Author's Note: For those who chose to skip the first entry, here's a recap: Emily Anne Wafton Bronson, 4th daughter of an established North American family, privileged, white and at 18, a bit too self-assured, finds herself all alone for the final summer before she takes off for university. Something is brewing in Emily's mind, but she's not sure exactly what it is. It might have something to do with her home, a mid-19th century Victorian, the plans for which she requested from the historical society. Or perhaps it is just time for her to sow some wild oats.
It was a Tuesday. A double-run day. The weather was going to be hot later, so she got out early and did the 20 miles in under 3 hours. Okay for training. Not close to her best, which wasn't really relevant to the triathlon. She just wanted to push herself. It was 9am and the temperature was already climbing. Sweating through her shirt, she had been looking forward to a hot shower and maybe sunbathing. As she loped up the driveway, she saw the trucks and realized she probably wouldn't be sunbathing at home.
Shit.
Passing by the living room on her way upstairs she saw Cos leaning over the table, his tanned arms filling the sleeves of his t-shirt, his face concentrating on the plans.
"Hey, Cos." She stopped in the doorway wiping her face with a towel. "What's on the plans for the day?"
He looked up and she saw the predatory glint in his eyes before he got himself under control.
Hmmm. He's attracted to me.
"Hey. Good morning! Still demoing around the basement stairs. You planning to go down?"
He kept his eyes steady, but she could feel him scanning her top to bottom. She mentally raised her eyebrows.
Is he flirting?
She thought she was being stupid. But, then again, dressed only in shorts, a sports bra and a t-shirt,
he'd
be stupid to not flirt with her. "Maybe," she said, smiling and choosing her words carefully, "but if I do," she let her eyes drift down for a split second, "I'll make sure to grab you first." She looked around at the sound of breaking wood. "Slim with you today? Or Bobby."
"Bobby. Slim'll be by later." He paused. "You need anything...else?"
Careful dude. Remember she's trouble.
She twisted her lips back and forth, her "mouse" face. She knew people thought it meant she was thinking. But she didn't need to think. "Uhhh...yeah. Maybe? I'm going to get cleaned up. You going to be around for a bit?" Satisfied with his answer she bounded up the stairs, stripping off her clothes as she made her way to her bathroom to clean up.
Her bathroom was the only one not in a bedroom, even if it was only two steps across the hall. Since she'd moved into the bedroom, way back in middle school, she had always made sure to wear something when she went back and forth between them. Something had changed, she realized, as she walked half-naked from the stairs to her bedroom.
When did I stop caring about being dressed?
Maybe it was since she had the run of the entire house? But no, that wasn't true. It had been the past few months; even with her folks here she'd often been walking around the entire second floor without any clothes. Maybe it was some kind of new phase.
Naughty
. The word leapt out and she smiled.
Curious
.
Not important
.
She tossed her sweaty clothes through her bedroom door and now completely naked, stopped to look down the hall toward the back stairs. She could see the garage roof through the windows above the landing, the blue sky bright in the morning sun. Being naked was so much more comfortable, especially after a hot run, her sweat drying and cooling. Although she'd been more relaxed about her nudity, especially when her dad wasn't around, she was still hyper-conscious of the air against her bare skin.
Naomi would be laughing right now!
Of course the nights Naomi had slept over, they had undressed to their underclothes, Naomi even going topless. Emily knew she did it to prove something, but she had to admit Naomi was so natural about it. Her olive toned skin so different from Emily's and her breasts were so much smaller, her aureoles dark brown, her nipples almost purple. It wasn't as if Emily didn't spend a lot of time around her friends naked. In the showers at school, shopping and trying on clothes...the Bare Naked Ladies parties.
But here, in her house, she was super-self-conscious with workmen one floor down. Still, that wasn't enough to stop her from walking to the back stair and peeking over the rail to the hall below.
Naughty. Wicked
. The feeling in her gut sparking up as she stood there, her thighs clenching. As she turned back toward her bathroom she briefly faced the blank wall, and behind it, The Study. And, as usual, the thought of The Study made her heart jump, reminding her how close she was to taking a leap she couldn't step back from.
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She opened the PDFs from the librarian, and though she had no experience reading blueprints, after half-an-hour studying them, she started to figure out what was going on. It took considerably longer to decipher what rooms were part of the original house. If it wasn't for the main stairs, she wasn't even certain it was the same house. Opening them again on her tablet, she went downstairs intent on finding the original pieces of her house. Within a few minutes she could see what the problem was: the original house was much smaller than hers. She walked out the front door and out to the street. Looking up to her parents' bedroom on the third floor she saw how far back it was from the front door. "I bet that's the original outside."
