Chapter 4 Please
Please
Nadine
My hand shook, the roly-poly peas tumbling off the tines of my fork onto my plate.
Aaron sat beside me at our kitchen table for the first time in two weeks, but he was still a million miles away.
I’d been thrilled when he walked through the door early. Happiness bubbled in my tummy as I flew around the kitchen, throwing together an easy dinner for us, excited to have this time to reconnect.
But Aaron gave no indication he noticed my presence never mind wanted it.
This was what we’d come to.
Kids grown and gone, big, old house echoing around us, memories the only thing keeping me company when I wasn’t working at a job I had no idea if I even liked.
I’d cried more over the past two weeks over the demise of my marriage, than I had throughout the entirety of my father’s illness, his passing, my mother’s resulting decline, and ultimate passing six months later.
Aaron was my love, my life, my home. And our foundation was crumbling.
I forked a mouthful of mashed potatoes and lifted it to my mouth as I stared unseeing out the window.
The winter sun had long since retired. This used to be the most hectic time of day.
Aaron and I flying around the house getting kids ready for ice skating and taekwondo, or scrambling to complete homework or school projects that had slipped through the cracks.
Rushing past one another in the hallway, offering brief kisses, dirty winks, and naughty promises for a bedtime that found us more often than not ready to pass out even as we giggled like the teenagers we used to be as we promised each other sexy time tomorrow.
And when the promised tomorrow inevitably came, it was always more than worth the wait.
Now the blackness of night seeped beneath the windowsill and sucked the last remnants of our joy from the bones of this old house.
I twisted the embroidered edge of the tablecloth between my fingers. Our trip to Portugal afforded this particular piece. The bowl on the table, the one I used to fill with fruit for the kids, came from a craft market in Quebec.
A small smile touched my lips. We’d gotten adjoining rooms for that trip.
The contents of our house constituted a journal of all our best vacations and anniversaries. I didn’t need to look around to catalog them, I’d done nothing but that for weeks, in part to bolster my faith in us, in part to search for clues to how we’d ended up in this cold, silent place.
Reaching for my water, I eased my parched throat before carefully placing my glass back down on the table. The arguing was bad, but nothing came close to the agony of his silence.
Watching him closely, my heart harboring a scrap of hope, I cleared my throat. “I think we should have a trial separation.”
He froze, his fork halfway to his mouth and blinked once. His eyes darted back and forth from his plate to his water glass and back as if somewhere, buried underneath the mashed potatoes, lay the key to decode my message.
Alarm bells peeled in my head.
His eyes, wide and stripped bare, locked onto mine for a pregnant moment before dropping to the table.
How could this come as a surprise to him? He’d barely spoken to me in months with no explanation as to why.
Oh, God! His eyes! I blinked back my tears. Had I misjudged?
Over the past year and a half, my emotions ran the gamut from devastation to gratitude and back again seemingly out of control. Was this just another extreme mood swing?
The very last thing I wanted to do was hurt him.
Finally, his gaze rose to meet mine. “What?” he whispered, hazel eyes stark with pain.
My chest seized painfully.
I thought I had nothing left.
I thought I’d been hollowed out.
I even thought he might be relieved.
I thought wrong.
“I—” My voice failed me.
What was I without him? Less than half. And the half that was left was not the half I wanted.
Carefully laying down his fork, Aaron gave me his full attention, his eyes clear and focused on my face for the first time in months. A deep frown marred his forehead. “I heard what you said.” He cleared his throat. “Nadine—”
“You’ve barely spoken to me in months,” I blurted, latching onto his attention like a buoy no matter that these conversations always sent us to sleep with our backs to one another.
“I know,” he conceded with a short nod, hands gripping the edge of the table.
Those two words were sharper than they had any right to be.
“I’ve tried and tried to talk to you,” I pleaded, my voice shamefully close to a whine, before giving my head a shake and clearing my throat.
His chin dropped, eyes skittering away as he grimaced. “I know that, too.”
Swallowing painfully, I pushed the words past the lump in my throat. “I feel like I’m losing you.”
He shook his head forcefully. “You’re not.”
I couldn’t not ask. After all, we’d been together since we were sixteen. Was there ever any real hope for us to go the distance?
Gathering my courage, I leveled my tone. “Is there someone else?”
His head shot up, but his hands remained glued to the table. “No,” he denied adamantly. “No, Nadine. There has never been nor will there ever be anyone else.”
Grief, my closest companion over the past year, gripped my throat. Swallowing hard, I choked out the words I needed to say. “You didn’t sleep with me last night. I don’t even know what time you came home. Where were you?”
Mouth twisting to the side, he shook his head. “Work.”
“Alone?”
“Yes,” he stated firmly. This time he reached across the table and offered his palm. “Alone.”
My hands remained clasped tightly in my lap. I wanted to reach for him but feared the inevitable letting go. “What is going on?” I whispered desperately, and not for the first time. “Tell me what’s happening!”
He closed his eyes and withdrew the offer of his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t want your ‘sorry’,” I hissed. “I want answers.”
“And you deserve them, Nadine, I just—"
“I can’t live like this.”
Eyes closing, he nodded in defeat. “I know.”
Aaron? Defeated?
When we got pregnant, Aaron wasn’t my knight in shining armor, no, he was the fucking dragon, burning down everything and everyone blocking our path.
Even as a teenager, Aaron possessed a confidence that most men strove for years to acquire. He knew who he was, knew what he wanted, and understood his worth. His mother instilled that in him as a child and up until now, he’d never lost it.
This Aaron who wouldn’t talk to me, this Aaron who stayed out all hours and didn’t come to our bed, this Aaron who had barely touched me in months, rarely smiled, and sat beside me even now with the weight of the world on his shoulders was a pale shadow of the Aaron I knew and loved.
Sifting through the chaos of the past year brought me no closer to pinpointing the moment I lost him.
And I couldn’t begin to fathom how many years it had been since I lost myself.
Now we were losing us.
I sucked in a breath and held it, ultimately failing to keep the words inside even as I prayed he wouldn’t let me take us down this path. “Maybe we should take some time apart—"
Abruptly, Aaron leaned across the space between us. “Come with me to the cabin.”
“What?” I drew back. “When? I have work.” My mouth twisted with a sneer, my hostility over his hours no longer worth hiding. “You have work.”
He shook his head. “I don’t. Not for the next two weeks.”
I blinked, shocked to my core. “What do you mean you don’t have work for the next two weeks? You’re taking time off without me?”
He winced. “It was sudden.”
Sudden?
Suspicion crowded out every other thought as I narrowed my eyes on his face and bit out, “What is going on?”
Jaw clenched, he held my eyes, his gaze fiercely intense. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything. Just…Nadine…Please,” he closed his eyes, “come to the cabin with me.”
His breath hitched as a tear escaped beneath his closed lid and stained his cheek.
I pushed back my chair and closed my arms around him, drawing his head to my breast.
His arms banded around my waist like a vice as he pressed his face to my chest. “Please.”
I dropped my face to the top of his head and breathed him in. I hated that tear, hated and feared in equal measure everything it might have represented, but I loved this man.
“Okay.”