like hell

Part One: IT’S FINE HONEY, I’LL BE OUTSIDE. things hadn’t been the same for dexter since his father died. he had become a shell of himself, finding only whiskey and blow enjoyable; one of which he had to strategically hide from his wife and the merry band of strangers practically living in his house. he had no issues with laurel having friends. dexter hadn’t exactly been enjoyable to be around lately and they were a good distraction for her. he hadn’t been one to go out of his way to introduce himself or have a heart-to-heart. but as always, there were two sides to every coin. laurel’s younger friends in his house much of the time meant less time for him to be alone or with his family, driving him out of his house and to the bar or to plan b or to find one of scotty’s minions selling cocaine to him for an up-charged price. he’d been working too, but just barely. she called them her children and he hated it because they were not his family. they were visitors filling the kitchen and eating his food, playing with his child, lounged up on his couch. most of the time when he was forced to come home, it felt like a death sentence. who’d be there when all he wanted was the solace of his home? who’d leave something out of place or make him cringe while calling laurel ‘mom’. was she really dayton’s mother theresa? who was dexter to her? some nights he just fell asleep up in the loft, slipping into the main house to grab fresh clothes as soon as laurel left. he needed his space to grieve and he needed to lean on the shoulders of his family but his family hated him almost more than he hated himself. laurel probably hated him too. the mitchell farmhouse had turned into his prison. 

busywork seemed to keep his mind from less than happy thoughts. again, there had been visitors in his farmhouse, laurel’s laugh ringing through open windows and he needed to keep his hands busy. she was a completely different person with the people of this town. half the time, while drunk and pissy, he was convinced she could be fucking one of them. he sure as shit wasn’t getting laid. finally he had gotten up the shutters a couple weeks ago, a nice deep green color popping beautifully against the fresh white paint of their home. there had been some cool, fresh bar opening laurel went to and instead dexter lined up some blow and got the project done in three hours. the yard had been freshly cut, the back patio pressure washed, a squeaky screw tightened on felicity’s swing set that afternoon. there were two options now to avoid the main living space where laurel’s guests chatted away. go to the bar or tick another thing off his list. going to the bar meant having to go inside to change and retrieve his keys. so up to the roof he went. 

initially, it had been to clean the gutters. work boots helped against the shingles, but really it had been practice that helped his balance. how many times had he scaled things for mitchell contracting? he scaled to the top and sat down with his forearms resting on his knees. a mitchell king of his shitty kingdom. from up there he could see the whole front of the property: front patches of grass perfectly manicured and the quintessential white picket fence sparkling from last weeks cleaning. the weather had proven to be perfect the past couple of weeks to work on his hunny-do list, though he was sure that laurel was too preoccupied to even notice. not that it really bothered him; peace and quiet was his only wish these days. and he knew he needed to get off his high horse eventually. bitterness was driving a heavy wedge between laur and him. up there, on the roof he had it really laid out for him: hedges, flowers, the steps leading up to the wrap around porch, a couple of cars in the drive way that dex couldn’t pin point the owners of if a gun was to his head. did it belong to the guy donning fishnets or the short blonde that pretended she wasn’t in the way all the time? for a moment, dexter really took in the scene, a breeze calming and serene. he was proud of this. his home that he had put literal blood sweat and tears into. he was proud of his toddler and her fierce attitude and striking beauty. he was proud of his business and how far he had come. he was proud that even in this dark time, he was managing. because that’s all he could do really - just manage the pain. 

but it was all a facade wasn’t it? something shiny and pleasing to adore. the outside looked so nice, didn’t it? the kitchen? a dream. better homes and gardens had been his prime, mitchell contracting becoming just as admirable as any hgtv reality duo. dexter had left the farm in alabama - left his legacy - for something different. something that he could define as his own. he had met laurel and thought that he’d have the love of a lifetime. while their love crumbled, dexter built up an image. all this time, he had been just like his dad, huh? his mouth became dry, the realizations sobering him up enough to realize he had been thirsty. 

Part Two: I’LL SEE YOU IN HELL, DAD at first he thought that it was just because he had been drinking beer most of the day, a bit of dizziness hitting him while sitting in the sun. dexter closed his eyes and tried to breathe out, adjusting his ball cap and taking off his sunglasses. he had been on the roof of shit a couple dozen times while smashed, he could get down just fine. eyelids opened and the sun seemed brighter than before, his chest starting to tighten. sunglasses hastily were set next to him on the roof but they tumbled over the side, dexter able to hear the crunch of them hitting the pavement. mouth dry, as if he hadn’t ever drank a drop of water in his life and dexter’s only thought was getting down that ladder and probably drink out of the garden hose attached to the garage. he thought about calling out to the two guys practically skipping down the sidewalk hand in hand but his voice broke, only a gasp for air making a sound. 

