AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She felt peculiarly safe, cocooned in a warm bubble, and although Alex’s proximity was unsettling it was also perversely comforting. Reading like this was…companionable. Intimate. As if they’d been lovers for a long time and didn’t need to fill the silence with words. She smiled to herself as the pages slipped from her fingers and her day of hard graft finally caught up with her.
At eleven o’clock Alex could stand the pretence of reading no longer. He hadn’t heard any movements from below him for a while, so he assumed Isobella was sleeping. He looked down past the edge of his bed and immediately wished he hadn’t.
She’d turned on her side, facing the wall, and had half kicked off her sheet. Her top leg angled out of the covers in something resembling the recovery position, and a cheeky portion of her left buttock was on display. Alex lay back against his pillow and groaned. She was wearing the leopard print.
He shut his eyes hard, curling his fists into his palms, resisting the urge to take another peek. He half sat and pulled his T-shirt off, hurling it to the end of the bed. The room had been warm, but now it was positively stifling.
He battled with his will for a while longer, admitting finally that he just wasn’t strong enough. He looked again. One long, bare leg greeted him, the gentle light gilding her skin with a creamy finish. The black lace of her knickers had ridden up, barely covering her exposed cheek, revealing the rounded delight of her delicate rump in all its glory.
Her top had ridden up slightly, to reveal the small of her back. He could see a glimpse of bony spine, the dip of her waist, the curve of her hip. A bare arm and shoulder were just as fascinating, her black bra strap clearly visible beneath the shoestring straps of the singlet top.
She murmured in her sleep and shifted slightly, and Alex pulled his head back sharply, his heart racing.
What the hell was he doing? She was a colleague. He was her boss, damn it!
He raised himself up on his elbow and twisted to turn off the kerosene lamp on the shelf. The room was instantly plunged into inky blackness, and he lay wide awake, praying for sleep he knew was never going to come.
Isobella was dreaming. The same dream. It was dark. The same cloying darkness that waited for her too frequently when she shut her eyes. The darkness that even when she woke, she couldn’t escape. She couldn’t move, couldn’t open her eyes to ward off the blackness before it dragged her under again. She railed against it, moaning her frustration, her fear.
And the noises were there too. The same noises, echoing around her head. Surreal, disjointed, coming from far away, but trapped in her head for her to relive over and over. Wind and rushing and sucking and spitting and a low-level white noise that never,never went away. She shook her head, desperately trying to wake, to rid her mind of the noises, a sob escaping from her throat.
And the powerlessness came again. Trapped in the strange no-man’s land between slumber and consciousness she felt it at its most potent. She knew her body wasn’t hers any more, that other people controlled it—the people who were responsible for the noises. It was frustrating, and she whimpered, trying to get them to stop.
Talking around her as if she was dead, as if she didn’t matter. Snippets of conversation, incoherent words, talking about her. Big words, grave tones. And she couldn’t wake herself up to tell them she was fine. Their talk scared her, and she moaned against the heavy weight of fear settling against her chest, paralysing her lungs. She couldn’t breathe.
A loud thud outside the window pierced the grip of her dream and she was startled into full consciousness, vaulting up on to her elbows. A mix between a cry and a gasp for breath left her throat before she could call it back.
Alex’s eyes, not long closed, flew open. ‘Isobella?’
Isobella stared into the oppressive blackness, completely disorientated. Where was she? She could see nothing. Oh, God, was she still trapped in her dream? Was she still in hospital?
‘Isobella?’
The scratchy voice came again. Alex? What was he doing here, in her dream? Her nightmare? ‘A…Alex?’
He sat up, alarmed at the tremble in her voice. She sounded terrified. ‘Are you okay?’
Isobella grappled for orientation. She was on Piccolo. There was a cyclone. The noises hadn’t been in her head, they’d been outside. The howling of the wind, the violent smashing of the waves and the greedy slurping as they clawed at the beach before being dragged back into the ocean. There were no ventilators, no suckers, no nurses or doctors.
So why was it so dark? She lifted up her hand, waiting for her eyes to adjust so she could see it. But it was no use. Why couldn’t she see it? ‘It’s d…dark.’
