She slept surprisingly soundly, stirring only once. When early daylight coming through the gauzy curtains woke her, she stretched leisurely and rolled over. The sight of Marcus on the floor next to the bed startled her briefly until she remembered what had happened. She groaned.
"What's wrong?" Marcus asked, apparently having been awake already.
She shook her head, flopping onto her back again. "I was hoping we'd wake up back on Babylon 5. We're still stuck here."
"Oh, bugger!" Marcus shot to his feet, looking comically dishevelled and flustered. "Not to add to your pile of miseries, but we have to go to work!"
Right. Muttering a few choice words of her own, she swung her legs off the bed and hurried to her pile of clothes. Halfway there, she caught him staring and froze. Glancing down at her scantily clad figure, she grinned ruefully. "Sorry. You get used to living alone, you know?"
He just nodded. "I'll um…" he motioned indistinctly at the opposite wall, "I'll just go over there, give you some privacy to get changed?"
She smiled and nodded at him, enjoying the teasing. He could be so cute sometimes—
Cute? Inwardly cursing herself, she yanked her pants on with gusto and pulled the tank top off over her head to fasten on her bra. Putting the top back on, she reached for her uniform jacket but hesitated. She was going to be picking strawberries… would she really want to wear that stuffy thing? Deciding that she didn't, she left it alone and wryly told Marcus that he could look now.
"I thought this would make most sense to wear," he said, motioning at what he'd slept in, "What do you think?"
"Looks good," she replied, "I'm going like this." She glanced around for a clock. "I wonder what time it is."
Marcus stepped quickly to the window and peered out. "It's still fairly early," he informed her, "The sun's not above the houses yet. We should head downstairs, nonetheless."
Grabbing her boots and tugging them on, she glanced wistfully at the previous day's empty dishes. "Maybe Steven will have some breakfast for us." She sighed. "But I suppose it would come out of our pay."
"Probably," Marcus agreed, finishing tying his boots and straightening. "Shall we?"
She led the way, but halfway down the hallway she paused. "Forgot the key. Just a second." She jogged back, grabbed the key off where it lay on the desk and hurried out again, struggling briefly with the archaic lock, and then rejoined Marcus. When they got to the lobby, they found Steven talking with an older woman who was sitting at—was that a computer?
He looked up at their arrival. "Ah! Here they are! Ready to go?"
Marcus chirped an excited affirmative.
Steven said a few more things to the woman and then beckoned them to follow him. They proceeded out the front door and around to a single-car garage, where a small truck waited. The man who'd driven them into town had had the same type, Susan noted, but this one seemed to have an even smaller passenger compartment. This became an even more prominent feature when Steven told them that they'd have to sit in the back. The open, unsheltered back.
Susan clambered up and sat down with her back against an edge. Marcus settled beside her, and with a loud revving noise and disturbingly large vibrations, the vehicle began to move. They backed out of the garage and onto the main street, and then zoomed away with alarming speed.
It didn't take long to get outside the edge of the town, and soon they were turning off the highway onto a short dirt lane marked by a cheerful 'U Pick' sign. They pulled into the grassy parking lot and hopped down onto the ground, and then followed Steven to a large shed built in the shadow of a towering maple. He opened it up and handed them each two plastic baskets.
"Go down to row 14 and start at the flag," he commanded. "When you fill these up, bring them back and I'll give you new ones. Put a tally mark down on this sheet for each one you fill. And, most importantly, don't pick the berries off the ground. Got it?"
Susan and Marcus nodded and headed out along the main path beside the field. Each row was numbered, decreasing as they went along from 43. At last, when they came to 14, they turned right and strode toward the bright orange flag that waved idly about halfway down.
"I'll go a little further down," Marcus said, continuing on and leaving her alone with the flag. She glanced around at the few other workers arriving and crouched down on the hay-covered ground, peering under the leaves of the stout bushes to find bright red berries peeking out in small clusters.
She set her baskets out around her and reached out to pull several of the berries off and deposited them into the first container. The second bunch she tugged on was soft and rotten, leaving her fingertips covered in lumpy pink juice. Her loose hair tumbled over her shoulder to drag on the dusty hay and she sighed, looking around for a place to wipe her hands so she could tie it back up. She ended up wiping them on the ground, and to her surprise they came back quite clean. That done, she dug into her pocket for an elastic and looped it into her hair, holding it back in a loose bun at the base of her neck. At last, she returned her attention to the berries.
When she had reached where she thought Marcus began, she had filled one and a half baskets. She marched ahead quickly, passed Marcus by an estimated five meters, and plunked herself down again. It didn't take long to fill the second basket to the brim, and she headed back to hand them in.
The day, having begun a bit chilly, gradually warmed up. Come noon, the sun was directly overhead and the air had to be at least thirty five degrees. At long last, a bell sounded, startling Susan enough to nearly spill the basket she was carrying. She approached a fellow worker. "What's the bell for?" she asked.
The worker, a teenaged boy with sandy hair and glasses, looked over at her tiredly. "Lunch," he said. "You new here?"
"Just started today," Susan admitted. "How long a break do we get?"
"However long it takes us to eat," the kid told her. "No more than half an hour, though." He made a face. "It's too short, if you ask me."
Susan nodded. "Thanks."
"Remember not to pick the berries off the ground!" the kid called over his shoulder. She gave him a wave to acknowledge she'd heard him, hoping that at that distance he couldn't see the confusion on her face. Why was that so important?
She stopped under a tree along the path to wait for Marcus, who was walking wearily toward her. "How many've you picked?" she called.
"Individual berries or baskets?" he asked sarcastically. She set a hand on her hip as he joined her under the tree. "Eleven. Well, ten and a half. You?"
