It was another breezy late summer's night, the wind from her open bedroom window was knocking the bedroom door against the frame with a repeating thump that irritated Mel as she tried in vane to complete the e-mail she was sending. She needed to sound cute, but professional, intelligent but sexy, informed but flexibleβand that door kept knocking into the frame.
She got up and slammed the door shut with force, the wind caught the door mid flight and it shut with a vigor that caught her by surprise. A shiver ran through her body and she threw a comfy old t-shirt over the bra and panties that had been all she was wearing. After a momentary pause to regain her breath she was went back to her computer, calmed by having thrown the door closed.
She finished what she was sending with a cute little semi-colon bracket, she loved them they were flirty and she was trying to seem sarcastically flirty. She smiled as she clicked on the send button. She leaned back; her only task of the evening was finished. It may have been nearly midnight, but she was finished. She headed for the kitchen and a celebratory drink.
She stopped at the doorway however. Some sense somewhere in her alerted her to something gone wrong, something a miss. Then she heard a sliding sound, it sounded like her kitchen window sliding up. Mel lived on the third floor of an old apartment building in the city and if one really wanted to they could climb the old fire escape ladder and get from the street to the metal landing that was on the opposing side of her kitchen window.
She knew that and she held her breath waiting to hear more, wanting to hear nothing. She stood silent for a few moments and heard nothing but the breeze rattling the photographs clipped to the fridge. Had that window already been open, it was the summer, but she hadn't been home all day; it was a large window and she closed it religiously when she went out. She couldn't decide. She still didn't hear anything so she began creeping the door open. She tried to look around the door without exposing her eyes to anything else that might be in the apartment. An impossible task as the man that had entered through her window was watching for her eyes, waiting for the door to open.
With a crowbar in one hand and a duffel bag in the other he smiled down at the helpless girl, Mel slammed the door shut, locked it and tried to scream. She scrambled to find her phone, but alas it was in the kitchen. Before she could make her way to the window to let out a scream her assailant had put his crowbar through her doorway. Now all she could do was stare: petrified by the hand that crept through the hole and felt for the lock.
With the door unlock the attacker swung it open. He moved toward Mel and as she crept back he cornered her at her desk. She bumped into the desk and tried again to scream toward the open window. He lashed forward and pressed his hands to her for the first time. He pushed a forceful, dirt encrusted hand over her mouth. Powerless to cry in protest the attacker closed the window slowly, dramatizing this final act that put Mel all alone.
Mel was already all too aware of that startling fact and now she hoped the attacker would lower his arm so she could plead with him for mercy. His hand smelled horribly and she could see all too clearly the dirt and filth that covered them. When he relented and let his hand down, she immediately began stammering her appeals. "Please, you can have anything you want; just don't hurt me; don't kill me. Take whatever you like, the TV, the computer anything, please."