Post by yukitamashii on Jan 17, 2008 19:01:04 GMT -5
I'm combining my original one-shot and it's sequel into one post, again, to save space.
Inspired by the November challenge's single line: "Hi, Mike."! Not edited, I apologize for typos and etc. PG13 for slightly suggestive dialogue, I wasn't quite comfortable putting it at PG.
Sunset
Mike had been everywhere across Whitebrook looking for his wife. It was a Saturday, and on Saturday evenings she was usually come upon walking a path or a trail on the property, looking at the sunset. He didn’t know what it was about the sunsets that made her sad. She herself seemed unaware of the orange-red sky’s effect on her, so he’d never asked.
Samantha had once said sunsets were sad, because they were the end of the sunshine and the day. Perhaps that was it. Maybe they triggered bad memories for her. He searched his brain. He was relatively sure Ashleigh had left her parents’ ruined farm in the late afternoon, had retired Wonder late one morning, and had found out the results about her latest pregnancy test—another false hope—in the evening, when the sun had already set. But these times of day never seem to bother her; it was only the sunset. Yet she kept seeking it out.
He shook his head and walked down the last path, that lead to a small clearing surrounded by trees on a cliff-like hill. She was not there.
He checked, one last time, the barns, and glanced across the empty paddocks. Nowhere did he sight a slim brunette ambling along like a sleepwalking deer, graceful but without purpose.
He walked back to the house, feeling the cramping muscles in his legs. Ashleigh had not taken her cell phone, as she had never liked the thing and rarely had it with her, and though her car was here she was gone and he didn’t know how to reach her.
But before he would panic he saw her go past the living room window, inside the house, and he went inside to meet her.
“Where were you?” he questioned her.
She looked surprised he’d even ask.
“Ashleigh!” he called the very next day, leaning in the doorway. She’d only left a minute ago, she couldn’t have walked far. He began to call her name again. But he trailed off, holding her lilac sweater in his hand. She’d left without it, and though she’d warm up walking, he hated to think of her cold, even for a moment.
Though it was Sunday, the day had been exhausting for her, and he felt she was still not recovered from the disappointment of not having been found pregnant. She no longer spoke to him about it.
At times he wondered why she was so desperate to have a child. Certainly, he’d never expected it. He’d thought she want to wait until they were older, being so caught up in her horses. But then she’d surprised him. For the last few months she’d withdrawn a little, seeming distracted, though she still lavished her horses with more treats and kisses than Mike did his. But having a child had become the new focus of her world. Considering her age, Mike had to wonder why; her biological clock could not be ticking so soon, could it? He wondered if that might, again, have been the source of her wanderlust, spilling over from its Saturday evenings to Sunday afternoons. She’d left in a rush, distracted, appearing mildly unhappy.
She’d been looking for her favorite red sweater, and had been unable to find it. Then she’d zoomed across the room, barely telling him she’d be back, and he’d had no time to hug her, or kiss her goodbye. But maybe that was a good thing.
Saying goodbye to her hurt him, it always had. A quick, quiet ache when they parted, until his body became accustom once again to being without her presence. So many times he’d wanted to tell her this, but he never had. He was not a man of poetry, and any attempt now would sound flat and unnatural. Ask anyone, and Mike was a man dependable, practical; he did not write poetry. Ashleigh was the dreamer, and it was she, who’d said those things to him. He agreed with her the only way he could when she said those things; he nodded against her hair as he held her. Unable, as ever, to describe with words what he felt for her, he’d no longer tried with words, but with actions. Mostly, he tried to tell her by touch, frequently touching her face, arms, hair. Everywhere, every time he touched her he was gentle. And she would lean into him like the tree bending into the wind’s caress.
Frowning, he shaded his eyes with his hands and looked suddenly towards the drive. Her car was not there.
He went back inside.
He had nothing to do and so decided to do nothing. But he shouldn’t have taken a nap; he had terrible nightmares. He couldn’t describe them when he woke up, even to himself. They had become, upon entering REM sleep, blurred dark landscapes with undefined figures that reached for him, but then a light appeared in the distance. He knew, vaguely, that he was to protect the light, and he went towards it, but ahead of him, the monsters were faster and they raced away from his stumbling feet and outstretched hands. He cried out, though he did not hear himself, and the light was led on by the beckoning shadows and walked to its own destruction, and was covered by the darkness until it was gone, or perhaps had morphed into similar darkness. He had failed the light.
