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It was a car horn that jolted me awake, my mind taking longer than it should have to focus on the present, making me think I was still in the woods until my vision cleared, and I saw a thick crush of traffic around the car.
“You’re with me, remember?” a deep voice called, making me turn to find Silvano glancing over at me.
“What time is it?” I asked, even though I didn’t even know what the time had been when I’d originally passed out.
“Almost five hours after you crashed,” he told me. “You talk in your sleep, by the way,” he said, lips twitching.
Oh, God.
Did I?
What did I say? Anything that might tell him what was really happening in my life?
“What did I say?”
“Something about a cocoa cup?” he said, brows scrunched.
“Cocoa… oh,” I said, laughing at my subconscious mind and its ability to think of the most random stuff. “I had a hot chocolate cup as a kid that I lost when moving apartments,” I said. “I cried about it every night for weeks. It was all very dramatic,” I told him.
“Did it have a flying pig on it by any chance?”
“That was a stuffed animal I lost,” I admitted.
“Bad at keeping track of your shit, huh?” he asked as he turned the car down a street, taking us out of the worst of the traffic.
“I was a child,” I insisted. Though, admittedly, even as an adult, I had a knack for losing things. But he didn’t need to know those sorts of personal details.
“How far of a walk is it?” I asked when he found a spot to park the car.
“Right there,” he said, waving maybe half a block ahead of us. “Sit tight for a minute, I’ll take Storm for a walk to the park over there,” he said, waving behind him. I didn’t even bother trying to turn to look.
“How did no one look at me?” I asked a few minutes later as we got in the elevator car in his apartment building lobby.
“It’s the city,” he said, shrugging it off. “No one pays attention to anyone else. Once was on a train where a guy stripped naked while ranting about the government lacing his clothing with LSD. No one even spared him a glance.”
I couldn’t decide if that was comforting or sad.
Luckily, we got to his floor, and I had other things to think about as he found his keys.
It was a small building, with only four doors on this floor. His was situated closest to the stairwell, something I committed to memory, in case I needed to make a quick escape.
I didn’t know the guy, so I had no frame of reference for what his place would look like. Still, I found myself both surprised and impressed.
As a girl who once dated a guy who lived in an apartment where he kept his old, empty liquor bottles on a shelf as ‘decor’ and didn’t own hand towels, I didn’t have high hopes when it came to a man’s home.
Still, this place was gorgeous.
It was a wide open space with an exposed loft where the bed was located.
Three of the walls of the space were red bricks. The final one, on the wall where the door was located, was covered in some sort of thin wood panels.
The opposite wall of the entry door had a strange slanted wall of windows, bathing the space in light.
The whole space had a sort of industrial feel. But in a cozy way. If that made any sense at all.
Beneath the loft was the kitchen, a U shape that gave it a lot of counter space.
