Azure Masquerade
By  Megan Hussey

CHAPTER ONE

The sight of ruby-hued rose petals, strewn with sensual abandon across sheets of azure satin, always aroused Lillith Munroe.

Yet on this evening, with these sheets bathed in the golden rays of a forlorn, solitary moon, this arousal became tinged with an undeniable sadness. In evenings past, Lillith shared the soft, slick sheets of her Victorian four-poster bed with her husband Gregory. The two tumbled often into the luxurious depths of their bed - prompting Lillith to stare wondrously at the silken pastel canopy that oversaw their nightly trysts.

Although a happily and properly married couple, they never gave up on caressing, flirting, or, if the mood hit, even making love.

During the course of their five-year union, they exchanged their modest college apartment at Port Emerald University for an expansive, two-story, ivory-hued home on nearby Port Emerald Beach. And they traded in their student ID cards for a small business license. Their rec room became a home office for the fastly growing Munroe Marketing Firm. And the multicolored rock’n’roll poster that once adorned their ceiling was replaced with a luminous, two-tiered chandelier.

Even so, the couple never stopped ‘making out’ or ‘sneaking around’ - sometimes even venturing into the velvet-upholstered backseat of Gregory’s restored 1945 Rolls Royce.

Although admittedly the site of some interesting marital memories, Lillith now hoped with fervor that she would never see the car again; though she knew in her heart that the Rolls was not responsible for her husband’s deadly accident.

Six months ago, the actions of a drunken, reckless driver ended Gregory’s life. As a blissfully unaware Lillith lay asleep in the couple’s bed, her husband’s car was pummeled in a violent collision on a dark, rainy road.

“That was the last night he lived,” thought Lillith. “And the last night I truly slept.”

Even so, it helped sometimes to play the old jazz CDs, pour the glass of crystalline champagne, and coat their sheets with a fresh supply of radiant rose petals in bloom.

“Just so something in this house feels alive,” she thought.

* * * *

The decorative French doors that bordered Lillith’s master bedroom suffused the next morning with a kaleidoscope of light, rays adorned beautifully by a Florida sun.

She shifted slightly in her bed, finally sitting up to greet the morning with a smile, something she hadn’t been wont to do since her husband died many long months ago.

“Despite the great temptation to do so, I can’t lie here wrapped up in my sheets like a mummified pasta shell,” she mused. “After all, if Gregory and I are going to work in a morning jog. . .”

Suddenly, she fell back against the pillows, her chest constricting with the hard, unyielding weight of a certain truth. Her husband never would make another morning jog. And she wasn’t altogether sure she would make it through another day.

Again sitting upright in her soft satin sheets, Lillith buried her head in her hands and let loose with a torrent of tears.

Weeping, while often considered therapeutic, was only a means of temporary relief for the newly minted widow. She knew the anguish would return - perhaps a bit less dramatically next time, or maybe in a different form.

Yet it would return. In a life turned upside down, that was the only certainty she felt left.

A loud, annoying ring of her doorbell disrupted Lillith’s troubled meditation.

“Who is it and how quickly can they go away?” she pondered, rising with great reluctance to her feet.

Lillith pasted an abiding smile on her face as she donned a long pink robe and made her way down the spiral staircase that lead to her living room.

She knew people meant well when they delivered gifts of brownies and homespun advice. Yet sometimes, she felt too weary, too impossibly drained, to respond to their kindnesses.

Even so, she always managed a smile of thanks, and greeted her friends warmly as she welcomed them to her home.

That is, until this morning. For when she greeted the man who now stood at her doorstep, a dozen dew-glistened pink carnations clutched dutifully in his grasp, her smile turned to a barely concealed sneer. And her intended greeting of “Good morning” morphed into a hearty “What the hell?”

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