Had he been, contradictorily, awake, he might have reasoned that the light had gone off to its death willingly, all on its own. Perhaps ignorantly, but still. But he was asleep, and so all he knew when he woke, was that he didn’t know why he had this horrible feeling, like his insides were twisting up on each other and he was slowly dying.
To shake himself out of it, he got up to have some coffee. Sitting up, he noticed a pile of letters on the table that hadn’t been there before. And in the kitchen, an empty glass sat beside the sink. He mulled it over, wondering what was bothering him about that. He rounded the corner mug in hand to head to his study to see if he could force himself to concentrate on paperwork. He paused to turn up the heat a few degrees, to ward off the chill in the air. But a few minutes sipping coffee and staring at the papers convinced him to give up. He went back out, glancing inside the master bedroom, where some papers were scattered across an oak desk by the wall, partially covering Ashleigh’s tattered copy of a classic children’s horse story.
Obviously Ashleigh had been in while he slept, and had not woken him up. She must have tip-toed around him to the kitchen for a quick snack and bounded right back out to finish doing whatever it was she was doing.
He poured himself a cup of coffee and wandered back into the living room, after a moment, and flipped on the TV. He stared blankly at the screen and slowly came to realize two things. The first, that he was watching Dora the Explorer.
Second, that Ashleigh had not seen the small blanket beside him on a chair while he slept and covered him with it, as she might have once. If she had looked at him, she might have seen it. But she obviously had not, because her soft heart would never leave someone out in the cold if she had bothered to look at them and see their sad plight.
He sat on the couch, head in his hands, Monday evening. The sun had set. Ashleigh would be coming home soon. He’d never noticed before, how often she came home after sunset from errands, or her personal time. Just like he’d never noticed when she stopped whispering her love to him at night, in his ear in bed like the sound of a sweet bird. When she’d begun to stop, he recalled, he’d wondered if she was also too overwhelmed for words by her feelings. But he’d never expected her to stop completely, because Ashleigh said what she felt. She always had. It was why Wonder was here today. Why had she stopped? Did she come to believe, without his verbal response, that it had not mattered? He regretted never having wooed her with his clumsy poetry. Perhaps, it was not in the fine words but in the love that made one try to speak at all, that a marriage was held steady on.
The sound of the door swishing opened made him raise his head. The sound was like Ashleigh herself; not gentle, but secretive, nearly silent but not quiet enough to escape notice. Even at her quietest, people noticed her.
She came into the living room, and would have said something to him, he’d never know what, but then she saw it. Beside him, on the couch, her red sweater. She stopped, and did not say a word. He knew then. He picked up the sweater, held it in his hands.
“He brought it by. He thought you’d be here, but my meeting with the breeders from Oakside was cancelled, and I was here instead.”
Not a word.
“You left it with him…yesterday?” he asked, desperately. His eyes begged her to say it was only yesterday. He wanted her to say it was not before that, that she’d not belonged to her once-enemy long ago.
Slowly, after a long hesitation, she shook her head. He dropped the sweater on the floor like a puddle of fabric blood, bleeding from his open heart. “Why?”
She didn’t know, didn’t know why, she said at first, looking apprehensive, but he made her tell him.
“Because he told me everything he ever thought and felt about me. He doesn’t love me, he never did, but he’s passionate about me, and he tells me.” Her voice rose a little at the last, defensive.
“Since when?” At last, a bit of anger flared, to save him from the cold despair.
“Since you and I married.” She saw the look on his face, the fear and helpless anger at the thought that he had lost her so long ago, and shook her head, losing her defiant tone. “No! Not then. It was not until...after, that he began to seek me out. I never slept with him! I just…needed to hear it,” she said, at last breaking, and confused sorrow washed across her face. “I needed to hear that someone thought about me like that, that I was the center of someone’s world.”
It was his turn to say nothing.
Foolish words had d**ned many men. But never before had he known that to not speak could hurt also. He saw her eyes now. His not speaking, his silence, hurt her more now than ever before.
Even now? her eyes seemed to say, narrowing, accusing. Even now you will not speak, won’t say what I need to hear? He spoke to her eyes, her question.
“I have always said how I feel about you, maybe not with words, but still I have, and you have never asked for more. Perhaps we don’t belong together, you and I. Maybe you need to find someone who talks more, and I need to find someone who understands the unspoken part of the language of love.”
And she crashed before him, formerly an isolated tower of emotional distance but now a broken castle revealed for what it was; a crumbled thing, once beautiful, fallen into wreckage. But he knew better than to blame himself for the faded and broken insides. He had always been who he was. She had never asked for more. He had not made her silent, or scared to ask, and he had not made her seek out another instead of turning to him. She had done that on her own. Had she always been that kind of person?
