff.
By this time I was hungry, so I went over and picked out a couple of things. I offered to bring Sharon something as well. She agreed, and I brought her a banana to start with. I watched her from the side as she stared off straight ahead with a contemplative look, slowly eating the banana. I had to look away. I needed to think about something else.
"Do you remember when we were little?" I asked. "Following me around with...who was it...Lisa and Sue and those others?"
Her lips pursed in a bit of a smile for the first time. "Yes," she said tentatively, expecting a follow-up question.
"You threw wood chips at me once. What was up with that?" I said in a teasing tone.
