Inamorata

Chapter Twenty - Ode to a Nightingale

Chapter 20. Author's note - to be perfectly honest I never expected to get this far with this story. So thanks to everyone for supporting me and helping me do it. You are all awesome! Also, I've linked the poem referenced in this chapter. Check it out, it's a very beautiful piece of poetry.

Michael and Nightingale didn't hang about for long after Nightingale's debacle with Clarence. She was on edge, her unhappiness plunging her into a sort of flighty perturbation, quite unlike any other unhappiness she'd ever had. Before, she raged against her clients and the world and was simply angry and miserable. Now, she was frustrated in a way she'd never been.

That manifested itself in an impatience that, when disguised behind her well-practiced allure, managed to trick Michael into thinking she was impatient for him.

As they left, and fairly early because Michael seemed eager to have her back at his home, Nightingale regarded him sadly.

"You're such a nice man, Michael," she told them as he held the door of the hovercraft for her. "A true gentleman."

Perhaps it was the champagne he'd had, or her charm, but he laughed gaily and grinned from ear to ear. "Thank you, Nightingale."

And it was true - she did think he was a very nice man. Her very nice, devoted little idiot. The poor, poor fool, she realized, as she looked over at one point and saw him staring at her longingly. He loved her. He loved an Inamorata. And not just any Inamorata, but one who would never feel more than an affectionate sweetness for him.

 The rest of the night passed as all of her nights with Michael passed. He slept with her, both in the euphemistic term of the word and the literal one as, right after they were done for the third time (Nightingale noted that he was particularly hungry for her that night), he dropped into a deep sleep.

So, making sure he was soundly asleep, she got up. Because she could not find anything other than her silk dress to cover herself with, she simply wandered away from the bed completely naked.

As she approached the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up most of Michael's penthouse, she smiled wryly.

"At least anyone who flies by will have a nice surprise," she muttered as she came to stand right at the window, seeing the reflection of her perfect body in the glass.

She delicately placed her hand on the window and flinched back from how cold the glass was. It was like ice, its coldness seeping through the skin of her palm, burrowing into her flesh, and curling around her tendons, and settling down right into her bones.

There she stood for a long time, simply watching the city. Far below, hovercrafts zoomed by, indicating that the city never truly slumbered as deeply as Michael, who had begun to snore in the next room over.

Like so many winking fireflies, they zipped about, unknowing of the hungry passion with which she was staring down at them. As her mind drifted, her thoughts jumped erratically from Clarence to Michael to Robin to David to Rose and back to Clarence again.

She heaved a sigh. At least her experiment had yielded positive results. Clarence had proved that she could feel things.

"But I wish I'd never found that out," she murmured sadly. Then she shuddered. Pining would do her no good, she knew that. She looked down on girls who pined for things they could not have. Did she really want to become one of those pathetic, tearful girls who cried over the idea of charming men and knights on white chargers?

Her lip curled involuntarily. No. she needed no knight.

So there she stood for a long time, staring down, trying not to think of anything too painful. When her eyes began to itch with sleep, she meandered back to bed.