Perhaps he had never known his wife.
He got up and walked past the sweater, and past her. “When you feel like spending some time with your husband, you know where I am.”
She was silent as he passed.
I'm continuing with the pg13 rating, since we are talking about almost-adultery. I just put the same rating in this fic, even though there's little swearing and no sex-scenes. Call me a prude if you must.
Daybreak
Mike awoke to find his wife beside him in the bed, turned on her side away from him, shivering a little. She had not snuggled next to him, but neither had she slept on the couch. He wasn’t sure what that meant.
He eased out of bed and looked at the clock. It was two hours before they were due to get up. But he felt…strangely awake, rather the way he felt mid-afternoon. He wasn’t inclined to go back to sleep, though he didn’t particularly want to do anything. He didn’t want to stay in bed.
He got up and went to the closet, quietly grabbing his long robe to cover his boxers and thin shirt, and slid his feet into the slippers Ashleigh had given him their first Christmas together. He thought about eating, but wasn’t hungry, so he prepared to indulge in one of his favorite past-times of his youth; going out into the darkness, on the porch, feeling the chill but not being bothered by it, to wait for the pre-dawn light to herald the coming of the sun.
Dawn was his favorite time of day; it was hopeful, new, and refreshing. And he needed that, desperately, as he walked by the living room, seeing the still frozen sweater on the floor. It seemed no longer to be mocking him mercilessly, but had lost its power over him, and in this new light looked rather…small. He let himself out the front door and sat on the swinging bench and gazed at the sky.
Maybe he was not the man his wife had needed, and his marriage had not been quite what he’d thought it had been, but watching the darkness turn into gray, then into soft pastel colors that lit the clouds long before the sun itself did, he realized something. He had an inner strength he’d forgotten, a strength he hadn’t called on so desperately since the early days of setting up Whitebrook, always running short of money and time and helping hands, and carrying the whole world on his shoulders but somehow still having the will to find a way. Somehow he’d found time to laugh. He felt like he hadn’t really laughed in…so long he couldn’t remember when he had last. He’d been all-business way too long.
“I’ve forgotten who I am,” he murmured. “No wonder Ashleigh couldn’t see the man she’d married any more; I stopped being him.” He’d been so sure that she knew, he’d stopped telling her how he felt, had hardly ever said it since they’d started dating seriously. And he’d worked so hard at being dependable, at never complaining, that he really had stopped saying anything at all. But silence didn’t make a man strong, and it had certainly not been the way to go about his marriage. For one thing, not telling anyone of his pains and weariness didn’t stop it from showing, and he’d hidden away his anger and sadness and disappointment, or so he’d thought, but thinking back to the looks he sometimes saw on other people’s faces, he wondered suddenly if it had showed after all. If it had scared them.
How much he had needed this sunrise, this new day! His thoughts became much clearer, and thought he was still upset with Ashleigh, he was not quite so angry. She hadn’t been unfaithful, not physically, and he highly doubted she was romantically-inclined towards Brad. She was just…a woman. A woman who he’d shut out of his life, even while trying so hard to bear her burdens for her. A woman who no longer heard the little things she’d needed to hear, and who’d become afraid to ask.
She should have…But maybe that thought wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t have turned to Brad for the attention, that he knew for sure. But she while she was strong in many ways, even for her horses, her one true passion, she was not an unbreakable fortress. She’d given in time and time again to the Townsend’s wishes regarding the Wonder-babies, because she was tired of arguing, because they were upsetting the horses, because she lost the will to continue at least for a moment. And she’d never really been strong when it came to personal relationships, or she never would have let people use her, take advantage of her, while she never said a word until it was far past time to. People said jokingly that Ashleigh was a bleeding heart, but deep down, hadn’t they meant it? Hadn’t they all?
She’d given in to Cindy’s demands about Glory many times, though she thought she was too inexperienced, and she was often too lax in disciplining the younger, snottier grooms (relatives of people already working there) and it was left to Mike to deal with them when they over-stepped their boundaries or were too smart-mouthed. Ashleigh was idolized, and people expected an attitude from her she just didn’t have but they reacted to her as if she did. But at heart, Ashleigh was always a shy Kentucky girl, never a proud or overly-confident superstar jockey. She was where she was, doing what she did, for the love of horses, not money or fame.
“I should be her strong tower,” he whispered. “I can’t do that by making her think she has no one, not even me.” She couldn’t handle emotional distance, he knew. She hated fights.
“Mike?” Ashleigh’s tentative voice called from the doorway. He turned in his seat, looked at her.
