#puddle dive

He tries to bring himself to care, as he drives down the mostly empty road at midnight, his eyes dull from his chronic lack of sleep. The reflective yellow of the Slow - Children At Play sign flickers briefly from the full assault of both his headlights and his high beams. The speed bumps shake and jolt his truck and he sends up a prayer that they don’t jostle his already tenuous transmission. The corner office window glows, and some small part of him still wonders why she’s working late. The rest of him holds on to his resolve to just not care.

It’s been a month. A month since he’s decided to move on. And what a piss poor job at it he's doing.

He hasn’t given in to her. Not yet. But here he is, long after Roland is asleep, idling outside the places where he’s made her his, if only for the space of panting breaths between the first electric points of contact and how her face contorted when she clawed her apex down his already-scratched back. He wonders if the scars have faded yet. His wife still hasn’t noticed.

He shouldn’t do this, he reminds himself again. He can’t afford the extra gas, not without giving something up to offset the unbudgeted expense. But when the moon is full like this, when streetlights flicker past his windows in the night, through subdivision streets, with neatly lined recycling bins, he lets himself indulge in his own commonplace iniquities.

It’s all so banal, this affair. She is indifferent to his comings and his goings.

I still do not condone adultery and I still have writer’s block. Really, really bad writer’s block. But I promised someone an update quite a while ago, and I apologize for taking so long, I basically forced my way through this. I’ve been stuck on it for months. The mandatory song.

The jealous rage is too much of a constant with him now, just like the dripping, rotting roof and noisy furnace. It burns his throat, that bitter bile that rises quickly, a muddy river flooding his esophagus, and it erodes the ground he stands on in a landslide, whenever she tucks hair behind her ear and and stops to speak with the new, tall, and foreign sheriff. He watches from his worn-down truck, the hubcaps dented and the wheel wells rusting in the cold. The other man just laughs, a hollow, mirthless, vulgar sound. It feels like plastic bags, loose trash blown in the wind, and like the crinkle of a condom wrapper tearing. Or maybe that’s his pettiness and hate.

She meets his eyes over the coffee that she sips, the redness of her lips staining the paper like they sometimes stained his neck. But then it’s pleasant, hollow smiles that are as hard as diamonds. Her gloved hand grabs a bicep as they walk. The lawman kneels down to retrieve her shoe. And somewhere in the sidewalk cracks they stumble, his own heart and self-worth slip through and freeze. His hands are rigor mortis stiff around the plastic of the steering wheel. She didn’t spare him more than that one glance.

But then, she’s always like that when he sees her on his way through town. She nods a curt hello at Granny’s. She spares him half a greeting in the produce aisle or at the pharmacy, where she picked up the birth control they used. She won’t agree to more than violent trysts. She doesn’t seem at all affected by his gaze, when he devours her tight skirts and knee-high boots and feels the need to leave more purple bruises on her rib cage. Instead, she picks out eggplant for her cart and reads the label on a package of some Sudafed.

It shouldn’t hurt, he tells himself again. It shouldn’t bother him a bit. But she won’t talk to him the way she does with the mechanic or the haberdasher. She doesn’t flirt and doesn’t linger with him on the park bench or the playground by the school. Her heated gaze is reserved for their brief office encounters, and sometimes for that captain by the docks, the one who sells her cod and scallops on some Sundays, which he hands over with a saucy wink. It is enough to make him wish the early autumn storms would drown his boat.

I’m still not really back to writing and I still do not condone adultery. But the Muse was screaming at me on my daily commute and I only really lost about a paragraph to my computer issues and then I got an idea. An awful idea. I got a wonderful, awful idea. So here’s this thing. It was originally Mrs. G’s fault. But this part? This part is all Laura’s fault. Blame her. Named after this. Trigger warnings apply for unhappy things. Not at all how I planned it to go, but I’m not too unhappy with it. This is what certain parties get for asking me for fluff. ;P

He knows he shouldn’t be here, in her house, not when her photo albums all lie open on the coffee and the kitchen tables. Not when she won’t return his calls or let him in her office in the evenings. Not when she’s barred herself to Roland even, arranging for the gym teacher, Ms. Fa, to let him watch the girls play soccer in the afternoon, her own little assistant coach, complete with bright red child-sized cap, and bright green plastic whistle. It is both kind of her and cruel, to look out for the boy but to remove herself at once and so completely from their lives. As if he never really mattered, not at all, not even just a little, tiny bit.

