Skin Deep 3: At First Sight

When the man awoke, he could sense the rising of the sun before he opened his eyes. Reaching up to rub the sleep out of his eyes, he realized that his goggles, helmet, and leather jacket were all gone. Sitting up, he opened his eyes and the hard orange light of the morning slammed into his eyes with the force of a hammer. He blinked and tried to get used to the light, but his eyes were adjusting slowly and everything around him was fuzzy and indistinct. He blinked some more, and rubbed his eyes and gradually his vision seemed to clear and sharpen so that instead of seeing only blurry shapes, he could distinguish specific objects. When his eyes finally adjusted, he tried again to take in his surroundings.

He was in a hut of sorts, with a metal frame. He touched the walls.

"Leather." He jumped and barely swallowed the yelp that threatened to burst from his lips at the sudden break in the deafening silence. Looking around he saw a figure lying on the ground. The figure wore goggles, but they seemed to serve a different purpose than his own. His goggles were for shielding his eyes from the air as it whipped around him and his flyer. These goggles seemed to be for shading the eyes from the sun, or hiding the eyes more completely. He assumed it must be the latter reason, because the figure also wore a scarf over its mouth, and a bandana around its head.

"Who are you and where am I?" he demanded as he attempted to stand. His feet seemed to be unable to hold him up though, and the figure was already on its own feet, catching him before he fell too far.

"My name isn't what matters at the moment. What matters is that you get some rest. Sit. you were badly injured and you don't have the strength to stand without proper support, which my leather walls won't provide."

He stared into the goggles of the person as he sat down gingerly, trying not to cause his rumpus too much pain. Suddenly he said a little loudly, "You're a woman!"

Putting her hand up to her ear from the sting of the noise and moving toward a small sort of table in the center of the hut, she picked up a clay cup and filled it with water from a cantine hanging at her side from her belt. "How could you tell?" She asked as she pulled out an herb from a satchel on the table and crushed it, then added its juice to the water.

"Your voice," he answered. He maneuvered himself so that his back was against the metal frame of the hut and his feet hung off the edge of the bed. She approached him, handed him the cup of water and signaled for him to drink it. He looked at it warily.

"If I wanted to kill you I could have just left you with that machine. You'd have never made it out of this desert alive without an incredible amount of luck. Drink." She turned around and grabbed a fat sort of blade on a smooth cactus in a pot and broke it off, squeezing out a clear liquid and scraping it onto a wooden plate.

He looked back to his drink and decided to trust her, gulping the drink down as quickly as he could, almost gagging at the bitter, earthen taste. "This tastes horrible," his voice croaked a little as he spoke.

"Good. That means it's ripe," she said and she took off the baggy long-sleeved shirt she wore, revealing a more form-fitted shirt that showed her shoulders. Mesmerized, he couldn't help but stare at her beauty, even though he could see nothing of her face. As he watched, she began to smear the clear liquid from the plate onto her arms and shoulders. She seemed to flinch a little as she did this, and he realized that she was badly sunburned.

"What happened?" he asked softly. How had she gotten such severe burns? She spoke without looking at him.

"I went into the desert in the daytime without my cloak and tunic." She continued smearing on the liquid and broke off another part of a blade when she ran out of the first.

"Why did you do that?" He asked, wondering how someone who'd been smart enough to build a hut in the middle of the desert out of leather and scraps of metal could have made such a juvenile mistake.

"You had a fever and needed as much heat as you could get, and I needed to gather plants and herbs to help you and myself and it couldn't wait until night fell again," she said matter-of-factly as she finished applying the gooey liquid. "This is an aloe plant. It grows here in the desert, and its blades are filled with a serum that soothes and heals burns. What you drank is good for reducing fever."

"So... I'm in a desert?" He looked out the paneless window where he could see miles of sand. Although the bottom of the window was level with his sternum, he could reach out and touch the hot sand as if he were lying flat on the ground. "Are we underground?"

She looked up and nodded. " The nearest town is a few miles from here. Because of the heat, I dug into the ground to give myself some cool air."

Turning around he looked back at the woman, "You live all alone out here? Why don't you live in the village?" he regretted asking as soon as he saw her shoulders hunch and her whole body tensed. She no longer resembled anything close to relaxed. She looked as though she were ready to attack anything that walked within a few feet of her. "I-i," he began, but she cut him off tersely,

"I don't like people." By the tone of her voice he knew that the conversation was over, and so he resumed staring out into the desert until the sand began to glare and his eyes burned a little. When he closed them to rub them he awakened again at sunset. As he opened his eyes, he saw the woman again. She was donning her cloak, and she turned around and for the first time since she'd saved him he saw her face.

In his mesmerized state he forgot to pretend to be asleep and whispered, "It's you." A hard look crossed her face as she placed goggles over her eyes. Before she wrapped her scarf around her mouth she said in a cold voice,

"No it's not. Tomorrow night I'm taking you to the village. If you value your life, I suggest that you never return here again." With that statement she walked out of the door to her hut and left him in a wild flurry of emotions. He was filled with such joy, and yet... What did she mean, "No, it's not"? As he lay there in bed he eventually fell back asleep and dreamed of her face throughout the night. Once in the night, when she had returned, she heard him whisper "Merchant Torrez, wait!" It caught her by surprise, but she ignored his banter, for there could be hundreds of merchants named Torrez, and this need not be her father. She prepared a soup for the man to drink when he awoke, and then, when the horizon turned lavender-gray with the approach of the dawn, she laid her cloak down on the floor of the hut and fell asleep, with dreams somewhat more unsettling than the man's who lay in the bed opposite her.