She was clutching the neck of her own robe, a soft pale blue cotton one, with matching slippers.
“Ashleigh,” he said softly.
After an uncertain moment, she came over to him, not shutting the door all the way, and sat at the far end of the bench, her eyes flickering briefly to the butter-yellow-tinged clouds at the horizon before meeting his calm gaze.
“You look…different,” she said unexpectedly, still quietly.
He raised his brows, surprised. “How so?”
“You…” she said helplessly, trailing off. She shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know.”
He waited, appreciating her features in the pale light. For someone who, while she may have missed the love in his physical affection had always been good with words, she seemed suddenly unable to complete her sentences.
“You look like you again,” she finally finished. She didn’t appear to realize she confirmed all of his fears that he’d been not himself while he’d tried so hard to be what he’d thought she needed him to be. Well, she’d needed it all right, but not to lose her husband in the process. Someday in the technology-dependant future people might trust machines to protect them, but they’d never want to be married to one, to be held by one, no matter how strong it was.
“I didn’t realize I was shutting you out,” he said after a long moment. From the way she twisted her fingers around themselves, hands clasped together, she was unsure of how to respond, and so she merely turned troubled eyes back to the sky.
“It’s beautiful,” she said of the painting slowly being made on the clouds, which were turning pink.
“What do intend to do about the situation?” He wasn’t letting her off the hook; he couldn’t and wouldn’t handle this mess for her.
She let out her breath. “I’m going to have a talk with…with Brad. He needs to stop pursuing me and I…need to stop letting him. I want you to know,” she turned abruptly to him, earnest and inching closer, “I never let him think for a moment we would turn into something. But he’d ask me out to lunch, and I’d go, even after the first time when it became clear he didn’t just want to call a truce, but wanted…I don’t even know what he wanted, exactly, I’m not sure how far he’d go. But I…this sounds so juvenile, but I was just glad he was talking to me, not fighting with me.”
She was just glad he was talking to her period, he rather thought. Of all the men in her life, only Mike himself and Brad had ever had such a profound emotional effect on her, had ignited such passion, good and bad, respectively.
“You sought him, or at least let him seek you out, out because he was the only other person whose relationship with you verged on romance,” he said slowly. She looked taken aback.
“No!” she denied his conclusion vehemently.
“I didn’t say you were in love with him.” He reached out, offered her his hand, and she took it, fingers gripping his tightly despite his words. Hungry for reassuring touch. He continued, “Therefore, he’s the only other man you would accept such attention from, to replace what you weren’t getting from me.” And then she looked confused, as if she’d never thought of it like that, and didn’t say anything to this last part.
“Ashleigh, I’m sorry that I tried to be like a stone statue to you. I wanted to be your strength, but I never realized you didn’t need that, not the way I did it.” He tugged her arm lightly, and she came over willingly, warm and flushed even though it was quite cold.
“I love you, I always have. I promise to tell you more often from now on. But you have to promise me you’ll talk to me, even when I’m being distant. You have to have that much strength, because we’ll never work if you can’t. I’m not perfect; I won’t always know what you need. You need to learn how to tell me. You don’t have to take on the whole world right now,” he said softly. “And when you do, I’ll help you. But you do have to be honest with me.
“I won’t ask you to be my strength. I don’t mind being strong for the both of us. I just want you to tell me what’s going on in your mind.
“Ashleigh,” he said suddenly. “Why do sunsets make you sad?”
She looked surprised, put her other hand to her heart, brows drawn together in sad memory. “Because Wonder’s first miscarriage was at sunset, and so was my first false pregnancy. Don’t you remember?”
He hadn’t, but then, he was not a woman trying to become pregnant, who would make the connection between the loss experienced by both beloved horse and owner.
“Oh…no. I’m sorry,” he offered awkwardly, glancing downward, and then looking in her eyes again.
She sat back against the bench, but didn’t let go of his hand, and sighed. “Sunsets are sad. They’re the end of hope. The paint all these pretty colors on the sky and then turn it black on you, and it’s like…well, it just covers all your hopes.” After a moment she added, “It’s just d**n depressing.”
So it was, in a way, what Samantha had thought it was, though there was more to it. He looked with her towards the blushing sky.
“Dawn is my favorite time of day. It brings all the hope back,” he said, and squeezed her hand. She squeezed back, and told him something she never had before—maybe she’d just now realized it.
“Mine, too.”
*~~~~*
A/N: They didn't solve all their problems, nor did he find out why Ashleigh is so desperate to have a child. But I felt this was a honest way for the next-day to have gone, considering the decision Mike made ('cause I made him) to want to go on with his marriage. What do you all think?
