The slam of the stone slab above her head sounded like death. Maybe more permanent. It sounded like the end of something, of everything. It sounded almost like her breaking point.
Robin crept down through the dark stairwell, a note with an address in her hair, something so close to a kiss on her lips. And she had nothing else. No home, no way to contact her co-workers (friends?), nothing solid she could call her own.
The stairwell ended with a dark corridor, with pipe-metal ladders leading up to street grates. Robin walked down the corridor a ways, deciding that it would be safer to emerge as far away from the office as she could get. Her steps echoed through the small passage, mingling with the vague dripping of water somewhere nearby.
The adrenaline that had built up during her escape was wearing down. She felt cold and alone, with some kind of an ache building up in her chest from … from ….
He had almost kissed her. No one had ever almost kissed her before. In fact, she didn't know if anyone had ever looked at her with desire at all. Before she left the convent, the sisters who had raised Robin gave her large, frumpy old-fashioned dresses, and had lectured her on the ways that young women could get into trouble with men. And she'd thought there'd be no problem, that no man would (could) want her like that, that she'd never look at a man that way ….
Well, she reminded herself, it's not like he actually kissed you. It's not like something actually happened between you.
And the thought of it not happening, of him being that close to her and feeling nothing, an absolute absence of electricity, made her ache sharper, and deeper, and make her tentative steps slow.
It's not like he actually kissed you.
The flicker of light above her head reminded Robin that she had other things to think about – her immediate safety, for one.
She peered up at a pipe-ladder to her left, trying to remember how far she had walked, whether or not this one would be safe. She clambered up the ladder, and slowly lifted the grate.
Robin didn't think she recognized the street she was on; although had she gotten a better view she thought it likely she would know. At any rate, it was brightly lit and full of people, and Robin didn't want to take the chance.
She replaced the grate as quietly as she could, and climbed back down the ladder. She needed to find someplace emptier, someplace where people wouldn't notice a girl emerging out of the ground.
She wished someone else could have been there with her, someone who knew where to go, someone who could have pointed her in the right direction, to tell her she would make it though this night alive.
She wished for Amon, and then regretted it.
For the first time since entering the corridor, she looked back. No one was behind her. Darkness, complete, final. The end. Almost her breaking point. If it had been a movie, he would have slid open that stone and come running after her. He'd pull her into his arms and give her the kiss that he hadn't given her in the well.
It was the first time in her life that Robin understood, no questions, no uncertainties, that in life, we rarely get our way.
If it had been a movie, he would have kissed her.