momento vivere

She doesn’t argue and she doesn’t ask. She knows why he has been so distant lately, it’s more than clear. At first it was just the case getting to him, which really isn’t surprising, as it’s all people seem to be able to talk about. But then more women followed, one just thirty minutes away from their home. First they go missing. Then people search. Then they are found dead. And with the most recent woman found this morning, it’s not going to be long before he strikes again. 

But what are the odds of it being her. She has him with her, a police officer. Surely whoever is doing this is putting time and effort into getting away with it. Surely, he wouldn’t be that stupid. That’s what she’s been telling herself anyways. She doesn’t want to be frightened every time she is alone. She can’t live like that. But it seems he has other ideas about that.

“Can’t that wait until morning? You have to sleep, Frank.” She knows he’s worried. How else had they gone from a couple of text messages a day to him calling her every thirty minutes, all within a matter of weeks. He keeps on telling her to be safe, to always let him know where she is. And she never argues. She always answers his calls and she lets him know what she’s up to. But that’s just for him. Of course she thinks of what if, but she doesn’t believe anything like that could ever happen.

“You’re having coffee at three in the morning,” she points out. “Come on, Frank. You’re probably going to leave early again. At least try to get some sleep.” How is he possibly going to help solve this case if he’s not even sleeping? Maybe that’s working for now, but it’s going to get to him at some point. “Please, Frank. You know I don’t like sleeping alone. I would feel much safer with you next to me.” Maybe that’s a low blow, but she has to find something to convince him. What he is doing isn’t healthy.

“ No, it can’t, Bells. I’m sorry. ” Any second Frank didn’t do something, any second he stopped to sleep, eat, take a shower was a second longer for the guy to plan his next actions, a second more awarded to that monster for him to do whatever it was he thought he was doing. Frank couldn’t let it go by. Not a moment to pause to eat, and certainly not a few hours to let himself go to sleep. He couldn’t let someone else get killed just because he wanted a nap. “ I have to do this, I have to do this right now. ”

A sip of his coffee and then his paranoia was back tugging at him once again. Frank turned around, looked over the front door, back door, the few windows that gave him a view outside. His eyes caught a glimpse of something for a second he almost rushed to get the gun over the table.

It was just a squirrel, though. Moving, rushing, past trees. Still awake. Maybe, already awake ? It was three am after all. 

His chest was too heavy. His eyes too hard to keep open, he couldn’t even lay down with her, couldn’t even pretend to go to sleep, just so she could find some peace, so he could sneak out later and go back to work. If he laid down, if he sat down too comfortably, he would drift off. “ Stay here, then. ”

He shook his head a second later. “ I mean, no, not here, the couch. If you really need me around, we can just, go to the living room, you can lay there and I’ll seat next to you and work while you sleep. ”

“You want to know why I act like this around you because it is like a nightmare! I feel like I can never get through to you. We haven’t been on the same page for years and I don’t understand why! I don’t get what I did to you and why the hell you pulled away. But ever since, it has been a nightmare and you fucking know it. Everything becomes an argument. It’s like your instinct is to always fucking fight even though there is nothing to argue about. So I drink. Because you give me a fucking headache. So I yell. Because you don’t make sense ninety-five percent of the time! I don’t know what the fuck you want from me, Frank? What do you want from me?! This has more to do with how you feel about me than it is about her and I don’t fucking understand. I don’t fucking understand what this is. Why you’re so hostile all the fucking time. I feel like being with you is the cold war  ―  fucking each one of us has our fingers on the button ready to blow each other up  ―  And I don’t fucking understand why! Why, Frank! Why!”

He had promised her he would come to bed in a little bit. That he was just going to work for a little longer, but that he would be with her soon. When she wakes up at three in the morning, his side of the bed is still empty. His side of the bed is still neatly made, just how she had left it this morning. So she moves out of the bed, her feet slipping into the slippers before she heads quietly down the stairs. She doesn’t want to wake him just in case he’s fallen asleep on the couch. 

But he hasn’t. He’s still at the kitchen table, bent over a ton of paperwork. It’s dark inside the house with the exception of the light above the table. She watches from the doorway for a moment, seeing him look at what seems to be a picture. “Hey,” she says, just before she moves into the kitchen. “Still awake?” She moves behind him, her arms wrapping around his shoulders. 

Spread out on the table in front of them are pictures and documents he’s been inspecting these past couple of weeks. Mostly the same gruesome pictures, but he’s looking at one she hadn’t seen before. Isn’t that the girl from the news? She’s been missing for weeks. Though when she was having breakfast this morning, she did hear something on the radio about it. She had turned it off when she had heard him coming downstairs. Now she knows what they must have been saying. 

