Free Picture Perfect by Jodi Picoult Page B

of the mirrors that lined an entire wall beside the sink. She cupped her hands over her breasts and frowned at the small swell of her stomach. She couldn’t imagine what had attracted Alex Rivers.
    She picked up the bottles and jars that dotted the countertop—facial creams and exfoliating scrubs and clear astringents that seemed to belong in equal proportion to Alex and herself. She had already brushed her hair and washed her face when she realized there was no toothpaste. There were two toothbrushes—one green, one blue—and she didn’t know which one was hers, either.
    She checked in the cabinets that were recessed into the walls, but all she could find were pale peach towels and two thick terry cloth bathrobes. She wrapped one around herself, rubbing her hands down the heavy brushed cotton. Maybe Alex had toothpaste in his bathroom, and surely he’d want his toothbrush.
    She didn’t know which room he had gone into, and she was about to knock on random doors when she heard him speaking a little farther down the hall. “Life’s but a walking shadow.” The door was ajar, and in the reflection of the bathroom mirror she saw Alex standing over the sink, his eyes hollow. “A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,” he murmured, his voice no louder than a whisper. “And then is heard no more.”
    Stunned, Cassie clutched the toothbrushes in her hand and leaned against the doorframe to see a little better. This was not Alex. He had transformed himself into a man beaten, a man who saw his life for what it would become—a flash in someone else’s memory, then something forgotten.
    Cassie fought back the urge to push the door open and wrap her own hope tight around him. She did not know this new stranger, she knew him even less than she knew Alex, but she understood that she had come to help.
    She thought about what Alex had said at the police station, the terror in his voice: You don’t know what it was like to lose you . And she began to see that the famous Alex Rivers came undone just as easily as the next person.
    Cassie took one step forward and Alex opened his eyes, seeing her reflection. He was Alex again, and smiling, but in the darker gradients of his eyes she could see the terror and the numbness of Macbeth. She wondered if he had always been like that, if every character became a tiny part of him. She knew that actors, in some part, had to draw and embellish on their own experience, and the thought of so much despair buried somewhere in Alex wrenched her. “Where do you get it? All that pain?”
    He stared at her, shaken by her second sight. “From myself.”
    She moved first, or maybe he did, but then he was holding her and opening the tie of the robe, running his hands up and down her sides. The toothbrushes fell to the floor and Cassie wound her fingers in his hair, burying her face in the hollow of his shoulder. She inched her hands down his back as if she were feeding a seam, bunching the fabric of his shirt until her hands burned the skin at his waist.
    He kissed hungrily, bumping them against walls and doorframes as he pushed his way back toward the master bedroom. Cassie fell against the bed, and he pulled apart the sides of her heavy robe, pinning her arms while the moon danced over her skin. His tongue traced the bend of her jaw, the curves below her breasts, the white lines of her thighs.
    Cassie opened her eyes, dazed by the image of his body over hers. Alex pressed his lips to her stomach. “Beautiful,” he said.
    He’s acting .
    As it had earlier that day, the thought came out of nowhere, and when it took root in her mind she began to struggle. But Alex’s weight was on her, pressing. He cradled her face in his hands and kissed her so honestly she thought she would shatter. And then she remembered the spell he had woven between them that afternoon; the emptiness that had opened like a raw