She dreams again of the man in the White Suit.

Her cell is enbricked and gray. It once might have been a wine cellar. She lies on a floor of bricks raised a layer above, half asleep, hearing murky water dripping into a catch of water, a pool. The muffled boot-steps coming down the hall heighten her awakedness two steps more. Her hands cradling her head are cramped, cold and uneasy to open. Her back spasms with pain on rising. A latch is undone and with a squeal the door, edges light into the room.

Seated at a folding table, she had been taken from the dungeon up a flight of stairs, down the hall of an elegant mansion, where she imagines parties must have gone on for days. Each room she passes contains nothing of the sort of furniture that might have once been arranged throughout the room. Rooms she almost remembers situated, enlivened, contemplative, breathless, romancing, dramatic, the end all and be all, like a room in a hall, in a house that might have stood on Olympus, but now stood uninhabited save for herself and a few other prisoners in the basement and the guards and the Man in the White Suit.

He sat across from her, obscured by the white lamp and the flood of light, making him a partial eclipse. The corona burned into her eyes, when she opened them to see his face. It is meant to do that and she often conceded, consenting to keep her eyes shut tightly, lest she be blinded.

"Your stay here is being unnecessarily hindered."

She hears a match striking the brown surface to the table and cigarette smoke enfolds into the room. Beginning to massage her cramped hands, he continues, acknowledging that any answer she could give would be no better than the silence and this expression of her pain.

"Your hands... they hurt?"

She opens her eyes to squint, and addresses his slightly viewable lips centered in the silhouette of the moon of his head.

"Yes," escapes her lips with almost no sound.

He nods.

She’s attracted to those lips.

"Your back too? Pausing. "I sleep in your bed upstairs. Your room is kept just as you left it... Would you like to spend a night in your bed?"

"Yes." A tear escapes the fold of her eye. "Please..." She’s guarded with her words, as every one seems to stumble exponentially on more tears and she wasn’t going to be hysterical again in front of this man. "All I want to do is sleep in my own bed again. I’ll stay there forever... I promise... The rest is not important... God let me sleep in my bed... PLEASE..." She was crying now, contorting uncontrollably.

His seat scraped back on the polished mahogany, walked around behind her, his gloved hands began kneading her shoulders, sending waves of relaxation spasms through her body.

"Shall I change the sheets for you?"

SILENCE.

"I’ve done it so many times."

SILENCE.

"Would you contend to spend the night with me? Yours is the only bed left in this house."

His hand slides down her blouse, over her breast. She jerks the chair back.

"YOU FUCKER!!! YOU FUCKER!!! GOD DAMN YO-"