Thor'sday Night
by
Maria Isabel Pita
Copyright © Maria Isabel Pita
Smashwords Edition
Chapter One
The Miami sky is often more interesting than the flat ground beneath it. Massive clouds loom on every horizon like the pale and powerful torsos of gods shoving against each other.
On a Wednesday morning in November, Carmen Palacios is gazing up at a shaft of light wielded like a sword by the cumulus army, not paying much attention to the dull battle of rush hour traffic around her.
She nearly hits a jaguar.
Shaken, she concentrates on her driving the rest of the way to work.
She parks in her allotted space, and getting out of the car allows herself one last wistful glance up at the heavens.
Above the twelve-story building, the sky’s delicate blue color darkens towards the zenith like a lake’s deepening waters, where indigo islands float around a volcano made of giant cotton balls. Its massive dimensions absorb her for a timeless moment as a gust of wind whispers of the cool weather to come.
Inside, her high-heels make an efficient ticking sound on terracotta tiles. Mirrored elevator doors gleam between the leaves of real trees, flashes of lighting in the quiet storm of water rushing down into a fountain from the mezzanine.
Up on the ninth floor in a shadowy foyer, Seaside Fuel’s obese receptionist, Louise, sits inside a circular glass booth. The first time Carmen saw her, she thought of a prehistoric toad preserved in ice. ‘Good morning, Carmen.’
‘Good morning, Louise.’ Her heels echo hollowly against the black stone tiles.
The space Carmen occupies with the Vice President is nearly as large as her apartment. The reception area is traditionally furnished in burgundy leather and polished mahogany, a décor that doesn’t quite match all the lush tropical foliage. At the far end of the room, a window reflects a narrow portion of sky. If you stand directly in front of it, it offers a depressing view of undeveloped swampland.
Her polished desk forms an L-shaped barricade just outside Mike Peterson’s office. Her boss is handsome, intelligent and even-tempered. He is out of the office a great deal, and he is married.
Dropping her purse on her desk, Carmen beelines it for the coffeepot hidden away in an alcove, which also houses the department’s files and office supplies, the copy and the fax machines.
She starts a pot brewing, checks the faxes, and copies the daily reports from the ships.
Returning to her desk, she is surprised to hear Mike’s voice coming from his office. Then she hears another quiet male voice, and realizes he is in a meeting that wasn’t on his schedule.
Tossing her dark brown hair behind her, Carmen walks in to his office, and places the morning’s faxes on his desk.
‘Good morning, Mike,’ she says.
‘Good morning, Carmen.’ He doesn’t even glance up at her, which alerts her to the fact that something is wrong.
‘Good morning, Carmen,’ the man seated in front of the desk echoes.
The subtle authority in his tone makes her pause beside him on her way out as though he had commanded her to. He is wearing a dark gray suit with a penetratingly black tie. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ she asks.
‘I would love one.’ His hair is a stunning reddish-blonde and just short enough to conform to the business dress code. The expression in his stone-gray eyes, however, clearly defies it. ‘Thank you, Carmen.’
Back in the alcove, the coffeepot is gurgling like a happy baby. She pours the visitor a cup, and curses herself for forgetting to ask him if he took cream and sugar. She also fills a cup for Mike, who always takes his black, then pauses outside the open door of his office for a moment to eavesdrop.
‘…Is not accusing Seaside of anything,’ the stranger is saying.
‘Then what exactly are you doing here?’
Mike’s angry voice gives her a strange thrill.
She strolls back into the tense space. ‘I just assumed you like it black,’ she tells the stranger, and notes that he reaches for the cup she offers him with his left hand. If he’s married, he isn’t wearing his ring.
‘You assumed correctly,’ he says, staring soberly up into her eyes.
Turning away from him reluctantly, she sets Mike’s cup down just in reach of his right hand.
‘Thank you, Carmen, hold my calls, please.’
