The Turn of a Page

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

            Hearing my weekend alarm go off, I reached over to my bedside table and turned it off, then lay face down and tried to bury my head under my pillow without having to move my arms. The brightness from outside trailed in through my curtains and it was hurting my head a little to have the ambient light around me; however, knowing I wasn’t going to get back to sleep, I decided to get up again and take some tablets.

            As I shuffled through my drawers looking for the box, I heard tapping on my door; it was so faint that I wouldn’t have noticed it if I was still in bed.

            I answered with the door slightly open, and when I realised it was Baz I opened it fully to let him in (for some reason he had decided to come to me as a wolf).

            ‘Hey, Baz. I’m sorry if you heard me shouting earlier, or heard me stomping up the stairs. The guys put me in a mood,’ I explained as he hopped onto my bed and curled up, propping his head over his curled up front legs and watched me.

            Sitting down next to him, I leant forward and, with my elbows on my knees, put my head in my hands covering my face. His wet nose was cold against my skin as he tried to push one of my hands out of the way; I let him and rested my left cheek on my left hand so I could look at him. His eyes didn’t meet mine, and at first I thought he was staring at my breasts but then, after my eyes wandered round the room in an embarrassed manner, realised he was staring at my exposed skin where his necklace should be hanging.

            In response to his gesture, I lifted my free hand up and ran my fingers over the area he had just been observing. My eyes fell to look at his paws. ‘In my anger, with them, I broke the chain as I had hold of it during my rant at them.’

            In annoyance, as his ears showed, he hopped down off the bed and then changed to his human form. ‘Well, it’s a good thing that the chain can be replaced. Don’t you have any other necklaces?’ he asked and then scanned my room to look for my many jewellery boxes.

            ‘Yeh, somewhere. So you aren’t mad at me?’ I asked while standing and putting my arms around his waist from behind.

            ‘Mad? Why would I be mad? It’s just the chain. If you’d lost it or broke the pendant then maybe I’d be upset, but I wouldn’t get mad at you,’ he said while rummaging through my necklace drawer in my jewellery wardrobe (it was a miniature version of a full size one). ‘Hun, let me look for another chain for you and then you can hug me all you like.’ To that, I let go and fetched my necklace for him to change chains. After some serious concentration, he had managed to slip the new chain through the little hoop on the pendant and clasped the ends together, placing it back on my desk where it wouldn’t fall off. Walking over and sitting down, he joined me on the edge of the bed. ‘How’s your head now?’ he asked while stroking his thumb across my forehead.

            ‘Much better now. I was going to take some pills just as you knocked but now I don’t need them since I have you here,’ I said with a smile on the end.

            ‘I did wonder why you were stomping up the stairs. So when I got out of the shower, I went down and asked the guys what the hell had been going on. When they’d finished telling me, I stayed downstairs and sat and thought about how it all might seem to you. But now I’m here and you can tell me your end of the argument.’ And so I told him what had happened downstairs between me and the guys.

            ‘And then I came up here, realised I had broken the chain and then fell asleep until my afternoon alarm woke me up,’ I concluded my little story.