"Hello?" Pt. 1

Daniel

This was longer than I planned to write it. It's about 3100 UNEDITED words and I wrote it in about two hours. Maybe a little less. 

Anyway, I'm kinda happy about how this went! By the way, all your comments on the last chapter was amazing! Thank you so much for taking the time to comment your thoughts. It means the world to me!

Just a thing I'm doing for this week, and THIS WEEK ONLY, if you want to be name-dropped in the story, comment below! (A/N at the end for more details.)

Like I said, this is UNEDITED!

Sarah, xx

~*~*~ 

I've never been one that likes waking up in an empty bed. From my days in boarding school and having always been in relationships, I've gotten used to waking up to noise, or at least another body in the room. This morning, however, I woke up in an empty bed in an empty house in a strange city. Blinking one eye open, I didn't expect to see Sophie next to me, considering we hadn't shared a bed, but I hadn't expected to wake up to an eerie quietness that fell over Sophie's magnificently large house.

When she brought me back to her townhouse yesterday afternoon, I was amazed to see where Sophie called home. I'd never been to her London place, so walking around her New York City residence was an eye opener for me. I wasn't sure what to expect but certainly not what I'd walked into. The entrance hall was was a light open space where a staircase came up from the lower floor and another heading to the upper floors. On the 'Parlour floor'- Sophie's pretentious words, not mine- was the living room and a dining room. Both rooms were large and spacious, the light coming in from the bay window and the feature window in the living room bathing the space in light. Just off the living room was a home office, not the Sophie used it. 

Along one wall of the living room was countless shelving, decorated with books, vases and other trinkets. I couldn't help but smile at the collection of Harry Potter books that took up an entire shelf. There was no TV in this room. Instead, above the feature fireplace, was a painting. A long couch was placed in front of the shelving, two armchairs opposite the couch and a round table in the centre of the room. There wasn't much of a personal touch in the room, and downstairs in the kitchen and breakfast room wasn't much better. 

It looked like your typical NYC type kitchen and rather sterile. Thankfully, we weren't in that room for long. Sophie, continuing her tour of her house, walked us up to the third floor of the house, where there were two bedrooms. Situated on opposite ends of the house, the bedroom to the right at the top of the stairs was the master bedroom. Sophie pushed the door open and showed me her favourite room in the house- the sunroom just off from her bedroom. There were a few armchairs in there, along with a small desk that house Sophie's laptop, and it was there that I got the real sense of who Sophie was.

On the coffee table next to her laptop was a coffee mug, still half full. There were crumpled up pieces of paper on the floor, a notebook and pen on one of the chairs, and a several fashion publications on the surface above the shelving. I could barely suppress the smile that lifted the corners of my lips when I saw that there were five photframes dotted around the room. One was of her and her sibling from when they were kids. Another was a family photo taken on Sophie's graduation day. Her face was still the same, physically, but in the picture, when she smiled, it reached her eyes and she looked beyond happy. Moving onto the next, it was a photo of her and Hugo, taken outside the Eiffel Tower. It must have been taken after Sophie's pregnancy because in this picture, when she smiled, it looked as if she was just going through the motions. The fourth frame held a photo of Sophie when she was on holiday. A straw hat was on her head and pulled down over her eyes, but you could see her smile peeking out from under the rim.