She leans over in her chair, one of her legs bent behind her as she reaches under her desk for the pen she dropped.
Mike’s visitor emerges from his office, and pauses to admire the view.
She sits up, turns back to her desk, and ignores him.
‘Can I see you later, Carmen?’ Her breath catches as though he pulled on her hair and forced her to face him. ‘You certainly don’t waste any time,’ she retorts, pleased.
He thrusts his hands into his pockets. ‘Life is brief.’
‘Yes, it is,’ she agrees, ‘but what I want isn’t.’
‘I respect that, Carmen, and I’d like to see you later.’
‘And I,’ the spiral she unconsciously doodles on a pink message pad rips through the paper, ‘don’t even know your name.’
‘Jay Westgate.’
She writes her name and phone number on the slashed paper, tears it off the pad, and hands it to him.
‘Thank you.’ His fingers caress hers as he accepts it. ‘I’ll call you this evening. We’ll have dinner.’
Her boss’ peremptory voice rises out of the speakerphone, ‘Carmen, can I see you in here, please?’
The moment she walks into his office, Mike demands with quiet intensity, ‘What did he say to you?’
‘Um, nothing.’ Having expected a letter or a memo to type, she is caught off guard. ‘Why?’
He flicks the point in and out of a pen. ‘Did he by any chance ask you out?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact he did. Is that against company policy or something?’ She sincerely hopes not.
‘No,’ he tosses the pen onto his desk, ‘it isn’t.’ His black suit gleams like an oil spill over his white shirt and makes his light-blond hair shine like silver. ‘I’m sorry, Carmen,’ he looks her straight in the eye for an instant, ‘I know it’s none of my business.’
She remains tactfully silent, waiting for him to volunteer more information.
‘I just don’t like the thought of him…’ He looks up at her again, and frowns. ‘No, I guess he wouldn’t need any other reason.’ She crosses her arms to cover up the fact that his steady regard made her blush slightly. ‘Sir, would you mind telling me what’s going on, please?’
He picks up his coffee cup. ‘Mr Westgate works for D.E.R.M.’
‘The Department of Environmental Resources and Monitoring?’
‘Correct. He heads the Enforcement Division, and he suspects Seaside of certain,’ he pauses to sip his coffee and to lift the end of his tie curiously, as though he has never seen it before, ‘violations.’
The word makes her pulse quicken and her dark-lashed, honey-brown eyes widen. ‘What kind of violations?’
He sets his cup down. ‘Completely imaginary ones.’ He pulls a stack of folders towards him purposefully.
‘Wait a minute, you think he only asked me out to ask me about Seaside?’ She is too upset to worry about grammar.
‘Unless the man’s gay, Carmen,’ he replies a little impatiently, ‘it can’t be the only reason, and it’s probably not even the case at all. Forget I said anything, and get Captain Richards in here ASAP.’
*
The day goes on forever. Her workload is light, as usual. She spends most of her time surfing the net, or reading actual b
ooks full of fact and fiction in equal measure. At least a distracting number of people from all departments walk past her desk today. However, smiling faces enter the Vice President’s office and grim ones emerge, from which entertaining banter is no longer forthcoming.
Having skipped lunch, another significant deviation from his routine, Mike strides out of his office shortly after three o’clock, black leather briefcase in hand. ‘Go home,’ he commands. ‘Thanks!’ She is delighted to be spared rush hour traffic as well as the five o’clock crush at the gym.
When Carmen walks into her apartment pleasantly relaxed after her workout, the carpet comes to life around her ankles.
‘Hello, my babies!’ She crouches down to greet her cat, Sage, and her three kittens, Buffy, Speckly and Runty. ‘I have a hot date tonight, Sage, wait till you see him.’ She picks up her purring, snow-white familiar. ‘He’s got red hair,’ she carries her into the bedroom, ‘and I’ve never seen eyes like his, I mean, the way they look at me. He’s not your usual Miami fare at all, not at all. He seems so intensely honest.’ She puts Sage down on the bed, and steps carefully around kittens as she peels off her gym clothes.