So he is desperate and he’s drunk, and Marian is almost catatonic once again. And now the roof leaks in another place and he has barely slept at all this week. So in his anger and his need and all that pent up desperation, he will see her. He will see her or he’ll steal and pawn her fancy, antique silverware and that one heirloom ruby ring he sometimes sees her wear. And let her call the cops on him this time! Maybe that way she’ll get to fuck that tall, dark, handsome sheriff she has spent the last month making eyes at. They know he’s got a record, it’s why he cannot get a decent job, so why not prove them all right and expose her lying in the process?

But that’s all just the whiskey talking, and he can’t. As much as he might sometimes want to, he can’t ruin her whole life like that. Not when it’s already a mess. Not when behind those pristine suits and perfectly styled hair she’s just as damaged as he knows he must be. Or maybe more. He’s got his son, and he knows how that pains her. So he won’t out their whole affair to this small town, not even when there’s almost nothing left to lose for him.

He takes another sip of Jack straight from the bottle in his clutched left hand, and fingers with his right the edges of a folded letter that he’s picked up from it’s place down on the floor. It’s a report card with all A’s and B’s, except for math. And there’s another and another still. And there’s a stack of parent-teacher notes, all neat and tied up with some baker’s string, there on the pulled out, off-white chair. It looks like every grade straight through to fifth. She’s kept them all, each pointless bit of grade school correspondence. And when he really takes a look around, that is not all he sees, these aren’t all just pictures and old school reports. This is a life that she’s got laid out throughout her parlor and her living room. This is her son, in stacks of toothy, smiling Polaroids and glossy, printed 6 by 8′s.

He is a toddler, grumpy, frowning up at her from Santa’s bloated lap. He is in preschool holding up two bunnies and running with the neighbor’s spotted dog. He must be eight or nine and dressed like Harry Potter from the books. His little blonde friend must be Luna Lovegood. And here he’s meeting Spiderman and Cyclops.

There are old drawings and old science projects too. A petrified potato and tin cans. And here’s an essay done in messy, misspelled, purple crayon about Thor. There is a picture of a tree, complete with bright red spots that he knows must be apples and two stick figures holding hands. The G.I. Joes and Marvel action figures are laid out in rows. And here are well-worn and well-loved stuffed animals and far too many re-read comic books.

She kept each single little thing of his, all perfectly preserved and loved and treasured like they were rare jewels. And it destroys his barely held together heart to see her scars out on display, to see her wounds so raw and fresh and scattered on the beigeness of her couch and soft cream, wingback, overstuffed armchairs. To see her still fresh mourning and her never-ending grief, the school portraits framed up on eggshell walls and the police reports that sit atop the ottoman.

And there are other photos there, but he had never thought to look before, not with her red mouth hot on his, not with the lights turned low and with her legs around his waist. She is so young and smiling far more brightly than the sun, dressed in her riding clothes and posing with a horse and handsome, grinning stable hand. And there’s another of the pair, they’re young and so carefree and brilliant, and she’s wearing his ring and beaming like a pair of headlights. And then she’s posing with the baby and a friend, more somber, older, but the ring’s still there. And when he thinks about it now, with guilt at how he takes off his own wedding band, he knows that it’s the one she wears around her neck. The petite blonde beside her in the photo reproaches him. And it is time that he moves on.

But what is there to move on to? That final piece of homework that he did for Ms. Blanchard? An angry cursive mess that says she’s never been his mother? That he hates her so much and that he plans to run away? If only Ms. Blanchard had called the cops, God bless her bleeding little heart. The teacher never let her know, she was convinced that it was all just in the boy’s imagination. Convinced that he could never feel this way about the woman who still loves him so completely.

And there is evidence of that, in photos up on Granny’s Wall of Fame, they’re smiling with hot chocolate on their lips. In all the drawings and the schoolwork that she kept, that showed the boy would never be a prodigy. In every stabbing step he makes up creaking stairs. He thinks he hears the TV news turned on.

I still don't condone adultery. This is in the Puddle Dive universe. (I.e. the one with School Night.) Named after this. Mrs. G's adultery thing is better by the way. This probably has a few mistakes in it as I will go back and edit it later. Life is still kicking my butt, but there might be a Manila update on Monday. Edit: Very minor edits for mistakes.

She doesn't answer his phone calls. It has been days, and he hasn't heard a single word from her and he is desperate just to see her. He needs to see her. He needs to see the way she looks at him: vulnerable and halfway broken and perhaps in love.

At least he tells himself that she's in love. Hopes with all his blackened, guilty heart she might be. Because he's not quite sure exactly what he'll do with himself if it turns out that she isn't, that this is just a fling for her, that she can't ever feel the same. He's not exactly sure just how he's going to go on.

But every time he's called this week, her line's gone straight on through to voice mail. Her no nonsense recording feels to him just like that last pen stroke of her name upon his execution warrant. And he would try to visit her at school, he wants so badly just to go there, just to see her stony face, like ancient ruins back home in his half-forgotten native England, but he's been working extra shifts and he's half swaying on his feet and it's too far to drive in his present condition.

