A thousand nights

XIV

The moment my eyes adapted to the pale colors of the first signs of the morning, I felt disoriented. They darted in every direction in search for anything that resembled my familiar four beige walls, but they ended up resting upon a forest of wild red locks.

The memories rushed back.

The argument, the awkwardness, her eyes as their gazed at the long shelves in the studio.

'Do you think we could play hide-and-seek in such a place?' Mallory had said the night before after watching the fireworks.

'You have a death wish, don't you?' I replied laughing. We proceeded to attempt at playing "guess the song I hummed" until we were too tired to carry on.

I took out my phone, which was barely on 10% to check the time. It was around eight, as I suspected.

Sighing deeply, I moved my hand to Mallory's shoulder to shake her awake. She mumbled something under her breath and completely ignored me. I smiled at her appearance. Her hair was stuck on the left side of her face and she had a slight drool on the corner of her mouth. Her lips were gently parted, and her bottom lip was curled downwards. I stared at her sleeping for a while and I noticed her eyebrows relaxed and the tiniest of smiles formed on her lips before she sucked in breath from her mouth, it made the tiniest of noises. I didn't want to wake her up, she looked so at peace. Nevertheless, we couldn't afford sleeping in for the rest of the day, we needed to find a way out.

I shook her harder than I did earlier, and her eyes slowly opened, showing that any small movement cost her an incredible amount of effort. She scanned my face as if she couldn't recognize me and then just before she realized who I was, she yawned. She rubbed her eyes with two fists like a child would and faced me again, more lucid now.

'Good morning' she said, suppressing another yawn. I couldn't help but do the same.

'What are the plans for today?'

'Well, getting out of here of course' I said rising to my feet. It felt a bit surreal to think about it, I had spent my first night out with the person I least expected to spend it with.

I got up and stretched my aching limbs as I yawned once again. My sight went slightly blurry as my eyes focused on Mallory. She stretched out a hand towards me and, rolling my eyes, I helped her up. In a silent understanding, we both collected the few possessions that we left hanging around in the cold office. I folded carefully the short red blanket in my bag and put on the jacket I had taken off in my unconscious sleep, as Mallory simply slid her feet inside her boots. Shoving my backpack on my shoulders, I approached the studio's blue door and opened it, letting Mallory go before me.

The short, narrow hallway was slightly more illuminated than the night before, it made it possible to not use the flashlights. However, it didn't make it any less easy to adventure through. It turned out that the long filaments were indeed cobwebs and other white stuff I couldn't identify.

'I can't believe we spent an entire night in this place,' Mallory breathed as we reached the end of the hallway and took the stairs to the ground floor.

'I know right'

We crossed the living room in an instant, the weightless fluffs of dust moving in our awake. We were now back at the front door.

I studied it cautiously, taking in every detail that I could have missed in the deep darkness of the previous night. At the light of dusk the door looked exactly as I remembered it, and yet it must have had something wrong to not have opened the night before. I could tell from Mallory's narrowed eyes and low profile that she might've been thinking the same thing.