Julep and the Case of the Missing Midnight




Julep Sanders awoke to the taste of stale cigarettes and sandpaper eyes.  Sunlight filtered through the blinds and across her face.  With a groan she attempted to pull a pillow over her head but was stopped by a weight on the other side of it.  Slowly moving her aching head to the right, she opened an eye.
“Good morning, beautiful.”
Julep closed her eye and breathed deeply out her nose.
“Oh, thank god it’s you.”
“Well who else would it be,” asked Erik tweaking her nose.
A smile graces her face and at last she opens both her eyes and blearily stares into his blue on      e.
“After last night, who knows.”
“Last night was crazy,” he agreed then paused.
“What happened last night,” both asked simultaneously, raising their eyebrows at each other in disbelief.
Gathering the thick quilt around her shoulders, Julep struggled out of bed, joints cracking and groaning with every movement.
“Where the hell are we?”
She pulled up the blinds and saw the rolling hills and endless blue skies of her Tennessee home.
“We must of hit it a little too hard if I don’t even recognize my own…”
Julep saw herself in the ornate mirror that was on her vanity. Her red hair was disheveled with sleep, and her green eyes were slightly bloodshot.  It was what she should expect after missing a midnight, but even so something else bothered her.  She looked down at her hands and was surprised to see them smooth.  She had been sure that they would have been lined with age and liver spots.
“Darling,” said Julep, “I’m going to take a shower, I feel just a bit off.”
With slow shuffling steps she made her way to the bathroom dropping the quilt in the hallway before she entered.
As the warm water flowed over her she examined the rest of her body.  Lithe and youthful.  But wrong, this wasn’t her.  Julep knew that this body was too new to be hers.  She thought there should be stretch marks on her stomach and hips.  Why would there be though?  She wasn’t a mother.  Her and Erik had just moved in together, children were still a long way off.  She held a hand over her flat belly and remembered feeling movement, remembered life there.
She remembered holding Aiden for the first time.  He looked just like Erik.  She remembered that she shouldn’t be remembering these things.  These were just whiskey dreams from the night before.  She tasted her lips again.  Why would she taste like cigarettes, she had quit smoking years ago when Erik had died of lung cancer.
No, thought Julep, this isn’t right.
She walked naked back to the bedroom.  Erik had his back to her, still laying in bed
“You’re dead,” said Julep.
Erik rolled over.
“It doesn’t help you when you remember these things my dear.  What made you remember?”
“My skin.”
Erik sighed, “Restart program.”


Julep Sanders awoke to the taste of stale cigarettes.






 

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