If that were true, then the house had been extended to the right, left and toward the street! On the plans, there were only two sets of windows on either side of the front door: the salon and dining room. The current house had four pairs on either side. Walking back in, she tried to see where the original house might have been. Maybe the two arches that opened onto the dining and living rooms were original. She stared at the blueprints and was stumped. The stairway may have been in the same place, but hers looked so much bigger. There had been no bathroom in the original, but the stairs climbed around the one in front of her.
Only after walking around the outside was she able to see where the original foundation peeked out from the landscaping. Inside though, nothing was the same. Looking at the blueprints sparked a feeling she couldn't quite understand. A secret, a mystery, a history she'd known nothing about. Why had they changed everything? When? It had been this way her entire life, except for the redecorating and updating her mother kept doing. A 'Butler's Pantry!' What was that? Her sense of mystery growing, Emily ran back to the front door and up the main stairs.
As on the first floor, the second didn't look anything like the original. The stairs themselves had clearly been enlarged. But on the plans they stopped on the 2nd floor. Next to her the stairs continued up to her parents' bedroom, which she figured had been an attic in the original house. She was facing the front of the house from the top of the stairs. Straight in front of her was her bedroom from when she was a little kid, when Joanie and Frankie were still living at home.
The second floor in her house was organized around an "O" shaped hall fed by the main stairs and connected to the back stairs off to her right, behind her at one corner of the O. The hall wasn't in the original plans at all. In her house, the second floor had eight rooms: five bedrooms, three bathrooms. On the blueprint there were only six rooms in all: a Parlor, two bedrooms, a "Servant's Quarters," a room labeled "W/C" which she had to look up. Water closet. A bathroom. A tiny bathroom. But it wasn't there anymore and a fifth room, its name too faint to read.
She walked the hall. Knowing the house had been extended to the front and each side, she wasn't surprised that all five bedrooms looked completely new. Nothing remained of any of the original second floor. The stairs were enlarged, the parlor and the two bedrooms that would have been to each side were gone. She was at the rear of the house, on the opposite side from the stairs going to the kitchen, standing in her doorway. This is where the maid's room would have been. In front of her there should have been a stairway going down to the kitchen. On the plans there should have been a fifth room. The fifth room had run the entire length of the back of the house. It shared the landing of the servant's stair. What happened to that room? What was that room?
She turned to face the back of the house where that room was supposed to be. Just a blank wall hung with artwork and photographs. She walked its length, the wall continuing until it went beyond the perimeter of the hall, becoming the outside wall of the back stairs. She walked down the stairs and went out onto the driveway, looking back at the second floor beyond the stairwell. The house rose from the back porch right on up to her parents' room. This was definitely the original exterior of the house. She stared again at the second floor, her eye stopping at the octagonal window sitting in the middle of the wall on the second floor. She knew there were two just like it: one in the middle of the back of the house and a third on the west side.
As a kid, whenever she'd asked about those windows her parents had shrugged. "Probably an attic vent," her father had suggested without much interest.
She sat in the kitchen puzzling over the label of that fifth room until she finally figured it out. "Study," she practically shouted, raising her fists in victory. We have a secret room! She ran upstairs to see if there was any way in. Looking along the floor and ceiling of the hall there was nothing, but the closet in her room overlapped with the end of The Study. She had named it already The Study. Opening her closet she stared at the shared corner and scanned the floor and ceiling. Nothing. No way in.
At dinner her parents could see she was excited, but knowing their indifference to the house's history, she kept her enthusiasm under control, mentioning how she'd found the drawings and how amazingly different the house was today from what it was when it was first built.
It was because of that her mother had started thinking about "refreshing" the basement.
One Saturday afternoon in February, Emily had grabbed the electric drill with as big a bit as she could risk and drilled an inch sized hole through the plaster. As soon as it punched through the other side, Em was hit with a feeling, a thrill, an electric energy that flowed through her. It hit her so hard, it was so physical, she'd almost dropped the tool. There was an aroma of spice, herbal or floral and she had to step back a little, shaking it out of her nose. Grinning, holding her breath, she pressed her eye to the hole, the electric feeling increasing when she scanned the room. Em had figured it would be dusty, but she hadn't figured it would have so much wood. Sunlight, dimmed by grime on the octagonal windows, painted dark orange shapes on the wood floor. She yelled out in excitement. The fragrance filled her closet, and she worried it might smell up the house. And that would lead to uncomfortable questions from her mother about drilling into walls. She shoved a sock into the hole and closed the closet.
Getting into The Study became a silent obsession. Over the next several days it was as if she had been infected. She would pull out the sock and stare into the room wondering what it had been and why it had been walled off. She would sometimes do it just to inhale the smells. Complicated, floral, tangy. When her mother had started thinking about remodeling the basement, Em started planning for a way to open up The Study.
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