Page 3 of Breathe Again

He loved her curvy body, loved to dig his hands into her hips, press his hips between her soft thighs, her skin like silk, the way sheresponded under his hands and his mouth, her taste, her sex drive he could not hope to keep up with. She kept that hidden most of the time, lucky for him, he did not like the idea of other men knowing that about his wife.

All this and yet, she was easily the most insecure woman he had ever met in his life.

In their earlier years, that insecurity led to tantrums and ultimatums that were shocking in their intensity and acceleration, like a female version of Jekyll and Hyde. He grew accustomed to it, as much as a person could. He trained his eyes not to glance at other women, one look was like a knife to her heart, the resulting tears and recriminations a pain in the ass he didn’t want to deal with, so he made sure not to look.

She worried incessantly that he would cheat on her. He wouldn’t cheat on anybody; it was not in his nature. Explaining this brought her no relief, only a new worry that he might someday want to be with someone else, and the thought of him wanting anyone other than her killed her.

When it was just them, in their family bubble, she was relaxed and even-tempered, funny, and giving, and life flowed along smoothly. Most of the time. Introduce others to the mix and she could get wary, and it was a wariness he needed to stay on top of or deal with the consequences, consequences which could typically take a couple of days and a long, hard fuck to sort out and get her back on track.

He didn’t know she was so insecure when they started out or he wouldn’t have gone in. Her constant need for reassurance was draining, her moods mercurial, and they could change by the hour. At times, she could get downright despondent, snap at the merest provocation, and become positively enraged by jealousy, though he could not think of a time when he’d ever given her reason to doubt him.

It was worse after they fell in love. In their beginning, she was just sweet and sexy and funny. As she became more attached to him, she got scared. He could see it. He could not see what to do about it.

He never figured that out.

He did not know she was so insecure, and by the time he clued in, it was too late. He was already taken by her sweetness.

Thank God because he could not fathom his life with her.

Names on a Door

Mara

I love beautiful things. They are food for my soul.

Flowers, sunlight sparkling on the water, sunset colors spinning moondust across the evening sky, a baby’s belly laugh, the feel of the wind in my hair, rain tapping on the roof and sliding down the window, the way the light changes immediately before the storm, lightning streaking across the sky, the sound of the waves, especially the sound of the waves.

It soothes me. The sound washes through me, then seeps out again, siphoning the pain out through my pores, opening my chest, and allowing me to draw the salty air into my lungs and breathe deeply.

To exhale.

I love the water, the sand, the tiny shells, the scattered stones, the treasure hunt for sea glass and driftwood, and the waves that kiss the shore.

It is the most beautiful of all the beautiful things that feed my soul.

I love beautiful things.

I desperately want to be beautiful too.

My sweet, beautiful girl needed leg braces. The toe-walking that had taken a back seat behind more pressing issues had started having a detrimental effect. Her feet were becoming misshapen, her posture altered, and her legs hurt from the constant tightness in her calf muscles. I was kicking myself for not getting on this a lot sooner.

Bex, my dearest friend for more years than I cared to count, drove us, both for emotional support and because I was a chickenshit who hated driving in the city. Normally, I would drive, but she had offered to help whenever she could, so I pushed back the guilt, and I took her up on it. Usually she waited outside, but not today, it was bitterly cold.

I was not accustomed to seeing her in this space. She looked quite comfortable in the lobby chair, her petite form curled up in a ball, her journal on her lap.

Bex had the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen, like waves of watercolor blue spilling from the ink dot of her iris. She kept herhair short, in a sleek graduated bob that framed her pixie face, the silver that threaded through the black doing nothing to lessen her appeal. She had been a homebody for a long time, but that changed when Rhys and the twins came into her life.

She met Rhys about six months ago, and moved in with him right before Christmas, as in a few days before. It took her a little while to decide to take the risk with him, after losing her husband and grieving him as hard as she did, but once she decided, she wasted no time. She was blessed to have found happiness and love again. She became a mother, too, something she’d given up as a lost dream. I checked in with her often and she easily expressed her delight with all that was new in her life.

Olivia, however, was not delighted at all about the braces situation, and she held nothing back in expressing this. We were in the orthotics clinic at the hospital in Milltown. We had already met with the orthotist, had negotiated and compromised our way through the tears and refusals. Olivia’s headphones were back on, holding back her halo of light brown curls, and she immersed herself in her tunes, singing herself away from what was happening in the here and now.

The orthotist prepared to take the braces to do the shaping in the machine room. She swung the door half closed revealing the inside of the door that displayed at least a dozen magnetic name cards.

“I’ll stick my name up here to hold this room.” She slapped her name card on the outside of the door, “This will hold the room forus. Feel free to go grab a snack or a drink while you’re waiting. You can leave your things here, just close the door and no one will disturb it.”

I smiled my thanks, my gaze fixated on those name tags. All those names that had long ago been bestowed upon newborns by hopefully loving parents, in hope and in wonder of who their child would become, while they prayed and dreamed of future achievements and successes.

I wondered if those parents ever doubted that the life they created would warrant their name on a door. I wondered if those parents were proud of the existence of that name, the name that they had chosen, stuck on that door, and all that entailed. I wondered if those named absorbed the warmth of that pride, let it seep under their skin and sink deep into their guts so that it became a part of them, a part of them they were not even consciously aware of, but it buoyed them anyway?

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