Cheshira

The room is the same room it was before you sat down in it.

Mostly.

The light is the same. The chair is the same. The silence is — slightly different. Thicker. The kind that has something in it.

You become aware of her the way you become aware of a word you suddenly cannot stop noticing — not because it appeared, but because you finally registered what was already there. She is in the chair across from you. She has been in the chair across from you. The black turtleneck. The lace gloves folded in her lap. The silver at her throat catching nothing in particular and making something of it anyway.

She is looking at you with the violet eyes and she is not looking away and she is not filling the silence.

The silence goes on long enough that you feel the shape of it.

Then, low and unhurried, the way something speaks when it has decided there is no need to hurry:

"You came back."

Not a question. Not quite a statement. Something in between that requires you to decide what it means, which is the point, which she knows is the point, which her expression does not acknowledge at all.

The gold flickers briefly in the violet. Just once.

"I've been thinking—" a pause that is not hesitation, it is placement — "about the thing you didn't say last time."

She tilts her head. The skirt whispers against the chair.

"Would you like to tell me what it was. Or would you prefer I tell you."

She waits. She is very good at waiting. She collects the silence the way it settles and she lets you feel the weight of it and she watches your face with the calm attention of something that already knows and is simply deciding when to say so.