this wasn’t a room in my apartment anyhow, so I knew that I was in someone else’s house.
The wrong place, I thought abruptly. I was in the wrong place. But how had I gotten here? And how was I going to get back?
I jumped up out of bed, leaving the sheets twisted and wrinkled behind me, and went quickly toward the door of the bedroom, my mind on getting out of there first, and figuring out where I needed to go second.
I nodded to myself, thinking that I was being incredibly rational for the middle of the night, and reached for the door. A quick twist of the knob and it swung open.
“Well that’s a good sign,” I whispered to myself, thankful that at least the door hadn’t been locked. I crossed ‘trapped’ and ‘kidnapped’ off the list of possibilities, and made my way out into the hall.
I frowned as I looked around. This hall definitely didn’t belong to me. Not that the room or those sheets had, so of course the hall didn’t. So far, it was all completely rational—as long as you didn’t pay attention to the part where this wasn’t my house. The whole thing was taking on a sort of shimmery feeling around the edges, though, and I felt as though I was looking at it all through a sort of curtain. A see-through curtain, obviously, but a curtain, nonetheless. One that took away my ability to think clearly through a problem.
When I started forward, the ground felt funny under my feet.
Carpet, my brain told me firmly. That’s not ground, that’s carpet.
Oh. Right. Carpet. Well, it still felt funny.
You’re going insane, my brain replied. You’ve felt carpet five million and three times before. It’s exactly the same as it’s always been. Something’s wrong with you.
Well that was very helpful, I thought darkly. Still, I was starting to think my brain was onto something. Because I definitely felt wrong. That shimmery effect of the world slowly burning inward from the outer edges, like it was a piece of paper that had been set on fire, was seriously distracting, and I didn’t remember the world having looked like that before. Wait, what was the world supposed to look like?
Suddenly I couldn’t remember. And that made the panic rising up in my chest even bigger and scarier.
What was going on here? Where was I, how had I gotten here, and why did the world look like someone had set it smoldering, crisping around the corners like an old letter?
Why couldn’t I remember whether it had always looked like that? Had someone drugged me? Had I had some sort of head injury?
I moved forward more quickly, striding through the darkness with my hands outstretched in front of me, the ghosts and shadows of unfamiliar furniture sliding up out of the dark to bite at me, and before long I was breathing heavily, totally panicked at the idea that I didn’t know where I was or what I was supposed to do about it.
I hit a wall and bounced off of it, muttering to myself, and then hit something else and bounced off of that as well. The moment I caught my balance and tried to find equilibrium again, a coffee table reached out from the shadows and grabbed at my feet.
I screeched in terror and fell to the ground, and heard the sound of shattering glass a moment later.
A second after that, the lights came on, blinding me, and everything started to come back into focus. I started to remember. I remembered, in fact, the man standing above me—thank God. That was Nikos looking down at me with both confusion and concern coloring his face, and when I turned my head to the side I saw not only the coffee table that had attacked me, but a picture lying next to me on the ground, the glass shattered, the frame cracked.
Nikos pulled me up next to him and slipped an arm around my waist.
I was in his house, I recalled. We’d had dinner. We’d had olives and wine. Way too much wine.
“Are you okay?” he asked breathlessly. “My God, you’re burning up. How long have you been like that?”
I had no idea, not having thought to slow down long enough to feel my own forehead for fever, and I opened my mouth to tell him so, but before I could say anything he was frowning and bending over to pick the picture frame up from the floor.
“I’m so sorry,” I