She showers and dries her hair. By now it is after six o’clock, and the phone still hasn’t rung.
Stubbornly optimistic, she puts on a little make-up then studies her naked body in the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door. Her legs are long and beautifully shaped, and the gentle hourglass curve of her waist and hips is a sexy, inviting compliment to her well-exercised slenderness. Her breasts are very generous handfuls, and instead of sagging with age will only grow fuller, which is a consolation. She smiles at herself, then slips into a sleeveless, thigh-length white dress, in which she looks both innocent and sexy, and white high-heeled sandals, after which she joins Sage on the black leather couch.
She turns on the television, even though she knows there isn’t much to watch at this hour.
They are playing Rap videos on all the music channels, so she settles for CNN’s Headline News.
With the volume turned down low, world events flow across the large screen as unreal as reflections in a stagnant pool. Kittens crawl over her sandals, and then try climbing her legs.
She scoops them up onto her lap, and they promptly decorate her dress with gold and black hairs as their mother watches approvingly.
When Carmen looks up again, an ancient skeleton lying in a bed of black earth consumes the TV screen. Red and gold artifacts glimmer around the bones, those of a young woman who apparently formed part of a Viking warrior’s possessions.
Her stomach rumbles hungrily as the station abruptly cuts to a car commercial.
Two hours, and countless murders, robberies and small wars later, she gently lifts sleeping kittens off her lap to turn off the television.
She is starving, but too full of restless disappointment to stay home and cook. It is nine o’clock. Jay Westgate obviously changed his mind about taking her out to dinner.
She throws some credit cards along with a tube of lipstick into a small white purse, snatches up her keys, and slams the front door behind her.
She heads east towards Miracle Mile, crosses the invisible border between Coral Gables and Miami, and decides to drive into Coconut Grove. She has never had dinner by herself in public, but Jay Westgate has so thoroughly humiliated her already, she might as well go all the way. She was looking forward to his phone call with such wholehearted excitement that the vacuum created by his silence has left her feeling strangely weightless. It doesn’t seem completely real that she is driving through the night with no real purpose except to satisfy her body’s hunger. She always forgets how hard it is to park around Coco Walk, even on a weeknight. She is wasting money by eating out, so she defies the parking garages and finds a spot on a dark road off Main Street.
She hesitates before getting out of the car, but she has come too far to turn back now.
Walking as fast as she can in her high heels, she passes a deserted baseball diamond on her right. On her left, glass glimmers beneath a streetlight like a faraway galaxy on the black asphalt of the road. She is stepping carefully around the shards in her sandals when two silhouettes suddenly flow out of nowhere and grab both her arms.
A male voice with a thick Spanish accent whispers, ‘If you scream, we hurt you!’
‘No tengas miedo, linda,’ his companion adds more gently, and his hold on her is just as painful.
Carmen feels herself floating across the street between them like her own ghost. She tells herself this is only a nightmare, but then her toes scrape against gravel and she knows her eyes are open because they fill with tears.
Her captors kick open a black wrought iron gate and swiftly drag her across a neatly mowed lawn crowded with trees into the shadow of a building, which seems to fall over her mind. All she’s aware of is a dark stained-glass window broken up by black branches above her, and of her soul screaming a wordless prayer. Then the ache in her arms seeps through her numbness, forcing her to accept the impossible – that she’s in the grip of mindless animals to whom she is nothing but fresh meat
– and her survival instincts literally kick in as she begins struggling and lashing out with her legs. The heel of her sandal makes vicious contact with a shinbone, but all it gets her is an angry groan, and a stab of pain in her shoulder as he yanks her more firmly against him. She tries to bring her knee up between his legs, and failing, between his companion’s, but that doesn’t get her anywhere either. They both let go of her suddenly and shove her down onto the ground. She lands hard on her ass between gnarled tree roots that look just like demonic fingers to her, yet she can’t scream because the impact knocked the breath out of her. ‘No!’ she gasps. ‘No! No!’
