The Actor

...leading to complications

Jenny 

Jenny checked her phone as she passed through the narrow lobby of Simon's apartment building: 3:46 AM.

It hadn't felt like a conscious decision to leave. Cocooned beneath the duvet, the idea had arisen as a dream-like possibility, as a right thing to do, a cutting of losses. Then her feet had been on the ground and she had discovered herself sifting the detritus of the bedroom floor for her clothes. She seemed to know what she was doing, was too dazed to argue with herself. She paused a moment to listen for the susurrus of breath coming from the other side of the bed. It continued uninterrupted.

Now, out on the street, the silence and the chill night air were helping keep reality at bay. A childhood memory passed through her mind, of bitterly cold mornings back on the farm and air that could cut your face like a razor. The city air was made of much softer stuff; it cupped her face like a lover with cold hands.

Following the pavement, moving through pools of streetlight and tree shadow, she clung to this detachment, holding her mind as still as possible lest the slightest movement set it off like a clockwork toy. This languid sense of warmth and contentment, she knew, would not survive examination. She didn't want to think about that now. At least the lingering alcohol in her bloodstream had yet to turn traitor, no symptoms of incipient hangover beyond the numbness in her head. If anything, it was helping her cause.

As she walked, she let the scenes replay in her mind, reawakening a tremor in her loins that was part imagination, part muscle memory.

A girl alone in the night. The neighborhood was not a dangerous one as such; the walk from Simon's apartment back to her own no more than a kilometer or so, a quarter-hour at most. A monochrome world broken only by the red eye of a traffic light. She looked about for the surveillance cameras, her friends in this deserted streetscape. None were visible, but they must be there. Fear would have been a safe emotion, but she couldn't bring herself to feel it.

The afternoon sky had threatened rain. Here in the darkness of night it was hard to tell, but the ground was not noticeably wet. The rain, if it had fallen at all, must have been brief. Above her the sky was a starless glow.

She hurried on. A conscious sleepwalker, walking home alone through empty streets, one shadow among many.