dexter stood, but as soon as he did his chest tightened as if someone had gripped him and twisted his lungs and muscles and heart. he couldn’t breathe, chest cavity screaming for relief and his left arm burning in pain. one step, just one step. all he needed was to get off this roof. 

and he took that step, his boot slipping and dexter mitchell lost his footing completely. 

he swore he could hear laurel’s laughter as whimsical as the wind; a flash of how her brightness lit up his crooked heart before all of the hardship. before she put those divorce papers in front of him. that’s what it had done, hadn’t it? ruined him completely. there was no turning back. he had been too angry, he’d never forgive it. he swore he could see felicity’s eyes and feel the warmth of her small toddler frame nestled in the crook of his arm. for a minute there dexter had thought that she could have saved their marriage. that laurel and dex would do it for her. he saw all the good parts of laurel in felicity. without the jaded sadness anchoring her down. no damage to be repaired yet, liss loved with her whole soul. the best parts of him too, the stubbornness and courage. he could feel his mother’s love. before he had disgraced her heart too. before they had turned cold and abandoned each other. it had gone so fast that it almost felt like he had landed on his feet. but in reality, dexter theodore mitchell had a heart attack and slipped from the roof of his farmhouse, his boot getting caught on a shingle that needed repair. he had ate shit against that gutter he was about to clean out, smacking his shoulder and falling off the roof. the big front windows had been open and anyone in the house could have heard the slap of his skull hitting the pavement, right in front of the porch steps. there hadn’t been any laughter, no lissy hugs. there hadn’t been any resolution in his marriage, the past year a total fucking waste. there hadn’t even been pain. just darkness. infinite and final while his blood seeped from his cracked skull, staining the mitchell property for the rest of time. 

fin

RIP DEXTER MITCHELL  1989-2020

Dexter sat at the table in his dining room. Straight backed and cross legged, arms folded tightly across themselves - he was on edge and achey. In front of him lay a manilla folder of wrinkled papers and an IPA he found in the back of the fridge. It was ten a.m. but Dexter hadn’t been hanging on to time very much. All he knew was that when he came home it looked as if Felicity had grown a whole year instead of an inch. But that was what happened wasn’t it? You left and people carried on because there isn’t some stop time button laying around? Lately, he had been too in his head about mortality. 

“Okay, you ready?” he let out scruffily, reaching out for the beer and taking a gulp. His gaze set on Laurel, his pretty wife with gorgeous, sad eyes. Dex couldn’t help it, a sloppy half smile and glittering eyes tossed over to her while he set down the bottle. “You look beautiful as ever. Get your hair done recently?-” He shook his head and flipped over the front of the folder. God, he hated looking at this shit. “Alright, alright, I know I’m stallin’.”

It wasn’t a secret, Dexter and this town went together like oil and vinegar but he had never been more thankful to come home. His home. One of the first things he did was retrieve the divorce papers that he had hidden and decide that it was time to have that talk with Laurel. The one they had been putting off? For him, it couldn’t wait any longer. “What, if anything, do you want me to do with these?”

Laur: hey, Fido is a very lovely pup

Laur: but no, that's not it

Laur: hey, guess what?

dex: hi, yes?

The fact that he was so casual about it was what set her on fire, the fact that he could just stand there and first ask ‘what the fuck are you doing here?’ to then ‘were you looking for me’ like Jesus Christ Dexter, what questions to ask a person whose life you literally ruined. Thea honestly couldn’t help the words that were coming out of her mouth, for years she had kept quiet, for years she didn’t say anything but right now Dexter had taken a gun and just blew the lid off of that causing this conversation to happen; “You were just asking were you? Just asking after years of not seeing me, after years of not reaching out to see if I was okay-… you suddenly decide to ask-… wow Dexter just wow-….” she actually couldn’t believe that this was happening.

“To call me up? That was fucking better taen what you did? You couldn’t get your ass on a plane and come and see me? Just like how you got on a plane after getting hitched to get your shit back you thought that only a phone call would suffice? Your family is literally made of fucking money Dexter. You know very well you could have gotten on a plane or something to come talk to me. Your silence was the loudest fucking thing for the longest time and you know deep down that even a phone call would have been better then what you did” a phone call would have made her angry but not as angry as she was now, at least she would have had some closure, but no she had to go through day after day not knowing exactly what she did wrong.

“Do you realise how many days I’ve spent thinking about what exactly happened? What I did wrong to deserve this? What actually happened? What made you do what you did?” he probably didn’t, he wasn’t self centered but he probably didn’t think about what went through a females brain when things like this happened; “Like you did not think about the fact that I had to answer to my family - who by the way thought it was my fault, still to this day - why you left. People for days, months, felt for me and said how sorry they were for what happened but I heard it from everyone else BUT the person I wanted to hear it from.” and that was the most frustrating thing, she heard sorry so much from so many different people BUT from Dexter.

