Chapter Text
It would have helped Fran’s pre-interview jitters if the receptionist at this place she was job-seeking at wasn’t so darn beautiful. She looked like she could have stepped out of a 1940s film noir, with her carefully-styled hair, collared dress, thin eyebrows, and dark lipstick. Fran tried not to stare as she approached the marble reception desk.
“Miss Izquierdo?” The receptionist spoke, her voice low and pleasant. “We’ve been expecting you. Please sign in.” The receptionist handed her a clipboard and a pen. Fran must have been the first person to interview of the day, no names decorated the list yet. As she took the pen and hovered it over the page, for a beat she hesitated. She was so nervous for this interview, a part of her wanted to chicken out because job interviews sucked and she was awkward, but she needed to at least try. Don’t be such a pussy, she told herself. you’ve been wanting to put yourself back out there again. Even if you fuck up, this will be good experience.
Fran puffed out her cheeks and wrote her full name - Francisca Izquierdo - in the space provided and slid the clipboard back over. The receptionist smiled and pointed her to the office. Fran knocked. “Come in,” came a deep, smooth voice from the other side. The sound of it gave her a couple more butterflies. She clutched her art portfolio tighter to herself, and opened the door.
She stepped into a small but posh office with wood paneling, dark green leather furniture, and a well-made wood desk with an old-fashioned pull-switch lamp on it. A tall, dashing-looking man in a black suit stood from this desk when Fran entered. Like the receptionist, he also reminded Fran of old movies, with his very dark, slicked hair and screen-ready good looks. Maybe he and that woman were a couple who did that as a theme. For a second, Fran half-jokingly allowed herself to be disappointed at the thought of such charming people being taken (unless they were up for a threesome? Ha, like she would ever have enough confidence to make that happen).
“Miss Izquierdo, it’s very nice to meet you,” The man said, extending his arm for a handshake. His eyes were so dark brown that they might have been black.
"Nice to meet you as well." Fran grasped his hand, and froze.
In the instant they had made contact, a strange force rolled its way across her skin. Some kind of pins-and-needles tension jittered down her arm, up her neck, and into her scalp. All the hairs on her body rose at once.
The man smiled and let go. Fran smiled back and resisted the urge to shake out her wrist. Wow, was she really this nervous?
“Please, sit.” The man returned to his desk, indicating the chair in front of it.
Fran sat across from him, willing her heart to slow. She was a high-strung person, no stranger to bouts of anxiety, and this man was a handsome, intimidating figure who was about to judge her fit for a job based on her art portfolio. Of course she would get a little antsy.
“Let’s see here,” The man reached for a drawer in his desk and opened it, revealing a long row of manila folders. He walked his fingers through a few until he found one, removing the papers and crisply tapping them against the desk. He leaned back in his chair to read. “Francisca Izquierdo, twenty-six years old, applying as an artist…” He scanned down the page, then raised his eyebrows and glanced up at her. “You were in medical school?”
Fran smiled thinly and sighed through her nose. Everyone always asks about that first. “Yes. I used to want to be a doctor, once upon a time.”
“Medicine to visual art…” The man tilted his head and rubbed at his chin, his dark eyes sliding from Fran's resume to her face and back. A corner of his lip pulled in what seemed like amusement. “That’s an intriguing pipeline. What changed your mind?”
Another familiar question, one that created a squeeze of shame in her chest. “Well, I realized medicine wasn’t for me. I guess I feel a lot more comfortable with art.”
“Comfortable?” The man’s lip pulled a little further. His stare grew intense with interest. “Explain.”
Fran paused, a little caught off guard by his reaction. “I just needed a change, that's all.” She averted her eyes from his as the squeeze of shame grew colder and made it hard to meet them. It was (lights, tube, vomit) a long story.