“Are you coming to bed?” She knows that he wants to solve this as soon as possible. If they’ve found this girl dead, then whoever is responsible might take someone else soon. But him sitting here all night, looking at these pictures isn’t going to help. He needs some rest. She reaches for the picture and puts it on the table, then removing her arms from around him. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs.”

@hopuma

It was despair, that is what it was. All-consuming, blinding despair. The kind of thing to keep him up at night, to rob him of a second’s sleep, to have Frank shaking half-way through a day, rushing off the station because he needed to breathe, and he couldn’t. Not with a guy like this out. Not when that was all he could think about.

His paranoia was always keeping at the edge of his seat, but it had been worsened lately. Its razor edge stuck against him, when he was put in the case, nudged closer to his throat once he got deeper into it, playing a terrible balancing act between keeping him alive and driving him insane by the time Frank realized there was a pattern behind the guy’s actions. Women, blond, between the ages of 25-35, at home, alone. Every time he thought about it, his stomach twisted, toppled over itself. It was too perfect a match not to rob him of the ability to think.

Frank called Arabella now about fifty times a day, once every thirty minutes. Even his hatred for phones couldn’t survive the fear sitting at the edge of his skin. She always answered because she was always fine, but he couldn’t get the thought off his mind that maybe next time, next time he called, next time he worried she wouldn’t be. 

He could picture all too well the guy coming in while she was distracted in their room, doing something. His mind could come up with to perfect a picture of that psychopath hurting her while he was too far to help. 

Frank’s breath hitched.

It was her presence that shook him back into being. “ Hey, ” It took him to readjust to the real world, clear his throat, shake his head. Frank only got up to move towards the coffee pot and to pour himself another cup. He only walked to walk farther away from the stairs. “ No, I — ”

He failed to realize his hands were shaking until he held onto his cup. His tired brain only thought of hiding it from her a second too late. “ I, hm, I still got some paperwork to get through, you know. I — ” There was a small shake of the head. “ Go back to sleep, babe. ”

His temple burned. He flinched away, a small groan leaving his lips as Frank tried, failed, really, to move away from her grasp. “ I am still alive here, you know that, right ? You are supposed to patch me to keep me alive, Leona, not the other way around. ” But there was a smile splattered across his face regardless of his words.

Frank could feel every muscle in his body burn. Sitting in the small emergency room, looking up at her, shoulders dropped, eyes unable to leave hers, he could feel still, the darkened patch of skin stinging his back, the probable broken rib, making it hard to breathe, and he couldn’t bring himself to care. At least not right there and then, not when she was that close. 

“ Good thing this hospital is open right now, right ? ” The smile, his smile never really left. “ Don’t know what else I would do without you. ”

“I wasn’t screaming at you! Now I am screaming at you! Are you happy now, Frank!?” Amanda was so close to flipping her shit. After all the years she had spent with him, she still had no idea how he managed to turn everything into how he felt. This wasn’t about how he felt. This was about doing something so their daughter enjoyed her summer and had something to talk about when school starts. Now it was about how he felt. “So what if she’s gay? It’s a fucking day camp! We pick her up afterwards! So she won’t need to hook up with people for rides! Hell, she’ll have us to drive her! If she even thought about exploring lesbian shit, she wouldn’t even have the time and if the planets and stars aligned and she managed to; she couldn’t get pregnant which is problem solved, by your logic, right?” Giving him the death glare for a moment as she took a deep breath. All Amanda wanted to do was give her kid something to do while she was at work. While he was at work. So they didn’t have to worry and figure shit out. “No one asked you to fix this. There is nothing to fix. All we have to do is send her to camp, pick her up after work and then get her ready for bed. That’s all. There is nothing to fucking fix.”

There were times where he seemed to be completely delusional. She was never against Frank. They were married. They had a kid. She had his fucking last name. She was always on his team and still was even though they couldn’t manage to work out. It was why she had the look of the most dumbfound look on her face. “What?” Amanda took a deep breath before continuing, “An asshole for sticking around? You think that I’m thinking like that? Are you fucking kidding me?” She almost wanted to slap some sense into him. “Frank. You’re an asshole, a lot of the time, but you’re just being an asshole for money reasons. I get that. I already applied for a stupid scholarship and the financial aid package. I just don’t get why you’re so adamant about her not going. We can figure it out, but she needs to do something for the summer.”

“Also  ― I don’t think that way about you at all. I don’t know what weird shit you’ve been thinking or listening to, but I’ve never thought that way about you. I love that you are so passionate about Lily to the point where I want to punch you. I love that you care. I want to make sure you are a part of every decision made on her behalf. You’re her father at the end of the day. I never expected the divorce to make you disappear. You’re half of her so it’s practically impossible. It was just because we don’t work. That doesn’t mean it was because I wanted you gone. It’s never been about that.”

