AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Mason
There was no reason whatsoever that I should have stirred awake before dawn.
The night (and day) before I’d drunk enough gargle to intoxicate an elephant. I’d been sleeping like shite anyway the past week like I always did the days leading up to anniversary of the worst day of my life.
I wasn’t exactly an “early bird catches the worm” kind of fella in the first place (just ask Rian or Conor). The room was grey and chilly, the sheets thick and warm, and Miss Last Night’s body beside me was soft and supple. Everything pointed to the fact that I should have slept in past noon.
All except that The One Who Got Away was asleep in the next room.
I shouldn’t have remembered this fact. This inescapable truth. This tear in my heart. See again, the copious amounts of alcohol for one. The tits that bounced in my face all night were decidedly lovely. But they were decidedly not Rachel’s.
Anger and hurt swirled in my chest. Part of me wanted her gone. Part of me never wanted her to leave Dublin.
I shouldn’t have awoken. And yet I did. I shouldn’t have remembered. And yet I could not forget.
Miss Last Night’s ass was against my groin. I had my arm draped across her breasts. Her legs were intertwined with mine beneath the covers. And yet as I blinked awake, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was close my eyes again. I didn’t want to stay in the warmth. In this comfort. To stay for the inevitable morning wood and a willing pair of lips drifting farther and farther down beneath the sheets.
I didn’t have a fucking clue what time it was as I slipped free from Miss Last Night. I stood at the side of my bed and waited for my swirling, pounding head to clear. Then tiptoed over the clothes thrown hastily to the floor from the night before. It didn’t really seem to matter to me what time it was.
All I could think about was Rachel. If I thought about time at all it was all the time we lost together. All the time we could have had.
The door of the old house creaked as I cracked it open, but Miss Last Night didn’t stir. She’d had a lot of alcohol, too. She said something about being a nurse so I’m sure she wasn’t unfamiliar with a lack of sleep herself. She didn’t have the person she’d loved and lost just a few feet away like I had. She’d sleep through a creaking door no problem.
The hallway was even darker than my room. Rain in the early dawn pattered on the window at the far end. The floorboards moaned slightly beneath my bare toes as I moved toward the only door that was ajar. I peeked inside to find in the dim light Rachel passed out on top of the comforter. She was still in her clothes from yesterday. The clothes she left America in. The clothes she came to me in. The clothes she was wearing when she told me we were married. When she told me she wanted a divorce.
I would always remember the costume she wore when I first saw her in Vegas. When the curtains parted. When I blinked against the blinding lights. When she smiled and circled her lips.
But I would also always remember these clothes: a pair of khakis, well-fitting, but not form-fitting, a simple white sweater (probably some expensive material like cashmere, something I couldn’t afford, that was damned sure), black boots with a heel neither high nor low, and a gold chain necklace that strangely didn’t seem to catch the light. She looked elegant. Posh. Expensive. She looked nothing like Rachel.
But then there was her hair.
It was spread out wildly just the way I remembered it. The way it was on that couch in her dressing room, spilling over the sides like a waterfall. It was the way I remembered it when we were together on the strip and she turned back to look at me. Wind catching it. Lights flashing in it. Strands wiping across her face as she smiled at me and extended her hand to me. It was the way I remembered it when I got the call that changed my life. When I ran my fingers through it for what I couldn’t possibly know was the last time. When I looked back at the door with my bag and passport in hand…
I had the sudden urge to creep into the room and slip off her shoes. To unclasp the gold necklace that bit into her neck, all twisted up from sleep. To lift her and guide her beneath the covers, to pull the thick sheets up around her shoulders again. Would she whimper softly and shift toward the warmth? Shift toward me like she did back then? Could it ever be like it was?
I stood there looking in and imagined that we weren’t in this fucked up situation. That I didn’t have Miss Last Night down the hall in another bed. That I hadn’t fucked her hard and fast and rough while thinking the whole time of Rachel. That Rachel had never left, we had never fallen away, fallen apart. That all these years she had been mine.
Perhaps Rachel was passed out on the bed in her clothes because she’d gone out for a girls’ night with friends. Out with Candace. And Aubrey. They’d had too many Skinny Bitches at The Jar. Rachel had performed her burlesque routine from back in the day on the bar. Guys had offered to buy her drinks. To take her home. To strip off her clothes and love her (and fuck her) like the goddess that she was. I imagined that Rachel shooed them all away because she was coming home to me. That she always came home to me.
What would it be like to go over to her and gently kiss her awake? To whisper something stupid and ridiculous and impossible like, “Hey, baby, here’s an Advil. I’m making pancakes.” I didn’t know how to make fucking pancakes.
The fact that I didn’t know how to make pancakes made me angry. The fact that I couldn’t make pancakes for Rachel made me irrationally fucking angry. And the fact that I knew my anger had nothing at all to do with pancakes made it all the fucking worse.
I was probably still a little hammered. That was it. That was why I was swaying there in the doorway like a fecking eejit. Making up little fantasies like a little schoolgirl. Dreaming about what might have been when what might have been didn’t exist. Couldn’t exist. Wouldn’t exist.
Rachel didn’t just leave me for a girls’ night. She left me for life. Apparently for a better life. A richer life. A life with more opportunities for big roles. A life where she didn’t wear sequins at the corners of her eyes. Where she didn’t dance with pasties on her nipples. Where she didn’t need me. Didn’t want me. A life she wanted more. Maybe always wanted more.
It wasn’t the first time I hadn’t been enough for someone. Hadn’t been enough to stick around for.
I tripped over Rachel’s purse as I stepped inside the room. The divorce papers went skidding out across the rug. I stepped on them—ah alright, maybe I ground them down with my heel—on my way to the side of the bed.
Now, how exactly does one wake one’s wife? A soft, gentle hand on the shoulder. A slow rubbing of the lower back, starting with a feathery touch. A whisper in the ear. Something lovely. Something sweet.
Maybe I messed it up because I wasn’t all that used to being someone’s hubby. I’d apparently been one for years, but I sort of missed out on the experience part. The trial runs. The adjustment period. The real-life bollocks after the honeymoon phase, as they call it. I was rusty. Maybe that’s why I startled Rachel awake, oops, rather than slowly rousing her from her drunken slumber.
Or maybe I was just a teeny, tiny bit petty. And a whole hell of a lot butt-hurt.
“Wifey!” I hissed as I shook Rachel’s whole body. Palms on her back like an overeager puppy ready for his breakfast. “Wifey, hey, wifey!”
