aftertaste.

[Jacqui]

"We look in the mirror and see shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our own ghosts; we haunt ourselves."
- Diana Gabaldon

i.

She wakes up with a spasmodic gasp. Her shirt slicked with sweat, clinging to her skin. Her hands scrabbling down to peel the material up to press her hands down over smooth, unblemished flesh. The phantom sensation of a blade slicing into her body lingers. A ghosting pulse, tapering off after minutes.

"Shit." She breathes, pressing her palms against her eyes, drawing her legs up into a tangle of sheets. "Shit."

ii.

She only had one glass at the Chantry.

The drive back from Morrison is one the Verbena knows well. Knows the road, knows the conditions. The traffic has never concerned her but a dark sedan has been behind her long enough to attract her eye in the rear-view. Tinted windows, obeying the speed limit absolutely. She turns the radio off and holds the wheel with both hands like a lifeline.

Looks at her cellphone lying on the passenger side seat. 

What would she say, I'm being followed by every movie's cliche villain? She looks in the rear-view again.

The sedan is gone.

Somehow, the absence is worse.

iii.

"Everything okay?" Debra Perry was wiping her fingers off on a napkin. She was watching another woman, a brunette, jiggle an infant up and down on a knee while he pawed at the sunglasses on her head, pulling them off and promptly sticking one corner in his mouth with humming satisfaction. The other woman looked up and there was no hint of the distraction that had been there all night. The glances out of a window, fingers toying with the chain around her neck.

Standing out on the old, worn porch and staring into drifts of snow.

"Sure, why wouldn't it be?"

"Kiara. You know you can talk to us. We won't judge you." There's a flicker of it, then. A tight little smile that stretches and stays and doesn't compliment her face. "Everything's great, Deb."

She doesn't stay for supper.

iv.

"My husband saw a doctor in New York called Woolfe. Do you have family there?"

"No." The inflection is mild, barely a lift of dark, manicured eyebrows as the healer carefully set a crystal down on a small, folding side table. "I don't. Must have been another Woolfe." The elderly woman reclining on a padded chair made a thoughtful noise and her eyes opened to regard the dark eyed woman attending to her.

She had very gentle, fine boned hands. They reminded the older woman of a pianist's. "Doesn't strike me as a very common name, Woolfe. Sounds German." There was a very small smile in response. "You'd be surprised how many of us are out there."

v.

The news article catches her eye over her morning coffee. It's a habit formed of preference for the tactility of the paper beneath her fingers, having a paper copy delivered. The ink that smudges off on her thumb as she turns the pages. The missing student had turned up - not so missing after all. The brunette swallows a mouthful of liquid (too hot, it scalds her throat) and smooths the page down.

Looks at the accompanying picture for a long time before she gets up and rinses out the cup, sets it in the sink and braces her hands over it.

vi.

There's light snow falling over Denver and every corner feels as if its gathering its secrets close for the winter. Shadows grow taller as trees become sparser. There's a (mostly illegal) fire started in Washington Park.

There are marshmallows and (entirely illegal) things smoked and at one point, music drifts out over the lake. 

She doesn't stay as long as she should.