She wouldn’t have heard it, had she not been stirred to wakefulness by the foreign sense of emptiness that had been pervading her house since Stephen had taken her girls. Still, she did not rise. She lay breathing quietly in the dark, waiting for her eyes to adjust and bring focus to the umbra of shadows flitting in the spaces her furniture should have been. Gradually her bedroom sharpened and the ominous amalgamations transformed into familiar objects: her writing desk, an ottoman, her dresser drawers. Her open wardrobe.
As she turned her head to grace the other cheek with the coolness of a satin pillow, and perhaps return to the clutches of sleep, a voice in the back of her subconscious said, ‘Wait.’
An open wardrobe. A scritch.
She inhaled as silently as she could and dared herself to look.
Her wardrobe was closed.
“You’re awake.”
A figure - how quaint a term for the feminine silhouette bent over her - raised a leather-sheathed forearm. Rolling in her open palm was something glittering.
Miranda’s grandmother’s ruby heart pendant, a single bright diamond embedded in its core. The owner of the hand raised the jewel to eye level, fingering it lustfully. Cowled with a cat-eared shawl and eyes masked with tinted oval goggles, her tight mouth was all Miranda had to go by: milk skin and a vaguely familiar smirk.
She’d heard the stories, read the newspaper articles. It had been different then. The seedy world the news reported on, where people were robbed or stabbed or kidnapped and tortured, was a shade of a different city that she had never seen nor ever had the need to speculate upon. Yet here it was. Without her having done much of anything, it had come to her.
“Go back to sleep,” the woman purred, and bowed her lips, crooking down to the curve of Miranda’s ear. “Sleep.”
Heart in her throat, Miranda squeezed her eyes shut obediently. She would live to see daylight again. To see her sweet girls again somewhere under the sun, someplace that was not a part of the unlit city that was showing itself to her this night. She had to believe that.
The mattress dipped beside her head as a body part pressed into it - the weight of a hand or an elbow. A sweet breathe touched her lips for an instant before a pressure was pressed to her mouth. It was a soft pressure that caused her chest to shudder, beating doubly, and pumping the blood beneath her skin. It felt as if it were pushing a drug infectiously from her lips to every other part of her body. She tingled.
Her mouth involuntarily parted in the need for oxygen her blood demanded. A flash of tongue met hers as a painful prick pierced the skin of her throat. Miranda recognized it as the deep, intrusive pain of needlepoint.
Miranda’s eyes fluttered open even as she fought the sudden intense effect of drowsiness. She had been drugged. She glimpsed the eyes behind the goggles pulling away before her own eyelids weighed too heavily for her to keep them up.
Terribly familiar. Like a family member she’d never met, or a color between one shade and the next that she could just barely imagine.
At Runway, in between sending Andrea for Starbucks, the new autumn run through and fielding calls from her custody attorney, Miranda struggled to reach that faraway memory of a memory, but attempting to connect the burglar with anyone she was familiar with proved ineffective. In the end, she was left with the memory of the quirk of the woman’s smile, a face she knew she had seen before yet couldn’t quite touch her mind to it, and Miranda’s own desire for sunlight - to be somewhere bright and open. In the light of day, surrounded by her coworkers, that desire rang false to her now.
Here she felt bare, fake. The metropolis she could observe from her office window was a mask. Last night it had shown its true face to her. A sweet pressure on her lips. A purr by her ear.
Ummmm I'll go with undecided, leaning toward no. I like what I wrote and I'm afraid I'll ruin it if I try to add more. Oh and thank you for the complement :)
Title: Daylight
Rating: G
A scritch.
She wouldn’t have heard it, had she not been stirred to wakefulness by the foreign sense of emptiness that had been pervading her house since Stephen had taken her girls. Still, she did not rise. She lay breathing quietly in the dark, waiting for her eyes to adjust and bring focus to the umbra of shadows flitting in the spaces her furniture should have been. Gradually her bedroom sharpened and the ominous amalgamations transformed into familiar objects: her writing desk, an ottoman, her dresser drawers. Her open wardrobe.
As she turned her head to grace the other cheek with the coolness of a satin pillow, and perhaps return to the clutches of sleep, a voice in the back of her subconscious said, ‘Wait.’
An open wardrobe. A scritch.
She inhaled as silently as she could and dared herself to look.
Her wardrobe was closed.
“You’re awake.”
A figure - how quaint a term for the feminine silhouette bent over her - raised a leather-sheathed forearm. Rolling in her open palm was something glittering.
Miranda’s grandmother’s ruby heart pendant, a single bright diamond embedded in its core. The owner of the hand raised the jewel to eye level, fingering it lustfully. Cowled with a cat-eared shawl and eyes masked with tinted oval goggles, her tight mouth was all Miranda had to go by: milk skin and a vaguely familiar smirk.
She’d heard the stories, read the newspaper articles. It had been different then. The seedy world the news reported on, where people were robbed or stabbed or kidnapped and tortured, was a shade of a different city that she had never seen nor ever had the need to speculate upon. Yet here it was. Without her having done much of anything, it had come to her.
“Go back to sleep,” the woman purred, and bowed her lips, crooking down to the curve of Miranda’s ear. “Sleep.”
Heart in her throat, Miranda squeezed her eyes shut obediently. She would live to see daylight again. To see her sweet girls again somewhere under the sun, someplace that was not a part of the unlit city that was showing itself to her this night. She had to believe that.
The mattress dipped beside her head as a body part pressed into it - the weight of a hand or an elbow. A sweet breathe touched her lips for an instant before a pressure was pressed to her mouth. It was a soft pressure that caused her chest to shudder, beating doubly, and pumping the blood beneath her skin. It felt as if it were pushing a drug infectiously from her lips to every other part of her body. She tingled.
Her mouth involuntarily parted in the need for oxygen her blood demanded. A flash of tongue met hers as a painful prick pierced the skin of her throat. Miranda recognized it as the deep, intrusive pain of needlepoint.
Miranda’s eyes fluttered open even as she fought the sudden intense effect of drowsiness. She had been drugged. She glimpsed the eyes behind the goggles pulling away before her own eyelids weighed too heavily for her to keep them up.
Terribly familiar. Like a family member she’d never met, or a color between one shade and the next that she could just barely imagine.
At Runway, in between sending Andrea for Starbucks, the new autumn run through and fielding calls from her custody attorney, Miranda struggled to reach that faraway memory of a memory, but attempting to connect the burglar with anyone she was familiar with proved ineffective. In the end, she was left with the memory of the quirk of the woman’s smile, a face she knew she had seen before yet couldn’t quite touch her mind to it, and Miranda’s own desire for sunlight - to be somewhere bright and open. In the light of day, surrounded by her coworkers, that desire rang false to her now.
Here she felt bare, fake. The metropolis she could observe from her office window was a mask. Last night it had shown its true face to her. A sweet pressure on her lips. A purr by her ear.
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Thanks for the read.
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Brava dear, brava!!
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