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She’s on her third truffle when she realizes she’s been picking out the ones with peach liqueur and leaving all the others.
She shrugs it off. It doesn’t mean anything.
There’s an amazing smell coming from a nearby market stall. She follows it to a fruit stand. The air is sweet with scent of strawberries and peaches.
She buys a basket of strawberries and doesn’t feel hungry at all.
During the summer, when her father and Irene (with equal measures of help and hindrance from Toby) bake pies, she gorges herself on cherry and blueberry, strawberry and rhubarb, even plum.
The peach pies smell the sweetest. She doesn’t touch them.
For Christmas she gets a basket of random bath goods from a distant relative. Dead center beneath the clear wrapping is a tube of peach chapstick.
It’s the only thing she keeps.
She puts it on just so she can lick it off. It just barely takes the edge off a hunger she refuses to identify.
The chapstick is gone in a month.
She’s lingering over a display of peach scented bubble bath when the thought finally slips through her defenses: a dance, an offer, something she almost wants but can’t name.
She turns and asks Irene if she’s ready to go.
Her stepmother buys sweet pea scented lotion. Sarah buys the bubble bath.
The squarish peach bottle sits on her dresser for a month and a half. One evening, home alone, she takes the bottle down and runs herself a bath.
Surrounded by the warm water, the sweet scent of peaches, the soft foam of bubbles, she thinks of mismatched eyes and slides a hand between her legs.
She doesn’t think.
A week later there’s a peach on the windowsill of her bedroom.
She doesn’t eat it.
She does take it from the windowsill and put it by her mirror.
It takes another two days before she stands in front of her mirror and says, “Jareth, I need you.”
It’s about time they talked.