Her room is big enough. It's relatively modern everything is obnoxiously clean. Outside her left window is a dirt path that disappears amongst the dense trees. The forest is the devil's breeding ground, where witchcraft is known to thrive.
Zoe views clothes as nothing more than a formality. She thinks nothing of wearing only her undergarments as she climbs through the thickets and she doesn't recoil at the constant thorn pricks. There's something thrilling about the pain—she thinks.
When she finds the end of the trail there is a tinge of a disappointment, nothing-sinister lies ahead, just a horse stable. Resting on the wooden fence, she's barefoot in her bloomers and corset.
"Zoe?" she hears from a distance. The voice is obviously male, but she makes no effort to cover herself. Kyle. Her heart flutters, but her opinion of him remains the same, he has no complexity, no depth.
He approaches from behind, gaining her attention by placing a magnolia blossom in her hair, "it symbolizes nobility, beauty, and strength." She scoffs at the adjectives, but blushes anyway.
"Is that a line you use on every girl, does it work? How quickly does it get them on their back?" Zoe's biting tone even catches her off guard, and Kyle moves into her line of vision, but she averts his gaze.
She changes the subject to the horse wandering around the pen, "you ride?"
"Sure. You?"
"No."
Before she even knows what's happening she's hugging onto Kyle as the horse sprints through the trees feeling alive for the first time.