Blossom Springs Book One

She can swear she hears a knocking on her door, and then a dog barking in the distance. It certainly isn’t hers. Coffee, her Akita is still sound asleep in her bedroom where she left him when sleep had once again eluded her. At only four, he was still a puppy, but with sleep, he was like an old man.
That someone is knocking on her door at this hour in the early morning leaves her mind before it has the chance to completely make sense.
Her favorite time to write is in the early hours of the morning when the rest of the world is still asleep, so it annoys her that someone is interrupting her while she is working, and she fights away the idea that someone is there.
She looks up from her laptop. It’s dark in the room except for the blue glow from her device and the flickering of the candle she always burns while writing, there is no light yet shining in from outside. She stretches for the lamp on her desk, fumbles her way to stand, and flicks it on. As the room fills with light, the brightness jars her into a semi-reality while she wonders who would look for her at this time of day.
Her mind goes into reel mode, surfing through her loved ones: Campbell, her daughter that left only a few weeks ago for college. Then, her aging parents before Nick.
Finally, Georgia, her neighbor, and best friend comes to mind. Is it already time for their daily walk? She and Georgia need to get in their exercise and gab sessions before Georgia’s children get home from school, but they never head out this early. Maybe it’s not all that early but dark outside because of an impending storm. No, she checked the weather app on her phone when she couldn’t sleep. It hadn’t called for any precipitation.
Campbell is safe in her dorm room. Pepper spoke to her after she settled in for the night. It’s a weekday, not a heavy party time, so she was probably sleeping.
Her parents and she spoke late yesterday and everything was fine.
And Nick, where is he? She pushes her ergonomic chair back and braces her hands on the top of her white desk. She tries her hardest to remember his itinerary and plot out where he’d be in the moment, but like always, when Pepper is writing, she loses all sense of time and days blend. Is it Wednesday like she thought a moment ago when she considered where Campbell could be?
Then it hits her, Nick is due back later today. It is Wednesday. Maybe he’s home early from his flight. Maybe he’s here to surprise her, sweep her off her feet, and carry her to their bedroom where they’ll make love.
The thought makes her snort. When was the last time they made love? She can’t remember. And Nick has never been spontaneous.
She pushes her weight through her arms and raises to stand. Sliding her feet into her pink, memory foam slippers to avoid the freezing floors of her mountain home, she shivers at the low temperature. Pepper also dons her fluffy robe that is draped on the back of her chair. She stands still to see if there is still the sound of a possible stranger, but she can’t hear the knocking any longer. Maybe she imagined it. As she writes, Pepper gets integrated into the environment she creates. But she’s writing a sex scene, not one where a stranger is knocking on someone’s door. The only knocking sound she should have heard is that of a headboard banging against a wall and she hasn’t heard that sound in her house in years.
She finally reaches for her phone propped in its holder and lights the screen to see the time: 5:23 am. She stares at it as if it can’t possibly be correct, but she knows it is. Pepper can never sleep when she begins a new project, her characters carry on in her mind, demanding to have their story told. She pockets her phone, dropping it into the deep opening of her robe.
Relax, she tries to convince herself. Campbell is asleep in her dorm room, her parents are nestled in their warm bed, and Nick is in Italy. Georgia is probably having the best time of everyone, snuggled into her husband Chad, for his body heat. Or they are actually making their headboard hit the wall.
What she hears is probably just the wind.