Beauty and the Pharaoh

Chapter 47 - [Beauty and Moving Forward]

When my eyes opened I gasped heavily for breath. I blinked a couple times, confused and heavy hearted. For a moment, I forgot where I was and what I was doing.

So I stood there. Frozen.

All I could smell was gasoline... gasoline and rubber and metal and cement. The light was fake and dim and painfully depressing.

I looked around.

I was in our parking garage. In one hand I was holding a coffee mug, in the other I had my car keys and a massive purse hanging from my arm.

And as I took slow breaths, it started to come back to me.

It all started to come back.

"Atem..." I whispered.

Almost immediately, I dropped the coffee mug onto the floor of the parking garage, turned around and ran back to the elevator.

I slammed on the elevator button a couple times and then pressed the close button a couple times too.

The ride up was excruciatingly slow.

And when the elevator ringed to a stop on my floor, I ran out of the elevator and used the keys to open my door.

When I was in my apartment, I let out a breath.

It looked different.

So different.

But that didn't matter now.

I dropped my purse and keys onto the floor and rushed into the apartment. "Atem?" I called, loudly. "Atem!"

I ran into his room and took a shaky breath. Aside from a single bed... it was empty.

No covers.

No books.

No bicycle.

Nothing.

But I refused to give up.

I ran through my apartment, calling Atem and Neferkitti too.

Even Neferkitti was nowhere in sight. There was no food bowl or water bowl, no cat food... absolutely nothing!

When I finally went into my room I saw that that too had no sign of Atem. Nonetheless, I still looked around, flipping over pillows, empting purses, and all sorts of other things. I didn't know what I was looking for exactly... just something to tell me Atem was here.

When I deemed my bedroom empty and was just about to leave, I froze in my tracks and did a double take at my full body mirror.

I turned to face it and put a hand over my mouth.

I almost didn't even realize that the girl standing in front of the mirror was me.

My hair was short... just to my shoulders. All of it had been cut off.

I was wearing high-heeled boots, which probably explained why it was so hard for me to run and my makeup looked... different. Not like how I would usually do it.

I was thinner... much thinner.

The kind of thin that I, at times, dreamed of being.

And to make it all even stranger, I was wearing high-waisted blue jeans and a white crop-top. A crop-top. I never wore crop-tops! But at the very least, to cover myself I had a leather jacket on.