Parisian petals permeated the air, saturating each and every particle of oxygen, until all that was left behind was the sweet scent of rose buds softened by fresh rain. The imported creme glides over your flesh with ease, as the aroma absorbs instantly into the palm of your hand, as if the notes of spring embedded themselves into the lines that ran like valleys along your skin. Fresh flowers plucked and placed upon the rippling canal, beneath the gentle beam of nature's raw light.
Glistening in the incandescent light of your vanity's display, the moisturizer smooths the bare surface of your arms. Up and over the ridge of your elbow and back down your forearm, your fingers travel with the sweet scent, before the thin sweep of satin falls back down in place. Sleeves of pale blush, embellished with the faintest whisper of an embroidered rose vine down at your wrist, the silken robe matching the nightgown flowing down your thighs.
The rain arrives just on the cusp of the darkened and cold midnight hour, as the mistakes of the day surely turn to regrets and the secrets of the night become history embedded in stone. For even as the blanket of indigo stained by the hue of a deep onyx, persisted as a new day dawned in the first hour, there was a finality to the notion of today now turned to yesterday. Like all of the possibilities and all of the lingering traces of hope, slipped away and out of your grasp.
For you could no longer change what had happened earlier in the hours, nothing could be avoided or prevented now that the day was done and gone. It was too late for the husband you loved to come home for the night, for as the breath of a new day exhaled over your shoulders in the dampened presence of a melancholy rain, the truth revealed itself. As though the knowledge you'd felt all along, had finally been confirmed in the boisterous void of his presence and in the ticking hands of the clock.
Tommy Shelby appeared just as the storms began to gather in the midnight's harsh hour. For the winds began to batter against the gothic brick of Arrow House, as though fists beating against the rattling metal of an abrasive cage, begging for freedom.
The clouds obscured by the darkness that ensued throughout the Warwickshire sky, relinquished its steady hold of the rain that had once descended in timid patters of gentle droplets, now letting torrents pound the Earth as if vengeance was sought. Saturating the baren fields and wringing through the trees bare of their autumn leaves, threatening to upturn the gravel of the driveway as if pining for the souls that rested amongst the cursed property.
His Bentley's headlights had illuminated the drive, a beacon of saturated light growing in the distance as the tires sloshed through the puddles now destined to expand. The world was shrouded in the shadows of the night, the storm's presence dawning an even darker sensation to the bitter November air, but still Tommy remained a sight that even the abyss of midnight could never seem to obscure.
For you'd watched him from the bedroom window, through the glistening trails that the raindrops left behind, without a single hinderance in the witnessing of his imperial frame marching up the front steps while the shadows closed in.
Even in a long black coat that blew in the angering winds, a cap snug with the black stitching of warm wool and gloves of dark leather concealing the blood of his past that lingered in the lines of his palms, Tommy stood out like a lighthouse out amongst a stormy sea. As though he was never bound to be drawn beneath the waves or obscured from the eye, even in the darkness, he still owned his place.
He strode in on a wave of silence, like his secrets spoke for him. Calling out like a siren in the night. For even as the man who carried the weight of the world upon his shoulders and the burden of a thousand lives and a hundred horrors in his head like lead flooding his veins, Tommy could climb the stairs without a single sound echoing through the corridors.
