Doors Secrets (doorssecrets) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-07-08 18:45:00 |
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Entry tags: | plot: secrets |
Who: Scarlet
What: Reveals
When: Secrets plot
Warnings: Suggestions of adult themes.
She was bare, when the morning came to take her. Bare, cool-damp and she suited herself because she could, Scarlet in the garden with the sunlight sparkling on pool water. She suited herself, even if she’d been dressed like a plaything ready to take apart, to unwrap and the cloak lay like a puddle of bright blood on the grass.
Rich men took playthings to parties. Rich men danced between the glitter of chandeliers and rich men rutted with the noise of a barn going at it in spring, without giving a damn who heard them or when. Rich men liked silk-soft things in slips of satin but Scarlet held her head high at the party's close, Scarlet was scornful smile and the unruffled tumble of curls. The door called, pulled them back, Scarlet picked her path with her bare-dirty feet, until she wasn’t a silk-soft thing anymore at all and the coal black curls (dark as sin, pretty as pictures to hang on the wall) mussed themselves into something that wasn’t plaything no more.
She stood at the edge of a hotel, blinking hot, tired eyes into the light and she stood at the corner of the place where the grounds met the road, fumbled through bills in her purse. There wasn’t much in it but air, a couple dollars folded over and wrinkled and she longed to take a cab right on up to the door but she walked instead.
Her hair was a dandelion puff of heat-frizzy curls, and her feet was sore in their sandals. Her dress was limp and the cool of that pool was distant memory and she looked the least bit like anybody’s plaything that anyone would want. She unlocked a barrage of hardware on the door, and she stood alone on the mat, looked at a place that wouldn’t be hers all that long.
It was exhaustion, that crept up her spine, at the memory of doing every damn thing for herself. Ella picked up the phone and she dialed the sitter, the one with a house all over security and a license proudly displayed on the wall, and she said I’m coming to get her right up until she looked at the calendar by the phone, an appointment circled in red pen and underlined.
She smiled, because her momma had told her to smile whenever she felt like shouting, and she put some of that smile back in her voice. She said a little while longer, with the cord wrapped around her finger, thinking of the envelopes in the drawer, thinking of the new place that cost more than a month right here. She said a little while longer and a couple hours later with hope in her voice. And then she hung up the phone and she climbed in the shower, and she wore the kind of underwear that was fancy from the back of the drawer. It wasn’t scarlet, not one bit of it, but it was slippery-silk close to the skin.
She walked out the door with no cloak, but a man’s plaything all the same, and she smiled because she wanted to shout.