Page 28 of Power Games

He’d come back with many scars, but they were all on the surface. Izzy might never have left home, but hers ran much deeper.

“What have we become, Izzy?”

“Monsters,” was her reply. “I killed it.” Her hands went to her stomach and squeezed it. “I didn’t want it, so I did everything I could so it went away. I killed it, Charles.”

He wrapped his hand around her head, ran his fingers through her hair, and massaged it softly.

“You didn’t. We did.”

He wasn’t exonerating himself here.

“I’m not going anywhere. Not ever again, you understand? It’s you and me, now.”

He didn’t love her. He didn’t even like her. But she was his, and it was as simple as that.

11

Back on Track

One year later

Intentions.Such an interesting term. No one ever used it to talk about success. Whenever anyone started to say “I intended to…” one could be sure that they’d thoroughly failed to achieve their goal.

Charles had intended to mend his marriage. Help Izzy try to find the woman she used to be, still buried until all the bullshit somewhere. He’d intended to fall in love with her again.

Easier said than done.

He married her summer 2001, age 19. She’d been 18. He’d had sex with two girls before her, but she was wild, teasing, funny, and charming so he fancied himself in love.

September 2001, the honeymoon period was well and truly over.

There was a difference between seeing a girl two hours per day outside of school, sneaking out after curfew to make out in the car, and actually living with her.

Izzy was messy. She had tantrums when she didn’t get her way. She got seriously pissed when he didn’t get back to her within half an hour.

Charles had been thinking about enlisting; he’d mentioned it in passing a time or two. Two months after their wedding, he just went for it, eager to get out of the house.

How easy it was, at 36, to forget what had happened half a life ago. He had trouble getting back to their better days because they hadn’t actually had better days.

The year following Izzy’s hospitalization, he admitted one fact he just couldn’t ignore anymore. He’d never loved his wife. Had he ever loved anyone really?

Well, there was his parents, his uncle, some friends he would have done just about anything for. But he knew very little about loving a woman, a partner.

Still, Charles was nothing if not determined. He wanted to fix his marriage, and he tried. He got Izzy the help she needed, and accompanied her every step of the way. They settled into a comfortable companionship. Within days, he could hold her hand her again without wanting to recoil. Within months, he learned to sleep next to her again.

She was a pillow-hog. He dealt.

They had sex six months after the hospital, for the first time in over a year. It wasn’t spectacular. He’d itched to take a shower after. But with time, that became normal too.

So while he’d failed to fundamentally repair a marriage that had never quite worked, he fixed what he could and built a bridge between them.

Charles had also intended to stop seeing, talking to, and thinking about Vanessa McNamara.

In that, he failed. Thoroughly.

He saw her less. He didn’t talk to her as often. Once every two weeks perhaps. But how he looked forward to each conversation. He found himself smiling for hours, anticipating hearing the sound of her voice, and it was days before the memory of each word stopped running through his mind.

He realized that his feelings for her were fundamentally wrong. He didn’t love her. He refused to use that term. Refused to even contemplate the possibility. But something about her made her extremely special to him. The people in his life were his employees, his partners, his friends, his family, his wife, and then, there was Vanessa McNamara, who didn't belong in any of these boxes. His...Vanessa.

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