Bending over her, one of them grabs her wrists and forces her to lie down by pulling her arms up behind her. She feels him kneeling there, pinning her arms down, and starts kicking out with her legs again. It is so dark beneath the tree she can’t really see anything. It’s as if she is lying at the bottom of the sea struggling to make it back to the surface, to light and life.
‘¡Estate quieta, coño!’
‘If you keep resisting, he’ll cut you,’ the one behind her warns, and her whole body stiffens. She has no choice. She has to let her legs be spread open. She has to allow a terrifying shadow that embodies death and disease kneel between her thighs, and tug her dress up out of the way. Then the rough feel of dirt beneath her soft white panties buries her hopes of escaping this nightmare. It tells her she is just one more body to the earth, and that there is no God…
The silhouette between her legs rises over her with eerie smoothness, and dives away from her headfirst just like an evil spirit in a movie suddenly called back into its grave.
‘¡Carajo!’ the one behind her yells, and she listens to him crashing away between the leaves before she grasps the fact that her arms are no longer pinned down.
She immediately sits up with the intention of running, but all she can manage is falling forward onto her hands and knees, and then sitting back on her heels.
It takes Carmen a few stunned moments to distinguish the breathless thudding sounds she is hearing from the pounding of her own heart. Finally, her brain registers the fact that an even taller silhouette is fighting the one of her would-be rapist, or rather, beating it straight down into the ground. It is such a terribly wonderful sight that she doesn’t even cringe when this miraculous portion of the night turns in her direction, and falls to its knees before her. A man’s breathless voice asks in English, ‘Did they hurt you?!’
She can’t seem to find her own voice to answer him.
‘Talk to me, honey.’
Warm, and slightly rough, hands cup her face, smoothing her hair back out of her eyes. It doesn’t help her see more clearly, but as his hands move gently down to her throat they seem to find her voice. ‘I’m all right,’ she whispers.
‘Are you sure?’
His hands pass lightly over her breasts,
and then travel slowly down her body. ‘It’s not torn…’ He seems to be talking to himself.
Bracing herself on his broad shoulders, she lifts herself up just far enough to wrap her arms around his neck. He is a lean, hard wall protecting her from any other menaces the darkness might hold. Which is why it is perfectly all right with her when his hands slip up into her dress, because she knows he is simply making sure she isn’t hurt. His hands linger, carefully assessing her condition, and suddenly realizing that he saved her life gives her such a profound thrill, and she shudders in his arms.
‘It’s okay,’ he murmurs, ‘you’re safe now.’
She shifts her hips, encouraging his fingers to check where it really counts, and he does a thorough job of making sure her panty is still smooth and intact, during which she experiences a breathless joy because she is alive and unharmed. ‘Can you walk?’ he asks, gently smoothing her dress down around her thighs again.
‘Oh, yes,’ she assures him, only to discover that her legs won’t cooperate and she needs his help just to stand up.
She isn’t conscious of falling, only of his arms catching her.
Blue lights flicker across the squad car like heat lightning, sympathizing with her pulse, which refuses to slow down, and reflect her shocked mental synapses, making it even harder for her to think straight, which at the moment is a blessing.
The officer who just took her statement remarks, ‘You were very lucky, miss.’ His small hard features, contrasted by a sagging belly, aren’t very sympathetic. ‘Damned lucky.’
‘I think she knows that,’ the man who rescued her replies tersely.
The restless blue waves of light wash over individual faces in the crowd that has gathered around the police car, the intangible tide of its curiosity held effortlessly at bay by another uniformed officer.
‘It’s too bad the other prick got away, but it’s a good thing for her you just happened to be around, Reed. It’s enough to make me believe in guardian angels.’
Thor'sday Night - Paranormal Erotica Page 1
