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Twenty-Eight
Finn
She didn’t askme to leave.
I considered that to be a good thing.
Instead, she stayed in the kitchen and she baked.
And she baked.
Then she baked some more.
But for all that her cookies and brownies usually had me sniffing around her, I stayed away. I hung out with Jake for the rest of that excruciating weekend, ignoring calls from both Conor and Junior. I didn’t answer a single work email either.
The precariousness of my position wasn’t something I was accustomed to.
I ruled over my world, dominating it in a way the homeless kid in me needed, but in this instance, Aoife held all the power.
As a result, I kept expecting to have the fight of my life, where I pulled out all the cards to convince her to let me stay, yet there wasn’t one.
She stayed in her domain, I stayed in mine, and at night, we went to bed where things stayed the same—she remained on her side and I was on mine.
That Saturday night, when she came to bed, I was lying in the dark.
She shuffled around the room, making me realize that she thought I was sleeping, and I didn’t do anything to make her believe otherwise.
I watched her as she undressed in the light from the bathroom. I watched as she scrubbed her face clean and applied some cream, and once the lights were gone, I watched the shadows as she headed over to the bed and climbed in at my side.
Marriage had changed me; I knew that. Throw happiness and love at someone who’d been perennially unhappy and unloved and it was like spreading horse manure in a garden—flowers were going to fucking grow.
I’d always felt unworthy of her, but these last few days, I had my confirmation. Trouble was, I was too selfish to leave her. To let her leave me.
Maybe that’d be the decent thing to do, but while I was willing to let sleeping dogs lie right now, I knew that I was too much of a scrapper to let her give up on what we had.
Registering that I was a piece of shit was the best way, I found, to spend every fucking Saturday night, so I just lay there, mind whirring while she settled down too.
Only, she didn’t sleep. I felt her crying. Soft shivers, tiny gasps, each one was like a nail to my heart.
Regret and remorse consumed me, but I stared up at the ceiling as she cried herself to sleep.
Every second that passed as I just fucking lay there while her heart broke killed me. I’d gone through some shit in my life, but hearing her cry in secret twisted my insides, turned them ragged and raw.
I clenched my fists, wanting to grab a hold of her, wanting to hug her, but I knew it wouldn’t be welcome—
The cries turned to sobs.
They’d escalated, not calmed down as she slept.
I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t fucking bear hearing her like that, so I reached over, and while I prepared myself for her to hit out, I hauled her into me, trapping her hands against my chest as I hugged her and held her tight.
Her face burrowed against my throat, her tears wet my skin and the pillow beneath us, but as I held her, her sobbing eased some.
It might have been ten minutes or an hour, but we lay there, neither of us saying a word as her grief bubbled free.
“I shouldn’t have hit you,” she rasped out of nowhere.
I didn’t tense up. “You needed a safe space to release your anger.”