Inspired by the November challenge's single line: "Hi, Mike."! Not edited, I apologize for typos and etc. PG13 for slightly suggestive dialogue, I wasn't quite comfortable putting it at PG.
Sunset
Mike had been everywhere across Whitebrook looking for his wife. It was a Saturday, and on Saturday evenings she was usually come upon walking a path or a trail on the property, looking at the sunset. He didn’t know what it was about the sunsets that made her sad. She herself seemed unaware of the orange-red sky’s effect on her, so he’d never asked.
Samantha had once said sunsets were sad, because they were the end of the sunshine and the day. Perhaps that was it. Maybe they triggered bad memories for her. He searched his brain. He was relatively sure Ashleigh had left her parents’ ruined farm in the late afternoon, had retired Wonder late one morning, and had found out the results about her latest pregnancy test—another false hope—in the evening, when the sun had already set. But these times of day never seem to bother her; it was only the sunset. Yet she kept seeking it out.
He shook his head and walked down the last path, that lead to a small clearing surrounded by trees on a cliff-like hill. She was not there.
He checked, one last time, the barns, and glanced across the empty paddocks. Nowhere did he sight a slim brunette ambling along like a sleepwalking deer, graceful but without purpose.
He walked back to the house, feeling the cramping muscles in his legs. Ashleigh had not taken her cell phone, as she had never liked the thing and rarely had it with her, and though her car was here she was gone and he didn’t know how to reach her.
But before he would panic he saw her go past the living room window, inside the house, and he went inside to meet her.
“Where were you?” he questioned her.
She looked surprised he’d even ask.
“Ashleigh!” he called the very next day, leaning in the doorway. She’d only left a minute ago, she couldn’t have walked far. He began to call her name again. But he trailed off, holding her lilac sweater in his hand. She’d left without it, and though she’d warm up walking, he hated to think of her cold, even for a moment.
Though it was Sunday, the day had been exhausting for her, and he felt she was still not recovered from the disappointment of not having been found pregnant. She no longer spoke to him about it.
At times he wondered why she was so desperate to have a child. Certainly, he’d never expected it. He’d thought she want to wait until they were older, being so caught up in her horses. But then she’d surprised him. For the last few months she’d withdrawn a little, seeming distracted, though she still lavished her horses with more treats and kisses than Mike did his. But having a child had become the new focus of her world. Considering her age, Mike had to wonder why; her biological clock could not be ticking so soon, could it? He wondered if that might, again, have been the source of her wanderlust, spilling over from its Saturday evenings to Sunday afternoons. She’d left in a rush, distracted, appearing mildly unhappy.
She’d been looking for her favorite red sweater, and had been unable to find it. Then she’d zoomed across the room, barely telling him she’d be back, and he’d had no time to hug her, or kiss her goodbye. But maybe that was a good thing.
Saying goodbye to her hurt him, it always had. A quick, quiet ache when they parted, until his body became accustom once again to being without her presence. So many times he’d wanted to tell her this, but he never had. He was not a man of poetry, and any attempt now would sound flat and unnatural. Ask anyone, and Mike was a man dependable, practical; he did not write poetry. Ashleigh was the dreamer, and it was she, who’d said those things to him. He agreed with her the only way he could when she said those things; he nodded against her hair as he held her. Unable, as ever, to describe with words what he felt for her, he’d no longer tried with words, but with actions. Mostly, he tried to tell her by touch, frequently touching her face, arms, hair. Everywhere, every time he touched her he was gentle. And she would lean into him like the tree bending into the wind’s caress.
Frowning, he shaded his eyes with his hands and looked suddenly towards the drive. Her car was not there.
He went back inside.
He had nothing to do and so decided to do nothing. But he shouldn’t have taken a nap; he had terrible nightmares. He couldn’t describe them when he woke up, even to himself. They had become, upon entering REM sleep, blurred dark landscapes with undefined figures that reached for him, but then a light appeared in the distance. He knew, vaguely, that he was to protect the light, and he went towards it, but ahead of him, the monsters were faster and they raced away from his stumbling feet and outstretched hands. He cried out, though he did not hear himself, and the light was led on by the beckoning shadows and walked to its own destruction, and was covered by the darkness until it was gone, or perhaps had morphed into similar darkness. He had failed the light.
Had he been, contradictorily, awake, he might have reasoned that the light had gone off to its death willingly, all on its own. Perhaps ignorantly, but still. But he was asleep, and so all he knew when he woke, was that he didn’t know why he had this horrible feeling, like his insides were twisting up on each other and he was slowly dying.
