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Brent opened up his eyes, wide, and it was the middle of the night – unmistakably so. There were slight noises coming from upstairs.
This was the one and only thing he just could not get used to about living with his bosses now: the pitch-black night. He was a child of the city, through and through, and now, here, there was no traffic, there were no street lamps, no non-stop shops, no electric buzz from millions of watts, flowing through the veins of New York.
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Here, he was in the cradle of nature, some borderline zone that belonged both to the city and to the wilderness, or rather – it belonged to neither.
So, the mornings were as quiet as a tomb, and the nights were as black as death, and sometimes he felt quite claustrophobic, in his soft, luxurious bed, in this huge, sweet-smelling house, too stubborn to endure the pretentious whim of having a nightstand lamp on during the night, too self-disciplined in assuring himself that he would soon get used to this sleeping location, just like he had gotten used to dozens of others. Before.
That he was here for only a month.
There was some shuffling of feet upstairs, and it wasn't unusual – both Mister Lan and Mister Jiang would make noises in the night, and often, but lately it had all been quiet, they had been quite tired. So he both enjoyed the silence, and dreaded it, because here, the silence was as absolute as deep space.
Now he listened for anything that might be alarming, but heard none. There were a couple of minutes with faint muffled sounds from the master bedroom, and then the silence reigned once again.
