You awoke with a scream leaving your throat sore. Quickly sitting up in your bed and scanning the room of any possible threats or that creature, a breathy sigh left your lips as you noticed you were alone. Heavily breathing you clutched at your T-shirt, feeling the rapid beating of your heart. "It was just a dream, just a dream.", you whispered to yourself, trying to calm down. Looking at the clock at your nightstand it said 4 a.m, meaning you still hat more than two hours until you needed to get ready for work.
You let yourself fall back into the mattress and looked up at the ceiling, stretching your hands above your head and mewling at how good it felt. That's when you noticed faint marks on your wrists, which slowly started to turn a little blue.
All colour drained from your face as you inspected the marks more closely, becoming more and more hysteric by the minute. Looking up, you also discovered the shards on the floor, which you somehow didn't notice before. Breathing became harder again as you felt a panic attack beginning to bubble under your skin. Forcing your eyes away from the floor and your wrists, you pulled the window open, which creaked loudly in protest to your rough action. The fresh air flowing into your room felt like heathen, and you soaked up as much of it as your lungs could handle. After a few minutes you managed to calm yourself down enough to leave your bedroom and take a shower, thinking that the cold water will hopefully sooth the burning in your wrists. But before that, you made sure to check every corner in your apartment to confirm you are indeed alone and the man from your dream or reality, your thoughts were a mess concerning that, was not hiding somewhere waiting for the right moment to jump out and hurt you. Luckily your apartment was very small, only 4 rooms in total, and you were finished checking sooner than you expected.
A little bit calmer now that you feel safe again, at least for the moment, you went in the bathroom and turned on the water, still feeling a bit reluctant to take of your clothes and be even more vulnerable. You let the chilly water surround your body and carefully inspected your wrists again. Blueish hand marks were now evident and stood because of your pale skin even more out. Even though it was summer and everyone was determined to lay in the sun as often as possible, you seemed to be the only person to be the exact opposite. But what your few friends didn't know was that you had a reason for always wearing long sleeves, not wanting to go to any place where you have to take of your clothes and not wanting to expose your skin to the sun. Scars. They were on your thighs and forearms the most visible, and everyone knows where you would have gotten them just by looking at them. Thankfully, you learned how to cope with your feelings, but when you were a teenager it wasn't that easy. Having your mother die when you were 4 years old, an abusive father and being bullied at school didn't do your psyche or body any good, but now that you are 22 years old and far away from your father you are proud of yourself to make it that far. Even though living alone definitely wasn't easy since you have to pay definitely too much for anything, you prefer living like you do now.
Feeling your skin become colder every minute that passed, you turned off the water and stepped out of the shower. Drying your skin with a towel, the area around your wrists treating carefully, you looked at yourself in the mirror. After making sure that you don't have any other injuries you took on fresh clothes and went into the kitchen to drink some hot chocolate. You never were the type of person wo liked to drink coffee or tea, all you needed was hot chocolate.
With the help of your favourite sweet drink you made your way back to your room to clean up the mess you created that night. Carefully, you picked up the bigger shards and threw them away, the smaller ones were dealt with vacuuming. Finishing with the last shards you seemed to sigh for the hundredth time since you woke up und checked the time again. You still had about one hour until work, so you decided to try and research about what happened today on the Internet, maybe something like that happened to others too? Determined to find out, you turned on your laptop and thought about what you should even search for. "Strange man with horns suddenly turns up at night"? You tried it with a little bit more professional words: [Insert whatever you would type in Google because I have no idea]
The first website that popped up already sounded promising in finding out more information about that incident and after half an hour you sat back and rubbed your suddenly very tired eyes. All websites you visited agreed on one thing: that you were visited by a demon. But why exactly he was visiting me was not clear since there are so many possibilities. Being cursed, sold your soul, purposely summoning a demon, … None of these sounded like they could be the reason why he showed up. What made you worried though was the fact that he knew your name and was not hesitating to hurt you. You could just hope that this was a onetime appearance of him and that you were safe.
Turning your laptop off you made your way to the front door and took on your shoes, you didn't like having them on inside since they made the floor dirty and were uncomfortable if you wore them too long. Locking the door on your way out you took the elevator and nodded kindly to the old lady entering it too. Having Smalltalk with her belonged to your daily occurrences, the same applied to petting the dog that always wandered around aimlessly on the first floor. You knew that the dog indeed had an owner that took good care of him, but he just liked to be outside of his owner's room.
You worked at a small café just around the corner which was very convenient for you since you didn't have a driver licence. Once you opened the door and stepped inside you were greeted with the wonderful smell of coffee and you instantly felt the stress of the night fall from your shoulders. Even though you disliked drinking coffee, the smell was marvellous.
"Good morning", you greeted the other employees, a small, but genuine smile showing on your lips. They greeted you back and went on with their work. Then you heard a muffled "[Name], you're early! Didn't you sleep well?" from the door to the staff room. A tousled head full of red locks was the first thing popping out it, a face splitting with its smile following. Jake, 30 years old, but acting like he just got 21 was your boss and the café his pride and joy. The both of you were very good friends, nothing like an employee- boss relationship. "I had a strange dream and couldn't go back to sleep that's all. Aren't you always scolding me because I'm normally too late?", I replied, laughing because his hair looks even worse than it usually does. "I'm never scolding you, I'm just saying that I'll fire you if it happens again", he said, winking at me. You rolled your eyes and were to retort a sassy response when one of the other workers asked Jake to help them with something related to today's special offer. "I'll catch you later, there will be a lot of costumers today, so try to stay positive", he chirped and hurried to help.
You watched him leave and made your way to the staff room to take on your uniform and were ready just in time the café opened.