To shake himself out of it, he got up to have some coffee. Sitting up, he noticed a pile of letters on the table that hadn’t been there before. And in the kitchen, an empty glass sat beside the sink. He mulled it over, wondering what was bothering him about that. He rounded the corner mug in hand to head to his study to see if he could force himself to concentrate on paperwork. He paused to turn up the heat a few degrees, to ward off the chill in the air. But a few minutes sipping coffee and staring at the papers convinced him to give up. He went back out, glancing inside the master bedroom, where some papers were scattered across an oak desk by the wall, partially covering Ashleigh’s tattered copy of a classic children’s horse story.
Obviously Ashleigh had been in while he slept, and had not woken him up. She must have tip-toed around him to the kitchen for a quick snack and bounded right back out to finish doing whatever it was she was doing.
He poured himself a cup of coffee and wandered back into the living room, after a moment, and flipped on the TV. He stared blankly at the screen and slowly came to realize two things. The first, that he was watching Dora the Explorer.
Second, that Ashleigh had not seen the small blanket beside him on a chair while he slept and covered him with it, as she might have once. If she had looked at him, she might have seen it. But she obviously had not, because her soft heart would never leave someone out in the cold if she had bothered to look at them and see their sad plight.
He sat on the couch, head in his hands, Monday evening. The sun had set. Ashleigh would be coming home soon. He’d never noticed before, how often she came home after sunset from errands, or her personal time. Just like he’d never noticed when she stopped whispering her love to him at night, in his ear in bed like the sound of a sweet bird. When she’d begun to stop, he recalled, he’d wondered if she was also too overwhelmed for words by her feelings. But he’d never expected her to stop completely, because Ashleigh said what she felt. She always had. It was why Wonder was here today. Why had she stopped? Did she come to believe, without his verbal response, that it had not mattered? He regretted never having wooed her with his clumsy poetry. Perhaps, it was not in the fine words but in the love that made one try to speak at all, that a marriage was held steady on.
The sound of the door swishing opened made him raise his head. The sound was like Ashleigh herself; not gentle, but secretive, nearly silent but not quiet enough to escape notice. Even at her quietest, people noticed her.
She came into the living room, and would have said something to him, he’d never know what, but then she saw it. Beside him, on the couch, her red sweater. She stopped, and did not say a word. He knew then. He picked up the sweater, held it in his hands.
“He brought it by. He thought you’d be here, but my meeting with the breeders from Oakside was cancelled, and I was here instead.”
Not a word.
“You left it with him…yesterday?” he asked, desperately. His eyes begged her to say it was only yesterday. He wanted her to say it was not before that, that she’d not belonged to her once-enemy long ago.
Slowly, after a long hesitation, she shook her head. He dropped the sweater on the floor like a puddle of fabric blood, bleeding from his open heart. “Why?”
She didn’t know, didn’t know why, she said at first, looking apprehensive, but he made her tell him.
“Because he told me everything he ever thought and felt about me. He doesn’t love me, he never did, but he’s passionate about me, and he tells me.” Her voice rose a little at the last, defensive.
“Since when?” At last, a bit of anger flared, to save him from the cold despair.
“Since you and I married.” She saw the look on his face, the fear and helpless anger at the thought that he had lost her so long ago, and shook her head, losing her defiant tone. “No! Not then. It was not until...after, that he began to seek me out. I never slept with him! I just…needed to hear it,” she said, at last breaking, and confused sorrow washed across her face. “I needed to hear that someone thought about me like that, that I was the center of someone’s world.”
It was his turn to say nothing.
Foolish words had d**ned many men. But never before had he known that to not speak could hurt also. He saw her eyes now. His not speaking, his silence, hurt her more now than ever before.
Even now? her eyes seemed to say, narrowing, accusing. Even now you will not speak, won’t say what I need to hear? He spoke to her eyes, her question.
“I have always said how I feel about you, maybe not with words, but still I have, and you have never asked for more. Perhaps we don’t belong together, you and I. Maybe you need to find someone who talks more, and I need to find someone who understands the unspoken part of the language of love.”
And she crashed before him, formerly an isolated tower of emotional distance but now a broken castle revealed for what it was; a crumbled thing, once beautiful, fallen into wreckage. But he knew better than to blame himself for the faded and broken insides. He had always been who he was. She had never asked for more. He had not made her silent, or scared to ask, and he had not made her seek out another instead of turning to him. She had done that on her own. Had she always been that kind of person?
Perhaps he had never known his wife.