"Eleven?" she echoed disbelievingly, "How in hell did you manage to pick eleven? You weren't picking them off the ground, were you?"
He shrugged, sinking down to the ground by the tree's trunk. "We used to pick as kids, back on Arisia Colony. You get better at it." He patted the grass next to him. "Have a seat. We can eat this basket for lunch."
"That's our pay!" she protested, leaning against the rough bark and wincing as it scratched against the oddly tender skin of her back.
"Your point?" he asked, popping a berry or two into his mouth with practiced ease.
She sighed but took a handful as her stomach grumbled at its lack of food. While the berry exploded into warm sweetness on her tongue, she grinned, "At least you picked them."
Steven brought them back into town later that afternoon. He'd paid each of them for their baskets, and once they said their goodbyes out front of the hotel, Susan and Marcus compared their money. Marcus' final total had been nineteen, leaving him with twelve baskets for profit, and therefore twenty four dollars. Susan had filled fifteen baskets and received sixteen dollars. As she assessed the nearby shops, she toyed with the coins and paper money, liking their weight in her pocket. There was a store just across the street that looked like a grocer and she opened her mouth to point it out to Marcus. He was examining the paper bills carefully, seeming highly interested, but his face was grubby and looked exhausted. She suppressed a sigh and made her way up to their room, knowing he'd follow.
She went to the window to look out at the street. There was a steady stream of people going in and out of the grocery store, and she made up her mind to go there as soon as she could convince Marcus to take a nap.
She looked around as she heard the door open and close, admitting the object of her thoughts. "Why don't you lie down for a while?" she suggested. "You can't have slept very well on the floor, so go ahead and take the bed. I want to clean up a bit."
"No, no," he began to protest. Something in his face changed and he strode quickly toward her. He darted behind her, despite her efforts to stay facing him.
"What the hell are you doing?" she demanded irritably.
He finally stopped moving and she turned to glare at him with her hands on her hips. "Your back has the worst case of sunburn I have ever seen," he declared, looking worrisomely determined. "We're going over to that store and buying some cream for it."
Before she knew what was happening, he had grabbed her arm and was pulling her quite firmly out of the hotel room, down the stairs, and across the street into the store. Once he had her inside, he released his grip, assuming it a safe enough bet that she wouldn't flee.
"We may as well get some food while we're here," she grumbled, "but I don't need any cream."
"Yes, you do," he argued absently, peering around curiously.
"I'll be fine," she protested, "I've had worse."
"By tomorrow it'll have blistered and split," he told her, picking up a green plastic basket from the stack beside the door with a paper advertisement lying crumpled inside. "Oh, look!" He pointed at something on the flyer. "A dozen eggs for only two credits! Let's get some."
"Let me see that." She plucked it out of his hands. "That's dollars, not credits."
"Oh," he looked disappointed. "Is that a good price?"
"No idea," she admitted. "But if they're advertising it, it must be. I could do with some eggs. I don't think I've had a real one since you sent me that awf—" She cut herself off when she saw his face light up at the mention of his gift and rephrased the rest of her sentence, "that breakfast a while ago."
"Did you like it?" he asked, walking into the fruits and vegetables section of the store.
"Of course," she replied honestly, "it was the first real food I'd had in months." She knew better than to mention the teasing she'd received from John and Michael. He'd feel horrible if he knew about that.
Since when do you care how he feels? she asked herself, but knew that she already had the answer. She'd always cared how he felt. She cared about how everyone felt. Not just him, of course. There was nothing special about him. Nothing.
They ended up buying eggs, oranges, readymade salad, milk, two bottles of water, pasta, a container of some sort of moisturizer a sales' boy promised would be just great for sunburns, a chocolate bar at Marcus's insistence, and a tub of ground coffee at Susan's. After a confusing run in with the cashier and their strange new money, they headed back 'home' with several heavy bags of food.
Susan stored the eggs, milk, water, and salad in their tiny refrigerator and put the oranges on the counter with the pasta while Marcus rummaged through the cupboards. "There are two pots and one bowl," he reported, "And up here we have… three plates and glasses to match. Oh, and a 'World's Greatest Grandma' mug." He brought it down and held it up pensively beside Susan. "Hm… perfect match."
"Right," she muttered, swatting his hand away and stuffing the plastic grocery bags into the garbage. He chuckled and put the mug away, and then picked up the moisturizer cream from the counter, where she'd tucked it discreetly out of sight behind the oranges. She caught sight of him holding it up and sighed. "Fine, fine. Let's get this over with."
She sat cross-legged on the bed and felt the mattress sink as he perched behind her. She listened to the wrapper being pulled off and the cap being unscrewed. There was brief silence, and then, softly "You'll have to take your shirt off."
She was fairly certain he was blushing as she pulled the tank top over her head. Then, as her fingers found the clasp to her bra, she heard him clear his throat awkwardly and suppressed a smirk as she folded her arms over her breasts.
The smile vanished and was replaced by a small gasp of pain as he smeared the cream over her back. "Sorry," he said.
"It's just cold," she lied, "Don't worry about it."
She relaxed slowly, actually beginning to enjoy the feeling of the cool substance on her burning skin, and hardly noticed when his hands crept up over her shoulders, turning the functional application into something closer to a massage. It was only when he gently pushed her hair out of the way to dig his thumbs into her neck that she realized how she'd given herself over to his hands. She jerked away from him suddenly, barely remembering to keep her arms up over her chest.
"Susan—" he began, but she was already gathering her clothes and heading for the bathroom.
"Thanks," she said offhandedly, closing and locking the door behind her. She sagged against it, wondering what had just happened. And, even more frightening, how he'd managed to break down enough of her barriers to let her like it so much.