Fran swallowed and focused instead on the sound of the ticking clock to ease her nerves. She was never good at doing interviews. Her social skills kind of sucked and being scrutinized by another person like this was always uncomfortable. She hoped her portfolio would do more of the legwork, here. Outside of college, two years of med school, and her recently finished first freshman semester of art school, her resume was pretty thin. She had thought she would find easy work in the medical field, but, well…
The man put her resume aside, got her portfolio, and began looking through it, a binder full of laminated scans of her best drawings and works. Fran considered herself a realism artist. Most of her subjects were portraits of animals, people, and objects in arrangements, the vast majority in pencil, though the occasional pop of color showed that she was trying to branch out into colored pencil and acrylic paint. However, all of her art was from a direct reference image since she’d always had trouble with drawing images from her mind’s eye. That and the sparse color meant there might not have been as much creativity as would be ideal.
The man took his time flipping through the laminated pages, surveying each of her drawings with a businesslike interest. As he did, he absentmindedly ran a single finger back and forth along the top of the binder. Fran’s eyes caught this movement and on impulse she pictured him doing that to her bare thigh. He glanced up at her in that moment, and she darted her eyes elsewhere, her cheeks coloring. It’s not like he can read my mind, she admonished herself, but those black eyes of his were so piercing that she felt like he could anyway.
“Miss Izquierdo, how long have you been drawing?”
“On and off my entire life,” Fran answered. “I only started taking it seriously a few years ago.”
The man hummed in response, studying a close-up of a peony in pink and mauve colored pencil, drawn from a picture on a drink coaster. “While you were in medical school?” he asked, turning the page to Fran’s still-life depiction of her father’s many liquor bottles.
“...Yes, actually. It was good stress relief.” Nothing helped ease the stress of med school except for leaving, but whatever. A white lie. Fran just wished he would stop bringing it up, why was he so interested?
Her interviewer slowly tilted his head at her. Fran felt another weird zap of anxiety, compelling her to look away. Could he tell she was lying?
His finger returned to running languidly back and forth across the binder. “How do you otherwise handle stress, Miss Izquierdo?” he asked, his words getting smooth.
Fran blinked a few times, taken aback. “I… don’t really do much else except draw.” She unsuccessfully fought back a blush and tried not to look at his hand.
“I see.” The man un-tilted his head and cast his eyes back down to the portfolio, but it seemed like they had to first drag down her body in order to get there. Fran suppressed a shiver. Sure, he was hot, but like most people she didn’t like to be creeped on by a future boss . (unless it was some fake fantasy thing, but that didn’t count.) But maybe she was also reading too much into all this and was jumping to weird conclusions like she usually did.
…No, maybe she wasn’t, because this entire interview had felt strange. Weren’t they supposed to be talking about the job? Instead this all just felt like she was being psychologically evaluated. For a second Fran considered leaving, but god, she had been trying so hard to improve, and maybe this would finally let her break into the industry…
Come to think of it, what was this job she was applying for even about? Where was this place? She glanced past the man out the window behind him, and found that she didn’t recognize the street this building was on. She didn’t even remember driving here, either. So how…?
Fran tried and failed to come up with answers, and the knot of unease in her stomach grew tighter. She couldn’t remember? How was that possible?
She was brought out of her reverie as a tingle crawled up her back, raising the hairs on her neck. The sensation of being watched. Fran bit the inside of her cheek and stole a glance behind her. The receptionist was standing outside the office door, looking in through the rectangular glass window. Fran’s eyes widened as they met the woman’s, who stared unblinking with those same dark, calculating irises. Something about it kicked Fran’s nerves into higher gear, and her whole body began to tense, her blood pressure spiking until she could feel her heart knocking against her ribcage. But she didn’t need to get this nervous, right? Maybe the receptionist had come over here to tell her boss something.
"Mister, um, your receptionist is outside," Fran said, her throat dry. She realized that she hadn't gotten either of their names.
The man held up a hand to silence her. "Don't worry, we’re just keeping an eye on you." He showed his teeth in another dashing smile. "Excuse us if it feels a little invasive." There was something put behind that word, invasive, as if he were savoring it. All this while that woman stood blocking Fran's only exit.