He's barely getting through his days just as it is, between all those all-nighters at the docks and his daily patrols, and sometimes, when they have the time for him, the shifts out at the bait and tackle shop. And he's already pouring salt instead of sugar in his tea and grimacing through all of those unfiltered coffee grinds that adhere to his teeth and last time that he tried, he'd gotten Roland's shirt on backwards. He knows that he just can't go on like this, not when his son had been the first to notice and to point it out.

And Roland? The boy is staying with his cousin, Belle, and he has barely seen his son these last few weeks. But Belle is better than his other choice. He cannot leave his son at home alone with just his wife. His wife who's barely left the bed and stares beyond them both through glassy, glazed dark eyes, that haze and that abyss that are the mark of her untreatable depression. And he is pulling double, sometimes triple, shifts and cannot let another problem happen in his life. Not with his wife and oh, dear God, no, never with his son.

But he needs money for the roof repair and barely driving truck and maybe even for that leaking pipe down in the cellar. And money needs to come from somewhere, and he guesses this is it. So he'll forsake his sleep and bedtimes with his boy and what scant traces there remain of what he thought had been his sanity. But he cannot forsake her.

And he does know that he's in the wrong, that this is unforgivable and sick, but she has been his balm, his tonic and his panacea, and she has soothed his pain and puttied over cracks throughout his broken and downtrodden spirit. The way she gasps his name and wraps her legs around his waist and leaves her scratch marks like indictments down his back. He needs it, needs her, needs her like he needs the air.

Originally submitted to Mrs. G. Inspired by this. Posted again here. I don't actually condone adultery. Not graphic, but not particularly child-friendly.

He needs to stop doing this. That's what he had come here to tell her. That this, whatever this is, it needs to end. But she just looks at him and laughs. Laughs at him before he even tries to get a word out. And suddenly, he can't. He can't. And every single good intention that he ever had goes sailing out her second-story window. Because she is the sun and he is Icarus, that moth-like fool that flew too close.

  And then? Then he's not quite sure how they get past his half-hearted attempts at decency. How he has her pressed against that one sharp corner of her desk that's not against the wall. How the dark veneer is bruising lines into her hipbones with every single thrust of his. He knows it hurts, but he can't stop himself. And she won't stop him either. It seems that pain and this, whatever this is, are the last two things that make her feel alive.

  The desk rattles. And there goes her pencil sharpener and that one red alabaster paperweight, the one that's shaped  just like a Red Delicious. There's an ugly crack in it now from where it hits the linoleum tiled floor. She doesn't seem to notice. Her ruby nails just dig their crescents deeper into the rough skin of his wrists as he starts pounding harder into her.

  They'll leave a mark, he thinks distractedly, as if he's watching someone other than himself go at it like a dog in heat with his son's elementary school principal. As if his wife would even care. She doesn't. He doubts she'll even notice it. Just like she hadn't all those other times.

  The woman he is pressing into moans. Somehow, without his even noticing, he's ripped apart her shirt. The pearly buttons skitter everywhere. It's not the first time that he's done that either. She warned him she'd be charging him for alterations at least three times before. She hasn't yet. He's not quite sure exactly why. And then she arches forward, just a little, and he's not quite sure that he can think.

  But later, he will. Later, when he's left a hornets' nest of bruises on her neck. When she's scratched her claws across his back just like a sated cat-o'nine. When both her nylon stockings have a run from where his undone belt has torn holes near their garters. When she's just straightening her blazer, trying to hide the ruined satin blouse. The way she looks at him, it gives him just a hint of hope.

  Like maybe, maybe she is something more than Roland's strict, exacting principal. Like maybe she's not all broken, jagged pieces and late night news reports where they have found a young boy's body in the woods. He's heard it all before, hushed whispers at the PTA and Little League. He's seen the faces on the milk carton, a little older every year thanks to the wonders of technology. It hasn't even been that long, he tells himself. But he can't give her hope like that, not when it's not his son that ran away right after learning that he'd been adopted. Not when he has his family left, if one can call it that.

  He buttons up his fly. No, his own son is safe, asleep at home right now, all tucked in where he left him, stuffed monkey squished between the railing of his race car bed and one tanned, perfect, chubby cheek. His son he loves and hates in almost, not quite, equal measure. But that's a lie. He wouldn't trade him for the world. Not even if it meant he'd get his wife back, just like she was before the birth, before the Sheehan's syndrome and postpartum depression. Back when she still knew how to smile and laugh. Back when he still knew that he loved her. He doesn't anymore. He can't.