Audra heard the alarm and quickly slapped it off. She lay in bed for a moment, covering her face with a pillow and willing herself to wake up somewhere else.
"This is only temporary, this is only temporary" she reminded herself.
A year. One full year of her life had been wasted in this god-forsaken place while her husband chased his dream of building his start-up company into a billion dollar industry. He was an incredibly talented programmer, and they had offered him an incredibly lucrative salary to relocate and work for a start up operation in Michigan. Audra would have given anything if he'd just passed it up. She'd had to leave her life and move here, 10 hours away from her friends and family to this cold and cloudy piece of hell on earth.
"Seriously, does the sun ever shine here?" she wondered out loud as she parted the bedroom shades a crack, revealing the usual overcast skies. Her husband, Jim, had long since left for work. She walked through the bedroom and forced herself to get into the shower and start her day. Although she had tried, and tried hard, Audra had not been able to get work in this part of the country. So she decided to just work for herself, picking up design projects as she could for soccer moms in the nearby affluent suburbs. Her days were free, she thought, empty and endless.
Showering quickly she stepped out onto the tile floor and grabbed a towel to wrap around her wet hair. Her curls had never been so wild before, she knew it was the cold dry air. After toweling her hair a bit, Audra opened the bathroom door, pulled on a short cotton robe and walked into the bedroom and stopped cold, startled at the sight of the man standing at the foot of her bed. He was wearing work boots and jeans with an blue oxford cloth shirt bearing a company insignia on the left breast pocket. His worn brown bomber jacket was unbuttoned, the collar still turned up to fend off the cold. He smiled a crooked smile at her, blue eyes glimmering.
"Shit, man! You scared me." Audra said, clutching her throat.
"Sorry," said Eric "you did give me your key, remember?" he said, shaking the key in front of her face before stowing it in his jacket pocket.
Audra relaxed and gave him a warm smile. "Yes, yes I did and this is a wonderful surprise. What brings you out this cold, gray morning?" she asked, placing her arms under his coat and wrapping them around him.
As she hugged him, her head rested on his chest and she felt the old familiar comfort. Now, she tipped her head up to look into those blue eyes that she had known more than half her life.
"So, want some breakfast?" she asked.
"No," he said. He kissed her, hard and passionately, his hand at the base of her neck.
"Coffee?"
"No," he said again, after placing a kiss on her collar bone and she shivered, still dripping wet from her shower.
"You know why I'm here." he whispered.