Here she sat, trapped in this room.
A dreadful realization spread across her thoughts. It was a deep instinct that had been prodding at her since the second she shook this man’s hand, trying to get her attention, but only now did she understand what it was. I’m in danger. These people are going to hurt me.
Fran gripped her purse tighter to herself and discreetly slid one of her hands in it. She felt for her phone and tried turning on the screen, but it was dead. She grasped her keys in a trembling fist as a last-ditch weapon. What do I do? Her internal dialogue felt scrambled, hard to decipher. She'd never been in a situation like this before. Do I fight them? Should I try to leave? Do I scream for help?
"I'd like for you to be honest with me, for once," the man spoke up, his calm tone wildly incongruent with Fran’s current panicking. "How do you feel about your art?"
Fran wasn’t even going to answer him, but then it was like something cold wriggled into the sensory-motor portion of her brain, and the dead-honest words that she would never have otherwise said were yanked from her thoughts to her lungs, then out her mouth by force. “I’m deeply insecure about it. I’m not creative, I can’t put emotion into my works, I’m worse than everyone around me who are many years younger and I could have been a doctor but I fucked up and I’m a massive failure and I wasted so much money and all of that makes me so god damn angry-”
She jerked in her chair and snapped out of that trance, grasping at her throat as she coughed and gagged. “What the fuck was that?! Did you make me do that?!” She cried.
The man’s face split into a wide grin that bordered on a leer, his eyes narrowing in satisfaction. “Yes, I think you’ll be a beautiful fit for this position.”
Fran stood and pointed hard at her portfolio. “Give that back,” she snapped. She tried to sound assertive, but her teeth were chattering.
The man handed her back her portfolio, his expression unperturbed. “One more question, before you go.”
“No,” Fran grit, grasping at her works with a sweaty hand. As she touched the binder, her fingers brushed his, and an incredibly strong tension slammed into her body and made every one of her muscles taut and rock-solid, paralyzing her. Fran stood in shock, like a wide-eyed statue. She forced her jaw open and made a small sound, couldn't do much more than that. Her fingers and eyelids twitched as she tried with all her might to move, to escape, but the grip of whatever force that was holding her was like iron.
The man rose to his feet and began to walk around his desk to her in a way that looked too smooth, too vivid, not right-
Fran tried to cry out, tried to run, willed the muscles of her arm as hard as she could to pull her keys from her purse to stab this predator in the eye before he could get any closer, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t move-!
“One more question, Francisca,” the man purred, his voice like velvet as he stood right next to her, and hearing that lecherous fondness paired with her name made Fran's paralyzed lungs wheeze as she tried and failed to scream. He reached over and slid his cold hands across her shoulders, along her upper arms. He leaned close and spoke, his lips caressing her temple:
“Are you a vulnerable person?”
Fran couldn’t even comprehend his question. With him this close, his teeth and hands and eyes this close, that deafening, looping fear instinct was all that her brain could hold. Dangerdangerdanger badbadbad getawaygetawayGETAWAY-
"Are you vulnerable, Fran?" he crooned into her ear. His palms splayed across her ribs, running down her waist, pulling her flush to him. His touch blasted danger chills throughout her system again.
"Are you vulnerable?" A woman’s voice, equally smooth, coming from behind her. It was the receptionist, though Fran had never heard her open the door. A pair of smaller hands reached into her peripheral vision and glided down the sides of her neck, nails scraping against her wildly hammering pulse before they tucked Fran's long hair behind one shoulder. The man and woman pressed even closer to her, pinning her between them as they began to feel her up. Their hands were icy and deft, touching and pushing and stroking and forcing her open, giving her no privacy or safety. Fingers like blades kissing her skin, a whispered promise of violence.
