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“No, no. I was…” There’s a pause before she finally touches me, her hand covering mine over her stomach.
God.
That feels so good. So goddamned right.
“You had it right. I just… I’m surprised.”
“Why would you be surprised?”
“We never…” There’s a pause, and she licks her lips before moving forward, where she clearly doesn’t feel comfortable. “We never talked about this kind of stuff back then.”
“Yeah, but we are now,” I say, a million different things in those few words. I wonder if she knows what they mean to me, if she understands fully.
Because suddenly, it feels like there is a future for us.
And it’s going to be beautiful.
Two days later, when she finishes painting her flowers, and I’ve finished getting some of the paint off the hardwood, I notice a new frame in her bedroom with a piece of the cloth we fucked on.
God, I love this woman.
38 CYNIC
NOW
STELLA
We get a week.
One week of blissful togetherness, of normalcy, and living in the now before reality comes crashing in.
Break
Riggins is at his AA meeting while I make dinner for both of us when I decide to shuffle out to the mailbox and grab the mail. Walking back to the house, I tuck a package I ordered under my arm as I sort through the envelopes. I move past a royalty check, a magazine, spam, spam, spam, catalogue, spam, then—weird.
My hand pauses and my feet stop moving toward the door, a white envelope in hand. An unlabeled envelope. I flip it over and see both sides are blank.
Weird.
I move up the stairs, staring at that envelope while I push open my front door and close it behind me. Gracie bumps against my legs as if I’ve been gone for a year instead of two minutes, but I barely realize she’s there.
Instead, I walk to the kitchen island, dump the rest of the mail on the counter, the package I’d been waiting for long forgotten, and flip the envelope over. There’s something inside, a stack of papers, I think, but nothing on the outside. How did it even get to me? I’d like to believe I would have noticed a car driving up or someone putting something in my mailbox, but I know that’s not true.
Anyone could have delivered an envelope without me noticing.
A fan, maybe? My name is officially splashed across the internet, so tabloids won’t take long to figure out who I really am, to find the marriage documents from Vegas. As soon as I saw the first headline ofRiggins Greene’s Secret Wife Revealed!I stopped checking, living in the bliss of not knowing.
Something tells me that it’s all about to end.
Slowly, like it’s a Pandora’s box and I’m about to release something terrible into my world, I slide my finger under the flap.
Am I? Am I about to ruin everything?I asked myself.
Still, I break the seal, the paper ripping and revealing colorful papers beneath. Slowly, I pull them out.
The acid in my stomach churns as it comes to understanding what they are, what I’m looking at.
Articles from the last week about our marriage. About Riggins’ history, relaying all the gory details of our breakup. Another with details about the DUI the record label concealed and his rehab trip, speculation about how it happened when he came home.
