Carmen slowly woke. She tried to open her eyes, but they were heavy, as if a ten pound weight hung from her lashes. When she finally managed to crack them open, the shaft of light that penetrated her caused a deep groan of pain. Her mind fractured into a million pieces of shimmering sunlight. What coherent thought she might have had disappeared in that one moment of sight. Now she was only aware of how the shadow behind her lids made the pulsating agony in her head barely tolerable.
It must have been that beer, but she could not, for the life of her, recall a time when she got wasted on a single beer.
She groaned again, and turned her head away from the bright morning light that was so the antithesis of her current situation. What she needed was the gloom of night, the silence of the world sleeping. Instead the birds chirped and twittered as they woke from the night's slumber, cars zoomed by on the busy street, and the world was awake with white noise that she had never before noticed until this moment.
How the hell did one beer turn her into this pile of suffering? It was one fucking beer!
Slowly her other senses returned. She could smell. Coffee, the grease of bacon cooking in another apartment, the clean laundry scent of the bed she was laying on, and underlying it all was an elusive scent she couldn't quite place. Something flowery. Something that didn't belong in her apartment, because she always had a few bowls of cinnamon apple potpourri placed strategically around her rooms.
An alarmed thought tickled at the periphery of her brain, but the pounding chased it away before it fully formed into something she could understand.
She could feel the softness of the sheets beneath her. They were soft and satiny. She moved sinuously against the sheets, reveling in the feel of something so luxurious against her bare skin. The thought that she was naked and did not remember getting that way flitted through her head, but since it wasn't unusual for her to sleep in the nude, she dismissed the thought. The thought that wouldn't go away was the one that said that she didn't own anything nearly as expensive feeling as the sheets she was lying on.
The clink of metal on metal resounded in her ears, and her eyes flew open. At first everything was white and then everything slowly faded into color. She took in the blood red walls that definitely did not belong in her bedroom. Her eyes traveled to a huge gilded mirror, blackened at the edges from age that hung opposite the end of bed. Her eyes traveled up the ornately carved wooden columns of the bed and the heavily draped fabric that canopied over her. To the left was a shut door. To the right, a large window let bountiful spring sunshine into the room.
The sheets she was lying on shone brilliantly white against the dark wood of the bed. They were tangled and tousled around her body, which was indeed nude but for the chain. Its long silvery loops wove within the sheets, coming out to clasp at her ankles, wrists and neck with thick, heavy bands.