“Are you vulnerable?” There were more voices besides the two of them now, making that phrase grow louder with each repetition, though nobody else had entered the room. Outside the window, the sun abruptly set as if time were in fast-forward. Darkness fell over the figures assaulting her. Their silhouettes began to distort, their eyes changed, their teeth shone.
“ARE YOU VULNERABLE?” The phrase kept growing in volume until it was so loud that it became a harsh, metallic ringing that hurt. Something not-human slithered between Fran's legs and undulated, grinded, a slow wave that massaged delicate nerves. Bile stung Fran’s unmoving throat as a gross zing of pleasure rocketed up her spine. All she did in response was twitch, as her internal self cried and thrashed and begged for mercy.
“AREYOUVULNERABLE?” Something sharp stabbed into her abdomen. Blinding pain seared across Fran's senses. The sharp thing began to travel, began to cut. It made her want to (vomit, tube, lights, quit,). It felt like she was (drowning, cold, can't breathe, dreaming-)
I’m dreaming, she realized, gathering the last of her strength to mentally push at her surroundings as hard as she could. This is a dream! This isn’t real! Wake up!!
The scene around her dissolved. The people and their touches and the pain and the terror faded away. The room began to brighten, her equilibrium shifted. She was laying on her bed in her student apartment, her body tangled in sweat-soaked sheets. The loud cacophony that was once voices clung to her ears, morphing itself into the electronic blare of her phone's alarm clock as her consciousness continued to rouse.
Her consciousness wasn’t rousing fast enough. She couldn’t reach to turn the alarm off. She was awake, but she still couldn't move.
Her eyes darted around the room and her blood ran cold as she perceived a blurry, human-shaped shadow in the corner, its bright eyes in a featureless void burning into her own. The figure stood for several long seconds until it, too, began to fade. Its eyes remained a little longer, branding into her retinas like sunlight before they vanished.
Fran regained control of her body and sat up so fast that she slammed her head into the shelf hanging above her bed, making pencils and pin buttons clatter to the floor. Fran yelped and clutched at her head, blearily groping for her phone next to her to shut up her still screeching alarm clock.
She sat there in the now quiet morning, trembling, swallowing down air as the adrenaline gradually faded. She couldn’t remember much from that nightmare other than talking to a really hot, vintage-movie-looking man and woman about something before they began to threaten her in some unknown, still-hazy way, but fuck, those had to have been some serious threats if she had woken up this freaked out, with sleep paralysis hallucinations, of all things.
…She was also really wet. Fran grimaced and shifted uncomfortably at the lingering heat between her legs. It did intrigue her a little, made her morbidly curious as to what had happened. But that wasn’t important, because none of it was real. She'd had sleep paralysis once or twice before, though only around the time she quit med school-...
Ah, her dream must have been because of stress, then. She had a bunch of stuff due soon, after all. She really needed to get on those. So she had to juggle frustrating assignments and sometimes had issues with artistic insecurity, but it was roses compared to what med school had (vomit, tube, lights) put her through.
…Ugh.
Fran rubbed her eyes and dragged herself out of bed into the shower, and tried her best to think about anything else other than that silly nightmare. It was easier said than done - She had zoned out trying to remember details of it while half-rinsed soap ran down her cheek, and the lukewarm water combined with the impatient knock on her bathroom door by her roommate alerted her that she was now 15 minutes late for her first class. Fran swore and rinsed her hair out as fast as she could. Get it together, dumbass, she thought to herself, pulling her clothes and shoes on before taking the stairs down two at a time to her car. No more thinking about the dream. Time to focus.
Something kept prickling at the back of her neck as she drove. It made her get a fake sense of someone lurking behind her, which only made her mind keep going back to that dream. She frustratedly scratched at the back of her neck to relieve that tickle, and winced as her nail nicked a mole.
She parked outside her building, and took a few deep breaths. She got her backpack and sketchbook. Get it together, she thought to herself again as she locked her car and headed in almost 30 minutes late for Art History II.