“ You know, what ? Fine. Fine. Fine, then. I don’t care, this is fine. ” He takes another swing at the liquor bottle before giving it back to her. Patience chipped away, anger tugging him. Whatever it was their conversation was supposed to be about at some point, he couldn’t register anymore. He just wanted to break something, to sooth the continuous ringing in his ear, to breathe normally again. “ She is going to camp and I’m paying for it and you don’t even need to open your wallet. I’m paying for all of it and now you are the one responsible for making sure the girl doesn’t get pregnant. Cool ? Cool ! I don’t care. I’m apparently being the unreasonable guy, right, great, so I don’t care ! ”

He just shakes his head. Again and again, pacing away from her, moving in the exact same place without really going anywhere. Frank couldn’t do it. His brain couldn’t process loving her still, more than he could conceive, more than it seemed logically reasonable to after everything they went through, and hating every second they stayed together. He couldn’t explain the feeling to himself if he wanted to.

Arabella has every intention of having sex with him again. After all, they are still naked and he did just propose to her. She wants him, over and over again. Her mind is already drifting off, his lips eagerly touching his. But then he stops her and she is forced to move back, to look him in the eye as he suddenly gets serious.

“But I want to help,” she tells him. “That’s the least I can do.” She pushes herself up from his chest and then moves to the side to sit down besides him. They can hardly have a serious conversation with the two of them naked, lying on top of each other.

“I think that it’s my job as your girlfriend, as your future wife, to do everything in my power to make you smile. And maybe it’s not always going to work, because no matter how hard I try, I can’t fix everything. But I’m always going to try, because I want to see you happy.”

“ But it isn’t. ” He’s seen her naked enough times that he can shut off the part of his brain that just wants her all the time, no matter what is happening. Still, her moving all of his body helps. His focus straightens on the conversation at hand. “ It isn’t the least you can do and it isn’t your job either. Listen, Bells, all I want is for you to be with me for as long you want to be with me. That is it. Not a second longer. ”

I’m giggling so hard. I’m glad this was able to get you to go get some. ����

I just gagged a little. Their fries are awful.

People still eat at Burger King?????

“Yes! I did what I did, okay? The mall was two towns over and my cousin McKenzie told me it worked. I did it, and she was right. I was trying to save the money for the mall, okay? Anyways, that was over twenty years ago and I’m not going to be lectured by you for something I didn’t know was wrong in the first place!” This is what it always became. A simple discussion became and argument. All she wanted was to give their daughter something to do with camp, but now Frank was literally banning her from living and she was getting sick of it. “Maybe it actually is just Kyle, Frank. Ever think of that? No, we are not killing a boy for just looking in her general direction. You’re being ridiculous, Frank.” Moving her hands to cover her face before groaning, “It is an all-girls camp! There will be no handjobs! No issues! Just her doing fucking arts and crafts in he middle of nowhere while we’re both at work so she has something to do! That’s all it fucking is!” Moving to get up, finding the liquor cabinet. Being around him too long always made her want to drink. He was so tiring. He always made things something they weren’t. A part of her loved Frank, but he made simple things difficult and made difficult things seem like they were fine. Getting a bottle of bourbon before she took a hefty sip straight from the bottle. Letting the glass rest before sighing, looking at him. “Why do you do this huh? Why is every single fucking conversation we have made into something it’s not. All we have to do is send her ass to camp, but no, you need to dictate how things work all the fucking time. It’s just Frank’s World and we’re all just living in it right? Is that what this is?”

Her eyes keep going to the door then back to her book and then to the door again. She knows they aren’t going to be back any time soon. They left mere minutes ago and she doubts he’ll blurt it out before they are truly alone. Yet she can’t focus on anything but that door. Has he told her yet? What did she say? No, that’s ridiculous, they only just left. Her eyes go back to her book again, but her mind fails to register the words she’s reading. She finds herself having to read the same page over and over again.

She had done her best to prepare him for what she knew was coming. She knows the chances of Lily being over the moon to hear this are close to zero. Of course, that still leaves a lot of room to any other possible outcome. Maybe he’ll manage to calm her down within a couple of minutes. Maybe it will take ten minutes. Maybe they will come back in silence. But not this. She hadn’t been prepared for this.

The screaming can be heard long before the two enter the cabin. Her book is already tucked away, her attention now solely on the door. Their voices come closer and closer and she begins to pick up words. Mostly Frank’s though, since Lily’s voice is so high pitched that she can hardly tell the girl is talking rather than screaming.

The door swings open and she is met with Lily screaming in the way only a twelve-year-old girl can. She’s not sure what Frank is trying to achieve, but his voice sounds frightening and it’s most definitely not going to calm the girl down. Lily then seems to notice that she is still there. Arabella braces herself. Braces herself for so many things. She’s ready for the accusations and the shouting. She won’t hold it against her, she’ll try her best to understand Lily.

