2Character sketch also for the contest (more about that in the A/N for Hypnos).
She was extraordinary — left-handed, used the right side of the notebook and a smudgy black ballpoint. "Is that shorthand?" I asked her. She put down her pen to throw a crumpled page at my head.
When she wrote, Esther leaned terribly close to the bedside lamp, a single black curl barely kissing the conical shade. Her dark skin was silk dusted in the finest sheen of gold by the light, and as she bit her plump, glossy lower lip I smiled. Her strong brow furrowed like she was lifting weights. As she scribbled, she pressed herself into the page, leaning off the edge of the mattress as if she wanted nothing more but to fall into whatever world she spun. With time, she wrote faster, pausing less.
I glanced back at her as I changed for the night; her single hand pressed so tightly against the surface of her little book that they could have glued permanently to her lap. She used to use her right hand to hold it and could recline without the notebook falling. Esther paused, and as she used her one remaining hand to push the tank top strap up her stump of an arm, I realized that she even wrote different.
I climbed in beside her. "What about?"
She was a veteran and I'd never been a big man — she easily took up more than half the space when she closed the book and lay back, but I didn't mind. "The same. Thoughts," she replied. "I think I will have the nightmares again tonight, Eli."
Bringing her hand up to her heart, she turned to me with dark eyes that were too old for twenty-six. She was in love with Western fashion and I could see where she hadn't scrubbed off all the winged eyeliner. The one thing she never liked were rings and I was surprised to see that she wore one that night, a simple gold band on her fourth finger. She didn't explain and I didn't ask. Instead, I kissed her cheek and told her, "I won't leave."
It's not like it is in the movies, ever; the nightmares never went away just because I was there for her, and when she reclined so she could nestle her head next to mine, she sighed with the resignation that she knew that too. Her fingers found mine and tap, tap, tap a pattern I couldn't place on the back of my hand. She bit her nails to stubs (still painted them to hide that, so they were smooth and cold when they brushed my skin).
"You'll be here?" she asked. Her eyes were closed, but the muscles in her face were still stiff. It's only when she was asleep that she was truly relaxed, and even then, sometimes she'd wake up in a cold sweat and reach for a gun that wasn't there. If it was really bad she might reach over and lock her body around mine to shield me from an explosion that wouldn't come, even if she knew it wasn't real, just because it kept her from falling asleep again.
"I'll be here," I promised. I kissed her again and her breath was tense, quick; her single remaining hand grasped vicelike around mine. We had spoken these vows one thousand times.