Suzanna Danna

Click here for Part I.

She gathered up her belongings, stuffed an unneeded scarf and sweater into her tote along with a small purse she carried and threw the tote over her shoulder. She smoothed her modest tank over her pants, rubbed imaginary lint off the thigh of her cuffed trousers, wiggled her toes in her sensible black sling back pumps and stood up.

Sliding the chair back behind her, she glared at the card. It was still sitting on the table in front of her.

She stepped around the chair, put it back under the table making sure it was just so, smoothed her tank over the waistline of her trousers again, settled the tote straps squarely on her shoulder, turned on her heel and walked away.

She took in a deep breath as she looked up to the doorway, she was almost there. But five feet from the door, with the other attendees filing out around her she stopped. She couldn’t move. With people brushing past her to get to a meeting or to grab a drink with a colleague she stood there until there until the class was empty but for the speaker and two people asking the speaker questions.

How much time had elapsed? Thirty seconds? Two minutes? She had no idea, she had just lost time. She turned against her will and walked back to where she was sitting, the card was still there. She was afraid to touch it. She told herself that she was being silly, that there was nothing sinister about the object, it was just a card. A business card with a number scrawled neatly with the digits leaning to the far right of the left handed.

She picked the card up and ran her fingers over the raised lettering of his name, sighed audibly then looked towards the ceiling to see if an answer to her unasked question was written there in the air above her. Nope. No luck. She put the card into the side pocket of her tote, located her hotel key and started the trek back to her room.

Pulling her phone from the opposite side pocket of the tote she checked her voicemails, her emails, FaceBook and her Twitter account. She wasn’t watching where she was going, looking at the lighted screen of her iPhone. Completely on autopilot she made her way through the convention center, through the hotel, back to her room where once inside she unceremoniously dumped her tote on the bed.

She kicked off her pumps, stepped into her slippers and fished the sweater and the lightweight scarf out of the tote to hang up, lest they wrinkle. She padded softly into the bathroom, gave herself a cursory glance in the mirror, pulled her hair back and brushed her teeth. With that completed she walked back into the room, pulled her schedule out of the tote to see what was in store for her that evening.

There was a charity event that wouldn’t be reimbursed by her company and it was quite expensive, so that was out. She had appointments with vendors and clients set up for the next two days but this evening she was free. Her shoulders slowly settled in their correct positions and away from her ears. She rolled her head on her neck and went to grab her iPhone out of the tote’s side pocket to plug it in so she could rest a little. She reached in and her hand closed around the business card… not her phone at all.

She could almost swear that it had a pulse to it. Some sort of vibration, heat or energy to it, so she felt an almost physical bite of an electric shock when she pulled it from the bag. Nothing had changed the card, it wasn’t dripping with blood like some omen and it hadn’t grown teeth with which to rend her flesh. It was just a business card. What was she afraid of?

Her eyes were pulled to the standard hotel issue alarm clock with green digital numbers. Four forty-five. She blinked slowly. FOUR FORTY-FIVE!? Her heart rate increased and her pupils dilated so that the room was suddenly too bright. Her eyes found the card. His name. She read it out loud. She followed that by saying, “Five o’clock and not a minute later.”

She heard her voice and it didn’t sound like her own. There was a dreamy almost disconnected quality to it so she tried again. His name and the demand that she call him at five. Her voice still sounded slightly detached so she made a quick mental sketch pad, a line down the middle, “Pro” on one side of the bisected page and “Con” on the other. She listed her pros to calling him and her cons. She had been using this method to make hard decisions for most of her life. The “Pros” won out, barely as she was extremely cynical. The race between to do or not to do was so close that she almost mentally discarded the list and the business card in the hotel trash can.

Being true to herself she went with the “Pro” list and sure she was completely out of time she turned to the clock again, so certain that it would be four fifty-nine. Four forty-eight. She was blown away that this intense inner turmoil had only taken a brief three minutes. Three minutes to decide if she was going to call him. Her ID knew what was going to happen, almost as if she could decipher the future, her body was ready, her brain was the only thing she had to fight against. The need to submit. That first step would be to call him at exactly five pm, and not a minute later.

*This is Part Two of a series. If you are interested in having it continue, please leave a comment below.