Page 104 of House of Desire

Charlie: Should I have the whiskey ready tonight?

Parker: Probably wouldn’t hurt.

She acknowledges my message with a thumbs up and I groan, thinking about telling her. The clock ticks a minute closer to five o’clock and I decide I’m done for the day. Keeping myself busy has only worked so well and I’m tired of fighting it.

“Mitch,” I call from my office. He pops his head out of his office, taking a bite of a candy bar and raising his eyebrows at me. “I’m leaving for the day. If there’s anything I need to do this weekend, shoot me a text. Otherwise, I’ll see you on Monday.”

He gives me a salute without saying anything and ducks back into his office.

As I make my way home, I think about going by the bakery but quickly realize a car accident has created a snarling mess of traffic in that direction, and I know with dinner at six, I’ll be late if I make the detour.

Brittany’s car sits in my driveway and I roll my eyes. After the first night, she gave me a sob story about not having enough money to get a hotel room, all the ones in the area being incredibly expensive. As I feel my heart rate spike, I know I’m going to have to kick her out this weekend.

And the fact that Anya hasn’t talked to me much so I could tell her what’s been going on and we could clear the air is sending me into a tailspin.

“Hey,” Brittany calls out as I come in, shutting the door behind me.

“Hi.”

“You’re home early.”

“I have plans with friends tonight.”

She’s standing in my kitchen, grabbing a beer out of the fridge, handing it to me. I twist off the top and take a long drink.

“Can I come?”

“No,” I say, untucking my shirt as I make my way back to my bedroom. Her footsteps follow me down the hallway and I don’t want to deal with this.

“Please? I’m so bored and you still won’t talk to me.”

I roll my eyes at her pushing. Before I would have given in.

“You want me to talk to you? Okay. Why did you leave, Brittany?” I ask, whirling around. “Why couldn’t you talk to me? Tell me how unhappy you were? Why wouldn’t you just talk to me?”

“Because you never would have heard me. It was the best thing for us!” she yells, equally as annoyed by the round and round we’ve found ourselves in. And yet, I can’t bring myself to open up all of this pain again. I know it needs to happen. It has to happen. But the pain might end me.

“Yes, the perfect way to work through the loss of our son was to run away. Great choice,” I say, emotion clogging.

My heart hurts. Just as it has every day I’ve thought of him, my son that didn’t even live longer than a day.

“And your solution was so much better? To not talk to me or cry or even pretend like it happened? And it’s not like I left the next day!”

“I had to keep moving or I was going to die with him. I’m sorry we still had bills to pay. I’m sorry I grieve differently than you.”

“That wasn’t the problem and you know it.” She huffs as if she’s just run a mile.

“Then what was the problem? Huh? What was it, Brittany?”

“I was trapped, Parker! He was gone and the entire reason I was still in that town, other than you, was gone. The only reason we got married was because I was pregnant. Did you really want to marry me? Did you? Because I don’t think you did. I wanted to leave, go away to college, and that choice was taken from me when that double line showed up.

“And that was okay. I was so excited to have your baby. To be a family with you. And then we lost him and all I could think about was what we would be doing if he had survived. How I’d be taking him to preschool or shopping for clothes for him. Every milestone he never had. I was suffocating under our lost son and my dreams.

“I just wanted to feel something, anything. All I felt was this great gaping emptiness where my baby was supposed to be and I was so scared that’s all I’d feel for the rest of my fucking life. All I could think about was how I wanted to go with him. To take care of him. To be with him.

“But I couldn’t leave you. Until that was the only thing I could do, so I could maybe feel something again.”

The ringing silence echoes after she finishes yelling and all I can do is nod while pushing the hurricane of emotions ripping through me to a distant corner of my broken soul.

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