He got up and walked past the sweater, and past her. “When you feel like spending some time with your husband, you know where I am.”
She was silent as he passed.
I'm continuing with the pg13 rating, since we are talking about almost-adultery. I just put the same rating in this fic, even though there's little swearing and no sex-scenes. Call me a prude if you must.
Daybreak
Mike awoke to find his wife beside him in the bed, turned on her side away from him, shivering a little. She had not snuggled next to him, but neither had she slept on the couch. He wasn’t sure what that meant.
He eased out of bed and looked at the clock. It was two hours before they were due to get up. But he felt…strangely awake, rather the way he felt mid-afternoon. He wasn’t inclined to go back to sleep, though he didn’t particularly want to do anything. He didn’t want to stay in bed.
He got up and went to the closet, quietly grabbing his long robe to cover his boxers and thin shirt, and slid his feet into the slippers Ashleigh had given him their first Christmas together. He thought about eating, but wasn’t hungry, so he prepared to indulge in one of his favorite past-times of his youth; going out into the darkness, on the porch, feeling the chill but not being bothered by it, to wait for the pre-dawn light to herald the coming of the sun.
Dawn was his favorite time of day; it was hopeful, new, and refreshing. And he needed that, desperately, as he walked by the living room, seeing the still frozen sweater on the floor. It seemed no longer to be mocking him mercilessly, but had lost its power over him, and in this new light looked rather…small. He let himself out the front door and sat on the swinging bench and gazed at the sky.
Maybe he was not the man his wife had needed, and his marriage had not been quite what he’d thought it had been, but watching the darkness turn into gray, then into soft pastel colors that lit the clouds long before the sun itself did, he realized something. He had an inner strength he’d forgotten, a strength he hadn’t called on so desperately since the early days of setting up Whitebrook, always running short of money and time and helping hands, and carrying the whole world on his shoulders but somehow still having the will to find a way. Somehow he’d found time to laugh. He felt like he hadn’t really laughed in…so long he couldn’t remember when he had last. He’d been all-business way too long.
“I’ve forgotten who I am,” he murmured. “No wonder Ashleigh couldn’t see the man she’d married any more; I stopped being him.” He’d been so sure that she knew, he’d stopped telling her how he felt, had hardly ever said it since they’d started dating seriously. And he’d worked so hard at being dependable, at never complaining, that he really had stopped saying anything at all. But silence didn’t make a man strong, and it had certainly not been the way to go about his marriage. For one thing, not telling anyone of his pains and weariness didn’t stop it from showing, and he’d hidden away his anger and sadness and disappointment, or so he’d thought, but thinking back to the looks he sometimes saw on other people’s faces, he wondered suddenly if it had showed after all. If it had scared them.
How much he had needed this sunrise, this new day! His thoughts became much clearer, and thought he was still upset with Ashleigh, he was not quite so angry. She hadn’t been unfaithful, not physically, and he highly doubted she was romantically-inclined towards Brad. She was just…a woman. A woman who he’d shut out of his life, even while trying so hard to bear her burdens for her. A woman who no longer heard the little things she’d needed to hear, and who’d become afraid to ask.
She should have…But maybe that thought wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t have turned to Brad for the attention, that he knew for sure. But she while she was strong in many ways, even for her horses, her one true passion, she was not an unbreakable fortress. She’d given in time and time again to the Townsend’s wishes regarding the Wonder-babies, because she was tired of arguing, because they were upsetting the horses, because she lost the will to continue at least for a moment. And she’d never really been strong when it came to personal relationships, or she never would have let people use her, take advantage of her, while she never said a word until it was far past time to. People said jokingly that Ashleigh was a bleeding heart, but deep down, hadn’t they meant it? Hadn’t they all?
She’d given in to Cindy’s demands about Glory many times, though she thought she was too inexperienced, and she was often too lax in disciplining the younger, snottier grooms (relatives of people already working there) and it was left to Mike to deal with them when they over-stepped their boundaries or were too smart-mouthed. Ashleigh was idolized, and people expected an attitude from her she just didn’t have but they reacted to her as if she did. But at heart, Ashleigh was always a shy Kentucky girl, never a proud or overly-confident superstar jockey. She was where she was, doing what she did, for the love of horses, not money or fame.
“I should be her strong tower,” he whispered. “I can’t do that by making her think she has no one, not even me.” She couldn’t handle emotional distance, he knew. She hated fights.
“Mike?” Ashleigh’s tentative voice called from the doorway. He turned in his seat, looked at her.
She was clutching the neck of her own robe, a soft pale blue cotton one, with matching slippers.
