Chapter 2
Riley
I swipe the eyeliner across my eyelid for the third time this morning and watch it smudge again. Fuck. I pull my shaking hands away from my face. This is what lack of sleep does and I’m working on probably about two hours max.
My husband Nate had another one of his binges last night, and I spent all night awake, praying and listening. I can just see him barging through our bedroom door, half awake in a drunken stupor, intent to manhandle me again. The memory makes my stomach churn. It wasn’t always like this. Nate’s my highschool sweetheart. He was captain of the football team and I was a head cheerleader. Totally cliché I know, but in the small town we came from, that's what you do: you graduate high school, you get married to your high school sweetheart, you stay in that small town for the rest of your life and have kids. Then, you raise those kids so they can do it all over again.
Nate and I talked about refusing to be the same, to not do things that way. We spent the first two years out of high school as newlyweds in our hometown and Nate worked his way up at his job. Then he got a job offer in the city we couldn't refuse. I thought maybe moving would add a little spark to our relationship, maybe change things up from the small town expectations we’d fallen into… I was wrong. Within a year of living in the city, things began going downhill.
It wasn’t that our first years of marriage were perfect before they started sinking, because they weren’t. Come to think of it, our best memories were our first couple years of high school. Nate treated me like a princess. Something changed during his senior year and I'll never be able to put my finger on it. It's like one day, he went from being the perfect prince I had imagined since I was little, to sometimes being downright mean. It started with little things like grabbing me a little too hard when no one was looking if he didn't like something I said or did. It was never enough to leave a mark, and nothing I would consider super serious, at least not at the time. I thought it was normal. I thought that’s how every relationship was. I was young, na?ve, and in love.
That changed though, something changed when we moved. I don’t know if it was being so far away from both of our families or the fact we were struggling to get by financially, but I’ve spent the last four years on a downhill trainwreck. It felt like trying to make any means necessary to get by. Nate felt pressured in this new role, and as a coping mechanism his drinking habits got worse and worse. He went from one beer a night to a six pack, then moved on to bourbon, scotch, or any available hard liquor. Eventually he couldn't hide his problem at work.
Nate doesn't know but I heard through the grapevine that his boss had finally had enough and fired him after he showed up to work smelling like he spent the last week inside a brewery. It's only been a few months of him not working but after the first week I already knew I needed a break from the darkness inside my home.
Thankfully, I had been smart enough to start going to college after we left high school, to not be like the other girls from the small town who decide they want to be a stay-at-home wife and not work while raising their babies. While I admired their dedication to their kids, I knew I wanted to make something of myself. I also knew I didn’t want to be stuck in one place forever.
I wasn’t going to be that girl who was left high and dry ‘without a pot to piss in’ like my mother would say. While she and my dad had maintained a fairly happy marriage and had my sister and I young, she had always encouraged me to be able to go my own way in life.
“Honey, don’t let yourself lose everything to a man. It ain’t worth it.” She’d drop these lines as she got my sister Corrine and I ready in the mornings. My dad was almost always gone at this point of the morning, already headed to work and wasn't usually back home until well after dark. To this day my sister and I still mock my mom when we visit or chat, quoting some of her most notable phrases. They were often accompanied by a glass of wine in hand.
It was with sheer determination I was able to land an internship at one of the biggest law firms in the states. Working for Bolt Corporation isn’t just a good opportunity, it's the opportunity of a lifetime. Maybe, just maybe, if I can work my way up in a firm like this I can get my marriage back to a good place. Like where we were before he changed into the monster he is now…
I wipe the corner of my eye and reapply the liner for the last time. I pull on my nicest pantsuit, which I’d bought at a secondhand store when I’d found out my internship had been accepted. After one last glance in the mirror I slip out of my room.
I sneak past Nate, still passed out on the couch from last nights’ whiskey bender, and ease out the front door. I jump into my beat-up Honda, putting on some 80’s classics to lift my mood for my twenty minute drive to work.
“Work!” I squeal out loud in my car. I get giddy just thinking about it. This is a chance for new beginnings and a fresh start for our future.