Lili sat up in her bed. She was sure she had heard something, just as she’d heard it the night before and the night before that, but on both occasions she was too afraid to investigate.
She looked around the room, now swathed in darkness. The clock told her it was 11.21pm. It felt later than that. She perked up her ears and listened intently but couldn’t hear anything, and after a while the silence turned to a dull ringing in her ears. Lili looked to the man that lay beside her and smiled at the soundness of his sleep. His eyes flickered gently to the beat of his dreams and his breath was slow and heavy, his heaving chest moving with rhythm. Suddenly she felt fine. She rearranged the sheets around her legs and leaned back into the pillow when, without warning, the sound came again, rising to her room from the downstairs kitchen. Or was it the sound of the sheets ruffling? With the narcotic effect of both fear and so many sleepless nights she couldn’t be sure, but wasn’t prepared to take any chances. Her hand reached, slowly at first, to Nick’s arm until her panic got the best of her. The noise came again. This time as clear as day. A clattering of pots and pans. Someone was looking for something. Her hand gathered haste and squeezed her man’s arm as her voice came unsettlingly through her panting breath.
“Nick? There’s someone in the house.”
He stirred and squinted through the darkness. Tears were forming in her eyes and as another noise forced Nick’s eyes to open fully, a tear dropped on his arm, further alerting him of the terror that rung through her.
“What?” He tried to make sense of the sounds. They were definitely there and not a part of his wild imagination. He had heard stories that started this way, with a break in, and he knew how they had ended. He wasn’t prepared for an ending like that. Not now. But then he couldn’t just let Lili soak in her fear, or wait for something to happen. For once he had to be a man.
“Wait here.” He said and gallantly threw the bed sheets out of his way, storming to the wardrobe and taking out a baseball bat. The man that inhabited his body now was no closer to himself than it was to his wife, but it put the fire in his belly and a storm in his heart and for that reason alone, he allowed it to possess him. He had no idea what he would do once he had got downstairs but he figured his possessor would think of something bold, after all, it had already gotten him out of bed.
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