Page 29 of Elijah
“I…I’m not. I was just passing and wondered what he was doing. Anyway,” I snapped. “What’s the tea towel for.”
“Oh this,” she replied, her brows arching and a grin appearing. “I thought you might need it.”
“Why would I need it?” I asked with an agitated shrug.
“Drool, or knickers, whichever needs mopping up the most.”
* * *
It was official, I hated my assistant. She’d done nothing but smirk at me all afternoon. I’d even walked into the kitchen to be met with Genuwine’s, Pony blaring from her phone as she chatted to Elijah. When I stormed over and turned it off, stating I had a headache, Claudia commented that she thought I liked Magic Mike. Elijah then grinned at me and went back outside, leaving muddy footprints all over the kitchen floor. Of course I’d made Claudia clean it all up – payback was a bitch. However, having sent Claudia home for an early Friday evening finish, mainly because I was sick of her making the sound of the Bow Chica Wah Wah porno riff every five minutes, I was alone in the kitchen staring at the vase of wild flowers on the table. I should have been sorting through rug samples, but my eyes kept being dragged back to the foxgloves, daisies, and bluebells and corn buttercups. Whenever Elijah had bought me flowers, it had always been some version of the bouquet that I was staring at – it was his thing, and had been since he’d bought me flowers for the first time when we were teenagers. I loved them and the fact that he always tried to find new varieties each time, as long as their origins were wild. I’d missed having them and when I saw the foxgloves in the florist’s window display, my feet moved of their own accord inside. I’d planned on taking them home, but when I saw the bouquet on the passenger seat of my car, I couldn’t stand the thought of looking at them every night - reliving all the memories of birthdays, anniversaries, and ‘just because I love you’ times. Stupidly, I hadn’t considered that I spent more time working than I did at home, so the pain at looking at them was even greater than it might have been.
My heart hurt every time I saw the blues and yellows, or got a hint of their perfume, so I decided that the best place for them was the waste bin. I stood up and marched over to kitchen island where I’d put them, picked up the vase and then marched right over to the pull-out cupboard where the various household waste bins were. As I lifted my arm, ready to dump them, the door opened and in walked Elijah.
“What are you doing?” he cried.
I looked down at the flowers, the vase tipped at an angle so that the water was dripping down the side of the waste bin. “T-they are dead,” I stammered, making it sound more like a question.
Elijah stormed over to me and grabbed the vase from my hand and pulled it to his chest.
“They’re fine. They’re not dead. You can’t throw them away.”
His voice was low and his breath shallow as he stared at me, a pained expression on his face. I sucked in my bottom lip and felt a huge ball of emotion growing in the pit of my stomach, blinking back tears as I watched him, clinging on to the vase.
For a few seconds we stood staring at each other, both of us still as statues, the only movement coming from the dust mites reflected in the early evening sunshine as they flew around us. Finally, Elijah cleared his throat and turned. He looked at the table and all my samples covering it and then did a half turn and went to the kitchen island and placed the vase in the middle, with a loud slam of the glass against the thick granite top.
“They’ll need fresh water tomorrow,” he said, his back to me. “I’ll take care of them.”
As I watched him reposition the vase and dead-head some of the flowers, I could see his shoulders were hunched and his head dropped. He looked crestfallen, broken even, and I couldn’t bear to be a witness to it any longer.
“Elijah leave them,” I said, going over him. “I’ll sort them.”
“You’ll throw them,” he snapped, his back to me. “When if you just gave them some care and attention they’d last a lot longer.”
“Maybe I should have done that with you,” I muttered, without thinking.
Making a growling noise from the back of his throat, he spun around to face me. “I didn’t need any more care and attention. I was perfectly happy, despite what shit you had going on in that head of yours.”
As he stared me down, his eye twitched and his nostrils flared and I didn’t think I’d ever seen him looking so angry. He’d looked hurt and heart broken when he’d turned up at Rachel’s to talk to me when I was leaving, and mad when he tried to tell me he was innocent, but this was different – this was bone deep anger. Every pore on his body was steaming with it, his eyes were wide with it and his stance was stiff with it.
“I don’t know how many times I have to tell you,” he said, his tone quiet and measured. “I didn’t have sex, or even attempt to have sex, with Lauren fucking Proctor.”
“Whatever you say Mr President.” I rolled my eyes and put a hand out to move the vase a half inch to the left.
“Fuck you, Amy, I’ve tried to tell you, I begged you to listen to me five years ago, and I’ve barely moved on with my life thinking one day you might actually wake up and realise you’re wrong, which makes me fucking pathetic because if you’d cared about our marriage as much as I did, you’d have talked to me. No matter what you thought you’d seen, you’d have asked me and tried to work through it, but no, you didn’t give a shit and took everything at face value and that hurt as much as you fucking leaving. You didn’t love me enough to even talk. So, you know what Amy, that’s it. No more. You don’t believe me, will never believe me, and its time I started living the life I should have been for the last five years. And one more thing,” he said, curling his lip and giving me a look full of disdain. “Next time you fancy a show, go on a ladies’ night, because I’m not yours to watch anymore.”
As Elijah turned to leave, I felt a stabbing pain in my breast bone and got the bitter, watery feeling of imminent vomit and placing a hand over my mouth, I watched as he walk slowly through the door, slamming it behind him. I startled as it banged and then when I heard his truck start, I allowed the tears to fall.