“Lower my voice? Why? You embarrassed Dexter?” she was aware that people were walking by them now with a various of different expressions and she felt bad, she did but fuck them, she was angry, she was pissed, they didn’t know what this man did to her. Taking the hem of his sleeve she pulled him out of the main passage way, off to the side where there weren’t a lot of people. God she didn’t even want to touch him right, every little bit of him made her feel dirty; “I’m not saying you’re a bad person. You fucked up. But you didn’t fix your fuck up and that’s what makes you a bad person. You should have said sorry. You should have told me what was going on. Like Jesus Christ, I could have understood if you didn’t love me any more or if you didn’t feel things any more but Dexter it fucking HURT when you married someone else”

“To see her face next to yours and to know that she got what I always wanted with you-… that fucking-…. that was a knife to the heart right there” she wasn’t angry at Laurel, she wasn’t, she was always going to jealous but it wasn’t Laurel she was angry at; “Like-… I still to this day do not know what happened. Like I trusted you. I trusted you to go to a place where sins are committed knowing-… ‘oh yeah my boyfriend will come back to me’-… but did he do that? No he didn’t. He gave some other woman the life I always wanted for us” she had tears coming and god she hated that she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he had brought her to this state stubbornly wiping at her eyes with her sleeve.

He shook his head in disbelief that this was happening right now. In the back of his head he knew that this was inevitable and that she would show up eventually - in the flesh, not just in his nightmares. Dexter really had loved her, that was the honest truth. But actions always speak louder than words and his actions had ruined every inch of what Thea believed in love. Dexter could see that now. It had also shown what he was capable of in hurting another person. With Laurel he hadn’t wanted to be that man. He wanted to fight for her. With an exhale through his nose, he tried to manage his breathing. It took all of him not to snap back at her and to level out his thoughts into calm strings of consciousness. Fuck, he was about to black out. He wished he’d black out. His hands moved from his pockets to his face that wasn’t covered by his baseball cap, rubbing his palms over hot cheeks. “It’s not like that, Thea-“ he stopped himself when his voice cracked at her name.

Leaving didn’t just mean losing her. She didn’t know that and it wasn’t her problem to bare, but it did play a huge part in not coming home to face this. The other part was his wife. There had been a lot of time privately spent working through this to be a better husband to Laurel, finding advice and solace in secret therapy sessions. But he had never really shared with her the details Anthea and him. His luck had been thin, but he had admired Posey for not gossiping much. Maybe it was a return favor for helping her, he wasn’t sure at this point and right now it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered because it was all blowing up in his face.

Just like it should of years ago.

The way she practically spat out his name had him spinning. Face burning red hot, he moved along with her to the opening of an alley near the sidewalk. God, maybe if she let him half more than a minute to process everything he would have been more than a bumbling idiot. It was like that with him, needing an extra moment to make sure he was taking everything in so it was clear and concise. His thoughts were usually linear and brought up into equations that were easy to solve. Emotions skewed them and they became less simple, but he could still work it out. It had just been seven years since he had saw her, or opened up those notes to figure out the math problem that was his ex girlfriend. Laurel usually left him be for awhile. Thea had always been direct. “I know, I kn-“ Thea kept at it and Dex practically choked when she emphasized the word hurt. He had always said he wouldn’t hurt her and at the time he had meant it. Then vomit crept to the back of his throat when she mentioned that Laurel had gotten what Anthea had hoped for. Shit, this was bad. It was only about to get worse as his anger bubbled up to the surface. 

“Nothin’ I say is gonna fix it,” Dexter grumbled, crossing his arms again as if it were his only line of defense. “Nothin’ I can possibly say will remedy this shit, Thea! Obviously. Pl- God, please don’t cry over this. I know you’re pissed and that’s why you’re cryin’ right? C’mon now.” He cleared his throat and swallowed back the vomit. “What do you even wanna hear, huh? That I didn’t do it on purpose? ‘Cause I didn’t marry her in Vegas on purpose. But hell, I married her the second time with conviction. And I’d do it over and over again. I ain’t sorry for that shit. But I am sorry I fucked everythin’ up. I’m sorry I wasn’t man enough to come back and make things right with you and let you know that I needed to get out. Outta Alabama. It’s shitty. It’s fuckin’ shitty and there’s nothing in me that has ever been able to make it right. You know, I’ve always just over compensated since doin’ what I did. Built a life around a lie I guess, workin’ through it on my own terms and almost losin’ just about everythin’ in the process. I’m still touchin’ fire and you’ve come out of the flames almost scot free.” Dexter gritted his teeth, piercing eyes darting into Anthea’s almost matching her fury. “Let me tell ya somethin’ darlin’. You got out easy. Be thankful you didn’t marry this scumbag you woulda been a hell of a lot worse off.”