Neela lay motionless inside her house, an immobile ball of red and white fur flopped in-front of a dying fire, striving valiantly to keep Neela warm despite the cold air filling the morning. Normally Neela would have stoked the fire but today she couldn’t bring herself to move and there was something appropriate about the pathetic, stuttering flame; it seemed kin to her own mind at the moment.
Neela felt tired, broken and betrayed. The last emotion was perhaps the oddest as it wasn't Tony she felt betrayed by, she could hardly blame an adolescent for giving in to an older woman's advances, but her own body and her inability to control herself in the face of her instincts.
More than that she felt she had betrayed what little she hadn’t already of her bonds to Julian. Not just broken, but ground into the ground and spit upon when she lost control of herself like a yearling and all but attacked the first male she had seen that day.
Even now Neela refused to admit her feelings for Tony, refused to let herself believe that there had been anything more between them than hormones; to do so would both give her an excuse, but also magnify the betrayal to Julian so she kept her thoughts locked up tight.
If it had been somebody her age Neela might have been able to deal with it and move on, remaining functional if depressed. But Tony was so much younger than her, fuck he was younger than her son! Neela felt sick that she had lost control with somebody so younger than herself, that she had felt any attraction to Tony at all.
The smell, Neela thought, was the worst of it. The collie was too listless to wash herself and absolutely stunk of a mixture of sex, heat and Tony; at the moment all three smells made her want to throw up.
The chicks were a whirl of motion near her, crawling and flying all over her in their attempts to cheer her up, Grynn standing watch on the lone stuffed chair that had survived the years, but Neela didn’t respond to the noisy chicks, remaining limp and absorbed in her thoughts.
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