But not this. As soon as Lily shouts the words at her, it is as if everything around her goes quiet. From far away she can still hear the two yelling at each other, but she can’t hear the words. All she can hear is what Lily had said. I hope your baby dies. Her chest feels empty, her stomach turning into a knot. She wants to throw up, but she can’t even find the air to breath.

Suddenly his voice is closer again, so close that it almost startles her. She opens her eyes, not even having noticed she had closed them. her hands move up to her face, her hands instinctively covering her mouth to hide her shock. To hide the utter panic on her face. There is nothing for a moment, just complete silence. Only his voice and her heartbeat, swiftly accelerating. And then the tears come. Not met with cries or sobs, but with a deep wailing, coming right out of her heart.

“ Hey, hey, hey, Bells. ” His voice, just a minute ago loud, thundering, threatening, turns soft, and weak. A whisper meant only for her to hear. Two steps forward and he has her in his arms, holding onto her, carefully, as though she could let herself fall back if she needed to and he would hold her. “ Look at me, hey, It’s okay. ”

He can feel his heart constrict in and around itself at this, he can feel the way the muscles move painfully, winning, begging him to do something, anything, to make her feel better. “ It’s okay, baby, It’s not gonna happen. Look at me. I am not gonna let anything happen. Our baby is okay. It’s gonna be okay. ”

“Oh, so it’s my fault now,” she laughs. “I mean, yeah, of course I’m always horny. Have you seen yourself? How could I not want that every second of every day?” Their kiss is a lot of things, but mostly disgusting. He had caught her off guard, unable to swallow her food before his lips touched hers. The kiss makes her laugh and she wipes her mouth, shaking her head a little.

“Hm, how about you apply for that job first? Then at least I’ll know if it’s just a one time thing or if I can have you like that every day.” That sounds like utter bliss. Waking up in the morning, their baby still asleep in the other room. The only reason why she hadn’t woken up yet is because he’s been so quiet in order not to wake her and their daughter. She opens her eyes to see him coming out of the bathroom, all dressed and ready for work. She makes him come over to the bed for a kiss, but then she refuses to let him go as soon as she’s got him in her arms.

“That’s too much to ask,” she decides. “I can’t tone it down around you, you know that. Your fault for looking like that,” she shrugs. “But all you would really have to do is lie back, eat your pizza and let me do all of the work, you know? Not much energy needed.”

“ Of course this is your fault, whose else would it be, mine ? ” There is a small laugh. “ You make me sound like George Clooney himself, babe, but you are the one who could win a goddamn modeling competition. ”

“ Ugh, fine. ” It did sound as though he was annoyed, but it was far from it. The smile was stuck to his features. Amusement not leaving him for a single second. “ I guess if you want me to be a deputy so bad then, what can I do?” There was a shrug.

He wanted the job now, at that moment and no other. He wanted already to be in their new house, in their new life, living as though nothing else mattered but the two of them, their baby and Lily. Really, in all honesty, it’s all he’s ever wanted. 

It’s just the two of them, all alone. She feels safe in the confined space of the taxi. Having sex in the backseat of a car isn’t exactly convenient, but it’s exciting and it’s better than nothing. But the couple of times she’s done that, it was in a private car and it wasn’t driving. Now there’s someone driving them just a few feet away and they are in a moving vehicle. Granted, it is dark outside. No one will see. Except the driver. But she’s already forgotten about him.

It is only her moan that brings her back to this world. Only when that sound leaves her lips does she remember they are not alone. It takes her a second to process things, her body moving much slower than her mind. “Wait,” she says, out of breath for some reason. She grabs a hold of his wrist, pulling him away from her, the movement hardly doing anything, but her intention is clear.

Her hand leaves his wrist and she moves her hair out of her face, blinking a couple of times to try and get back to sanity. At least until they get to his place. She looks up to see the taxi driver looking at her and she quickly looks away, turning her attention back to Frank. “Unzip your pants,” she whispers. She’s too drunk to keep herself quiet, but maybe he’s still capable of being subtle.

He leans back in the seat when she tells him to stop and Frank thinks, at least for that moment, that is about it, as far as they will go so far, as far as this car ride will take it. Anxiety and anticipation get caught in his chest, but it’s excitement instead that has him raising his eyebrows at her next works. “ Jesus fuck. ” is barely a whisper, barely audible. 

There was no way he could be discreet with how drunk he was, no way this taxi driver wouldn’t end this night with a great goddamn story to tell. But he does what she tells him to, all the same, unzipping his pants, leaning back, amused, exhilarated, every bit of his sanity clouded by alcohol. A short sigh of relief leaving his lips as he frees his erection of the constraints of the clothes.