More of their first day together. Also, the chapters get much longer as the story goes on! (There will be 35 chapters total!)

"I don't wanna be like Cinderella

Sittin' in a dark old dusty cellar
Waiting for somebody to come and set me free
I don't wanna be like Snow White
Waiting for a handsome prince to come and save me
On a horse of white unless we're ridin' side by side
Don't wanna depend on no one else
I'd rather rescue myself."

(Cinderella- i5)

Maia couldn't have prepared herself for the wave of calm that had come after his agreement to not eat her. It didn't make a damned bit of sense. The man had claws that shot out of the backs of his hands! Metal claws that looked more than capable of producing the horrible things her pissy captors had unintentionally shown her. She had to be crazy. Had to have lost her mind along with her freedom.

He liked her smile though. He'd been recalling it every few minutes for the last hour, moving around the room and growling at her occasionally. He seemed confused by her presence. From the headache she was getting from his scattered thoughts though, she couldn't blame him. Things would be easier if he could talk, but whatever their captors had done to him seemed to have left him incapable of producing speech. She was just lucky he knew English. The few foreigners who didn't speak English or French had always made her head hurt, and he was doing a bang up job without a language barrier augmenting the problem. A Chinese thinking wild man might have made her head literally explode.

Maia dropped to the ground, crossing her legs underneath herself, never once taking her eyes off the man in front of her. His mind was so strange. Usually the minds she heard came to her as streams of speech only she could hear. The nature of hearing inner monologues was that most of the time she heard a whole lot of half-baked sentence fragments. This man, however, was jarringly different.

All she heard was lone words, and only if she really focused. Right now though, she got the sense he was cursing at whoever 'Stryker' was. 'Fuck' and 'Stryker' were pretty much the only words she could glean from his mind. Well…that wasn't exactly true. She was also getting 'red', 'smile', and 'smells' over and over. So he wasn't going to eat her, but he thought she stunk…

"You know, you don't exactly smell like roses." She groused, needing to fill the silence. She didn't do silence well. The thoughts of others were usually drowned out by rock music funneled almost constantly into her ears by her favorite green ear buds and half busted Walkman. What she wouldn't do to have them now. Not hearing him at all might make her head hurt less. She began the painstaking process of blocking her mind from him. It was never a foolproof process, hence the thoughts of the vehicular manslaughterer leaking through, but it should be enough to keep her from being overwhelmed by the cursing and repetition.

It was a terrible idea for Maia to pull herself out of their respective heads. Without the intermittent words to focus on, her eyes started doing more of the focusing. On him. On the fact that he didn't have a shirt on. On the fact that, even in the unnatural lighting, his skin was impossibly tan. And good God was there a lot of it to look at. And then there were the muscles coiled tightly under his skin. In all her life Maia had never seen a man so built. Then her mouth went dry as her eyes locked on a trail of dark hair that grew down the center of his chest and over taut muscles before disappearing under the waistband of his shorts. The shorts he was wearing left very little to the imagination, and her mouth went completely dry.

She was only aware of her abject ogling of his body when the metal door behind her was jostled as a slot she hadn't noticed was opened. "Eat up, you animals." A voice growled, but that was all the information Maia got. Whoever was about to feed them wasn't one of the two men she'd seen. A grocery sack and a plastic tray of food were shoved in perfunctorily.

The man inside the room lunged towards the tray, and Maia tossed herself to the side, not about to get between the feral man and his food. "Shit, wild man!" She exclaimed.

He froze, a hunk of raw meat halfway to his mouth on claws she hadn't noticed pop out since she'd been too busy throwing herself out of the way. How convenient. If she hadn't had the good sense to give him that space, he might have skewered her, regardless of his agreement not to do so. So… not malicious, but certainly not as harmless as she might have been trying to convince herself he was.

He was staring at her again, and, when her stomach made an unbidden growl, his head ticked to the side. His eyes ticked to the meat on his claw and after several long moments, he held it towards her.

Maia shook her head, but was awed by the gesture, "I can't."

He looked confused for a second, and Maia dared move closer.

She gestured to the tray, glad to see it wasn't all raw meat, "I can't eat raw meat, I'd get sick, but if you'll share, I'll help you finish off that wilty spinach."

Honestly, the spinach and other vegetables on the tray looked horrific, but they were going to be better for her than trying to consume raw meat. She just hoped they weren't feeding him people, that would be beyond horrific. He didn't move, so she did, settling cross legged on the floor, leaving plenty of space between them while allowing her to reach the food.

When they'd finished eating, the tray was pulled back through the slot by a metal chain, but Maia grabbed the plastic bag before it went through. It couldn't hurt to have. Her mother had taught her for years to look for alternate uses for things, though she doubted her mother would approve of any of the ideas Maia had for the bag.

They'd made a mistake, hadn't they? The bastards had obviously assumed she was a meek school-girl who was only going to get a few seconds of life once she'd been thrown inside, but that wasn't the case. Maia was the youngest of five, with three of them being boys. She was tougher than she looked, and, even with her new companion seemingly being a few cards short of a full deck, there had to be a way for them to work together to escape.

That would need to wait though. Maia could feel her eyelids growing heavy after a few hours of sitting and staring at the wild man pace, and moved to lay down on the cold ground. She was almost asleep when she felt herself being picked up. Instantly awake, Maia's heart hammered in her chest before she realized it was just her companion and he was taking her to the cot that set against the back wall of the room. He lay her down and walked away. "Thank you." She whispered after taking a minute to let the shock wear off, curling up to keep herself warm.

He grunted in response.

Maia smiled in spite of the whole situation, "Goodnight, Wild Man." Her eyes closed before she got a chance to take in the stunned expression on his face.