The air-BNB was nothing special, but she supposed that's what you got when you rented mid-price and last minute. It looked enough like the pictures that she was not disappointed. A small living-room was attached through an open doorway to the kitchen, with front windows that faced out over a small lawn. A hallway led from the wooden front door--one of those old-English style ones with a barred porthole window and large hinges--down to a clean bathroom and her bedroom. The bathroom counter was scattered with beauty products and tiny hotel shampoo bottles. An open suitcase took up the lounge chair in the corner of the bedroom opposite a bed; the drawers of the dresser beside it still empty. Her clothes spilled out over the zippered edges.
The house was garish. That was good. This place didn't feel like home--and it
shouldn't
. On either side of the window, white polka-dotted black curtains hung. A couple of boxes sat in the living-room, beside the couch. She had to step passed them as she made her way into the kitchen. She'd arrived last night, and it took her a couple of minutes to locate the coffee maker. It looked like it had been purchased in the late nineties--cheap white plastic, but it would do. Picking it up, she placed it on the counter and plugged it into the wall socket. Setting the small glass bot inside of it, she filled one of the top compartments with water from the sink and the other with ground coffee from a large tin in the cupboards above the stove.
The house hadn't come with food, but it had come with coffee. That, she supposed, was good enough.
Outside the windows, the day matched her mood. Listening to the light rumble of the coffee maker, and the slow drip of liquid hitting the bottom of the glass pot, she glanced out of the kitchen window. Small lines of rain tracked down the glass, leaving faint impressions for a moment before they faded away. Overhead, the sky was heavy and grey. It promised a proper downpour of rain before the day was over. In the yard, between her and the neighbors, two large oak trees reached gnarled limbs up toward the overcast sky.
It was ugly, she decided. Ugly--and perfect.
Her thoughts were also ugly. They were suited to the day. She tried not to think as she worked, knowing what she was avoiding thinking about even as she tried to keep her mind blank and stared out of the window. Stepping closer, she pressed her hands down against the wooden mantle beneath the window. Like every other piece of wood in the kitchen, it had once been painted white and still
mostly
held that colour, though brown showed in long streaks where either the paint of the wood had cracked in lines. Turning her fingers into her palms, she pressed her knuckles against the wood hard enough for it to hurt. Hard enough that a couple of knuckles cracked, the sound and the slight easing of pressure toward near-pain managing to center her for a moment.
Her thoughts might have been ugly, but she wasn't. She could see a faint reflection in the glass of the window, between its slightly fogged edges. A face that held the shape of an oval stared out from the sweep of her brown hair, which fell well passed her shoulders; straight, and currently loose. A pair of wide brown eyes and slightly loose-looking pink lips were all that remained to tell of her Bulgarian heritage. If her skin was slightly darker around the neck and shoulders, fading more toward brown than beige near her hairline and the back of her hands, she knew that most people passed it off as a tan.
She stood tall, her chin raised on a slightly short neck, trying to hold the image of a proud woman. Something that she didn't feel.
Luke
--the name in her head came to her with the same sound as the rain hitting the glass. The same sound as the drips of coffee slowly filling the pot behind her. Pressing her nails into her palms, she tried to focus her anger into her hands. She tried to make her anger white-hot, as if she were attempting to burn it out of herself in a single flashing, rage-fueled moment. It didn't work. The name caught in the back of her throat, and for a moment she struggled to breathe around its weight.
Luke and
--there should have been two names there, but she'd never learned the second one.
They were a blankness. An empty space, which could have been filled by anyone. Over the course of the last forty-six hours, she'd spent a lot of time thinking about that; wondering whether it was a good thing or not. It
was
good, she decided. She wanted her rage directed at Luke. The empty space that whoever it was took up, the space that had once been hers, wasn't to blame.
He was--right?
Deep down, she knew that it wasn't her fault. Somehow, the knowing didn't help. It didn't ease the slight prickle of anger from behind her eyes, the one that had been threatening tears for the last two days. It didn't help lift the Atlas-sized stone from inside of her stomach. It didn't help her breathe around the name that was caught inside of her throat. The one that threatened to choke her, any time she spent time thinking about it. The worst part, she thought, was that the memory was still there. When she paused, she could still feel him. The weight of his body standing behind her shoulder, the warmth of his arms around her waist, the slight bristle of the beard he had been perpetually growing around his mouth.
When she woke up in a strange bed this morning, in the moment before she'd remembered where she was and what had happened, she had reached an arm out instinctively to his side of the bed. He was still there--because she could still feel him.
She could feel him inside of her. The length of his cock parting her, opening her; a memory that once would have sent a flush of pleasure through her so violently that it was nearly uncontainable. A memory that now made her teeth feel too large, too sharp, too hard in her mouth. Something travelled up her spine, making her shiver slightly; a small spark that had once been desire, but was now something... colder.
Angrier.
That was something else that he'd left behind, another thing that turned her stomach inside out. She had never been an angry person. It wasn't that she'd
never
been angry, of course she had. Everybody was angry, once and a while. But until two days ago she'd never felt like this. Like a shell had fallen inside of her, and was waiting for the smallest change to detonate. As if she were lying beside a bomb, unable to close her eyes, waiting for it to go off. Everything annoyed her. The sound of the rain. The sound of the coffee maker. How the salt and pepper shakers stood slightly off-center on the counter. She'd never been angry with herself for something that wasn't her fault.
At some point, she knew, she was going to explode. Everything else, everything in between, was only a waiting game. How long before something set her off? How long before she went
fucking
nuclear?
Pushing the thought roughly out of her mind, she turned and slid the now full pot out of the coffee maker. Taking a cup down from the cupboard, she poured it about three-quarters full. The slightly click of the glass pot going back into the coffee maker annoyed her. The tap of the mug against the counter annoyed her. The fact that the cupboard creaked as she closed it annoyed her.
The fact that the dishwasher was broken, and that she'd contacted the property owner earlier and received no response annoyed her. That one, especially, ticked her off.