“Ashleigh,” he said softly.
After an uncertain moment, she came over to him, not shutting the door all the way, and sat at the far end of the bench, her eyes flickering briefly to the butter-yellow-tinged clouds at the horizon before meeting his calm gaze.
“You look…different,” she said unexpectedly, still quietly.
He raised his brows, surprised. “How so?”
“You…” she said helplessly, trailing off. She shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know.”
He waited, appreciating her features in the pale light. For someone who, while she may have missed the love in his physical affection had always been good with words, she seemed suddenly unable to complete her sentences.
“You look like you again,” she finally finished. She didn’t appear to realize she confirmed all of his fears that he’d been not himself while he’d tried so hard to be what he’d thought she needed him to be. Well, she’d needed it all right, but not to lose her husband in the process. Someday in the technology-dependant future people might trust machines to protect them, but they’d never want to be married to one, to be held by one, no matter how strong it was.
“I didn’t realize I was shutting you out,” he said after a long moment. From the way she twisted her fingers around themselves, hands clasped together, she was unsure of how to respond, and so she merely turned troubled eyes back to the sky.
“It’s beautiful,” she said of the painting slowly being made on the clouds, which were turning pink.
“What do intend to do about the situation?” He wasn’t letting her off the hook; he couldn’t and wouldn’t handle this mess for her.
She let out her breath. “I’m going to have a talk with…with Brad. He needs to stop pursuing me and I…need to stop letting him. I want you to know,” she turned abruptly to him, earnest and inching closer, “I never let him think for a moment we would turn into something. But he’d ask me out to lunch, and I’d go, even after the first time when it became clear he didn’t just want to call a truce, but wanted…I don’t even know what he wanted, exactly, I’m not sure how far he’d go. But I…this sounds so juvenile, but I was just glad he was talking to me, not fighting with me.”
She was just glad he was talking to her period, he rather thought. Of all the men in her life, only Mike himself and Brad had ever had such a profound emotional effect on her, had ignited such passion, good and bad, respectively.
“You sought him, or at least let him seek you out, out because he was the only other person whose relationship with you verged on romance,” he said slowly. She looked taken aback.
“No!” she denied his conclusion vehemently.
“I didn’t say you were in love with him.” He reached out, offered her his hand, and she took it, fingers gripping his tightly despite his words. Hungry for reassuring touch. He continued, “Therefore, he’s the only other man you would accept such attention from, to replace what you weren’t getting from me.” And then she looked confused, as if she’d never thought of it like that, and didn’t say anything to this last part.
“Ashleigh, I’m sorry that I tried to be like a stone statue to you. I wanted to be your strength, but I never realized you didn’t need that, not the way I did it.” He tugged her arm lightly, and she came over willingly, warm and flushed even though it was quite cold.
“I love you, I always have. I promise to tell you more often from now on. But you have to promise me you’ll talk to me, even when I’m being distant. You have to have that much strength, because we’ll never work if you can’t. I’m not perfect; I won’t always know what you need. You need to learn how to tell me. You don’t have to take on the whole world right now,” he said softly. “And when you do, I’ll help you. But you do have to be honest with me.
“I won’t ask you to be my strength. I don’t mind being strong for the both of us. I just want you to tell me what’s going on in your mind.
“Ashleigh,” he said suddenly. “Why do sunsets make you sad?”
She looked surprised, put her other hand to her heart, brows drawn together in sad memory. “Because Wonder’s first miscarriage was at sunset, and so was my first false pregnancy. Don’t you remember?”
He hadn’t, but then, he was not a woman trying to become pregnant, who would make the connection between the loss experienced by both beloved horse and owner.
“Oh…no. I’m sorry,” he offered awkwardly, glancing downward, and then looking in her eyes again.
She sat back against the bench, but didn’t let go of his hand, and sighed. “Sunsets are sad. They’re the end of hope. The paint all these pretty colors on the sky and then turn it black on you, and it’s like…well, it just covers all your hopes.” After a moment she added, “It’s just d**n depressing.”
So it was, in a way, what Samantha had thought it was, though there was more to it. He looked with her towards the blushing sky.
“Dawn is my favorite time of day. It brings all the hope back,” he said, and squeezed her hand. She squeezed back, and told him something she never had before—maybe she’d just now realized it.
“Mine, too.”
*~~~~*
A/N: They didn't solve all their problems, nor did he find out why Ashleigh is so desperate to have a child. But I felt this was a honest way for the next-day to have gone, considering the decision Mike made ('cause I made him) to want to go on with his marriage. What do you all think?
