The Blue Room Vol. 5 Read Free Page B

more
than a cocktail waitress, but I guess I was more naïve than I thought back
then, or just too crazy about Rita to ever think she could be doing anything
less than wholesome. She'd started to change her whole wardrobe, too. Wearing
jewels her mysterious Mr. X. had given her – the man she said she thought she
was starting to love.
                I
still don't know his name. I still don't know if Mr. X. is the man that killed
her, or even if somebody ever did.
                These
are the questions that haunt me. These are the questions that turn my dreams of
Rita into nightmares. I see her before me: dead, shot in the head, bleeding out
on a hotel room floor, and although part of my conscious minds knows that it's
Roz, there, lying dead upon the floor, I can't stop myself from seeing Rita's
face, from seeing Rita's beautiful eyes lying glassy and open, a single tear
running down the cheek I can feel, even in my dreamlike state, is so cold.
                What
happened to you, Rita? I open my mouth to cry out the words but nothing
comes out. Where have you gone? Where can I find you?
                Please,
please, I whisper, choking on my only silence. Tell me where to find
you.
                In
my dream she wakes up. She sits up straight, staring at me, the bullet still in
her brain, the blood still trickling down her temple, but she's alive and
blinking and her gaze is terrible.
                “You
fool,” she says. “Staci – don't you see? The answer's right in front of you.
It's been in front of you this whole time. But you always were stupid, weren't
you, beautiful? You never knew how to recognize something when it was right in
front of your face. And now I'm dead, because of you. And you'll never find out
why.”
                “Rita!”
This time I am able to cry out, but it is too late. Rita dissolves, and then
I'm in a room: like my hotel room at Blue Tower, but bigger, somehow, and
everything's just a little wrong, a little tilted, a little strange. My bed is
rocking back and forth like a ship in a storm and my sheets seem to rise up of
their own accord all around me, caressing my skin. The touch is like the touch
of a lover.
                At
first I think it's Rita.
                I
call her name, but she's gone now. I can feel it, how far away she is from me.
I can feel her absence and it is like the worst and the coldest chill in the
world.
                But
then I feel something else. My sheets are rubbing against my skin. And they are
not cold. Their touch is...almost warm. Compared to the icy storm around me,
they are welcome. I moan involuntarily as the sheet slowly rolls itself along
my thighs, across my stomach, between my breast, wrapping me tight.
                And
then I think I hear it. The heartbeat. The sound of another life next to me:
beating, hard. The sheets have a pulse and I can hear it, and it is beating in
sync with my own, and the feeling is beautiful and terrible all at once, and I
am afraid I will not be able to stand it.
                I
cannot believe what is happening. I am experience a strange, dark feeling. A
flush in my cheeks. A heat in my skin. A familiar throbbing all through me,
running up and down my spine from the nape of my neck to the warm places between
my legs.
                What
is happening , I wonder.
                But
now the sheets seem to have bunched together to form a figure: a man.
                And
then I am looking at him, straight at him, a man with a face in shadow but who
is so familiar, the way he touches me is so familiar.
                Mr
O... I think. But I'm still dreaming, aren't I – am I still dreaming? As
he touches me, I begin to moan again. He strokes me, and my skin shudders and
shivers against his touch. He drives me wild with his lips, teasing my
shoulder, tantalizing their way down my