Page 503 of Flirting with Darkness

“Time for breakfast,” my father said, his voice the same even low tone.

But I couldn’t eat anything.

4

PRESENT TIME

Iwas dreaming about my monster again.

As I woke up, I almost expected to see him perched at the side of my bed, his horns almost lost in the shadows, his eyes watching me expectantly. For a split second, Ididsee him, and then he was gone, and reality was back.

I was alone in my room.

My delusions faded with the last of the dream. My therapist said a lot of sympathetic things about how I’d made up an imaginary friend to salve my loneliness. How I’d made up a sharp crack in time to explain how my parents switched from being viciously abusive to merely absent. How my imaginary friend had faded when I no longer had to protect myself quite so desperately.

My parents had moved through that big house like ghosts, coming and going from work, handing me money for clothes, putting my wishes on the grocery list. They’d barely spoken to me, but it was always polite; there was something dreamy and faraway about their gazes. It had been better than the sharp, predatory way they’d often looked at me when I was little.

It had been safe, but it had been empty. Lonely.

And I’d still escaped that big quiet house to go swing in the rain.

My therapist asked me sometimes what I was waiting for. Why I seemed to hang suspended in time like a ghost myself. Oh, I’d gone to school, and then I’d started a job; I’d done normal human things in roughly the normal human order. But I didn’t date. I didn’t join book clubs or go out clubbing. I talked about how I wanted a pet but never walked into the local animal shelter. It seemed to her as if I was just… waiting.

That sounded so pathetic. Which was probably why I’d ghosted on yet another thing: therapy.

As I stood in line at the coffee shop for my chai, I tried to catch the last fragments of the dream I’d had the night before. I missed the imagination I used to have, the one that had brought Tor to me out of the substance of dreams. At night, some of that imagination seemed to surface again.

In my dreams, a prickle would run up my spine, electricity threading its way across my body. It was a warning someone was watching me, and yet I’d smile as I turned to search for him in the shadows. Tor always emerged from the darkness, as if he was watching me on the dark streets.

In my dreams, I confused demons and guardian angels.

But in the daylight, I knew neither one was real.

A smiling man turned around, his hand resting lightly on the small of a woman’s back, and I felt a lurch of longing—not for him, but for the easy way they touched each other. He accidentally steered her into me, and she lurched to one side at the last minute, the two of them giving me the briefest of looks, as if I were invisible.

I glanced at the reflection in the windows; rain was falling against the glass and the skies seemed dark outside, which made it easier to see myself. I’d dressed for work in loose brown slacks and a thick, cozy beige sweater. The world seemed to treat me like a ghost. With my short brown hair hanging around my pensive, pale face, it wasn’t hard to see why. I wasn’t particularly unfortunate-looking, but I was no beauty.

As I left the coffee shop, a man was sheltering under the overhang, his hand cupped to protect the orange glow of his cigarette. His eyes slid toward me, then away. “Hey.”

I didn’t answer. I hoped I’d fade into invisibility as usual.

Work was the usual dull angst. There was a constant low buzz of tension in the office, even though nothing actually seemed all that urgent. I worked in bookkeeping, which I liked. The numbers and patterns were comforting and the work was quiet. But my boss was neither comforting nor quiet. The atmosphere every day was as cold and cutting as winter wind. He was in his thirties, handsome and fit, and he used his power to manipulate and intimidate, particularly with the women in the office. The other two women in the office flirted with him and that made him better behaved, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. So, he just leaned over my shoulder and berated me about tiny errors constantly.

By the time it was two o'clock, I was already formulating her plan for dinner. The rain was still beating on the windows when I packed up to leave, and even though my boss glared at her for leaving on time, I felt a little thrill of joy.

I walked back home from work, stopping off to pick up my favorite tacos for dinner

Rain started to fall again halfway through my walk home. I cuddled my bag of tacos protectively against my chest, shivering in my thin jacket.

I had the sense of someone watching me, and when I turned my head over my shoulder, some ridiculous part of me expected to glimpse horns and dark, glimmering eyes. But no one was there in the shadows.

I was almost to my apartment. A man walked across the street toward me, and I fished in my tote bag for my keys, wrapping my fist around them. I didn’t want to be too slow getting the door open, just in case.

He stopped at the base of the stairs as I jogged up them. He stared up at me, and I tried not to make eye contact. Fear jolted through my stomach as I realized it was the man from the café this morning. I should’ve kept going down the road. Now he knew where I lived.

I fumbled the key in the lock, afraid he’d push in behind me and force himself into the apartment building. But he blocked the stairs now. I couldn’t run. I just had to move faster. My fingers shook as I twisted the key in the lock.

“Hey honey,” he said.

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