This is a story I originally wrote back in October. I had originally intended to submit it to "Erotic Horror", but as the story came together I decided it worked much better as a Romance. Please leave me feedback and let me know what you think of it, good, bad, or ugly. Thanks.
Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real person(s) or events is purely coincidental. All characters are eighteen years of age or older.
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I sat alone in the darkened living room, the only illumination in the entire house provided by two flickering candles on either end of the mantle. Between them, the flames danced on three silver frames, pictures from much happier times. On the left was a photo of a much younger - and far happier - me, with my arm around the shoulders of a gorgeous blonde. In the middle, the same couple, a few years later, on their wedding day. On the right, the blonde woman by herself, slightly older, perhaps, but still incredibly beautiful. She was smiling, just as in the other two, but in this photo the smile almost-but-not-quite reached her eyes. I blissfully had no clue as I took that picture that only a few months later, she would be gone.
I took a sip of my wine, remembering. If ever two people were fitted together more closely than Cindy and me, I've never met or even heard of them. We complemented each other perfectly - where one of us was weak or lacking in one area of our lives, the other was strong and had more than enough for both of us: she was my patience, since I so often seemed to have none; my casualness when I took things too seriously; my logic, when my lack of patience made me too hasty or rash. For her, I was her confidant to tell her deepest, darkest secrets and fears to; her strong shoulder to cry on; her rock in the stormy seas of life. More than anything, though, we each were the seemingly inexhaustible fountains of love that the other drank from every day. Love tends to perhaps not fade, but soften as the years go by, but not for me: each and every morning I woke up as much in love with Cindy as the day we first fell in love.
I thought she felt the same; certainly she never gave me any reason to think otherwise. Then one day, I returned early from a business trip. I finished up my business early and was able to catch a much earlier flight home than the one scheduled. I got a taxi home instead of calling her, intending to surprise her, but in the end it was me who was surprised.
As the taxi pulled up to the house, I was surprised to see a rented moving truck backed up to the front door. My first thought, naively, was that Cindy had bought new carpet or new furniture and intended to surprise me with it. But as soon as I stepped from the cab, I saw the look of horror on her face and with a terrible certainty, I knew.
I'm a proud man, successful in business due to luck or skill or a combination of the two, distinguished and well-respected. But you wouldn't have known it that day. I fell to my knees, groveling and begging at her feet like the poorest, most abject beggar. Whatever it was that I did or failed to do, just tell me and I would do anything, pay any price, to make it right. Just please, for the love of God, don't leave! Oh, God, please! Anything but this!
But it was all for naught, because it wasn't due to anything I had done or didn't do that she was leaving. It was because of two things I had absolutely no control over: time and gravity. She sat me down in this very room, mere feet from where I sat now, and explained things. She intended, she said, to write me a letter and leave it for me to find, but since I had unexpectedly come home early, she explained face to face.
I am almost ten years older than Cindy. When we met, she was just out of college, young, and stunningly beautiful, the sort who could almost turn a blind man's head. Although to me she was just as beautiful on the day she left as the day I met her, by her thirtieth birthday she had begun to notice tiny imperfections in her beauty, and began to notice that she didn't turn quite as many heads as she once had.
Though beautiful, Cindy was no bubbleheaded peroxide blonde. She was highly intelligent, with an IQ that very well may have been higher than my own. But when you see a woman walking down the street you don't elbow your friend and say, "Wow, look at the brains on her!" No, you look at her face, or her breasts, or her legs, so when slightly fewer men chose to look at Cindy's external features, it affected her in ways I never knew or appreciated. Therefore, when a much younger man that she knew only in passing still got tongue-tied and weak in the knees when she was around, she ate that up. Though I never failed to tell her and show her nearly every day how beautiful she was to me, when I pointed that out that day, her response was, "Yes, but you're my husband. You're supposed to tell me I'm beautiful."
For nearly a year, she explained, she and the young man had had at least an emotional relationship. Several months ago, that relationship became physical and intimate. I had always trusted Cindy because she had never given me reason not to, and so when she told me she had to work late or was meeting a female friend for lunch and shopping, I naively believed that was exactly where she was.
"You're saying what I'm guilty of is trusting you too much?" I bluntly asked her that day, to which her reply was simply, "Yes."
She and the young man were in love, she explained, and when she said that she loved him more than she had ever loved me, I cursed the cruelty of fate for not mercifully allowing me to die before hearing those words. There was nothing, she said, I could do or say to change her mind. She was taking, she explained, little more than her clothes and personal items and moving in with him, and when she suggested that it would be easier on us both if I simply left and came back after she was gone - as she had originally intended - I was too broken-hearted and despondent to do anything else.
That was six years ago. Six years to the day. Ironically, today was a Friday, just as that awful day had been. A few hours later I had come home to a dark and empty house. She had been true to her word, taking nearly nothing besides her own things, but without her warm and loving presence, the house was as barren as if she had cleaned it out to the bare walls.
As a last and unsuccessful grasp at convincing her to stay, I warned her that the relationship with this other man was doomed to failure, a prediction that came true less than a year later. I took no joy in being right. In fact, it had ended violently, with her male friend accusing her of unfaithfulness, and he abused her both verbally and physically for several months until she left. Whether his accusations were justified or not is open to debate - someone who will lie for you will lie to you, after all - though his abuse was clearly unjustifiable.
For a long time I entertained fantasies that Cindy would return, that she would come home, tearfully beg forgiveness, and I would sweep her into my loving arms, and like in fairy tales, we would "live happily ever after". But while I kept the door open for her, it never happened.
"Why the hell do you do this to yourself, Johnny?" I said quietly, staring into my wine glass.
Six years ago on that terrible Friday night, the longest night of my life, I had sat right here, the same pictures on the mantle, the same candlesticks, identical candles providing the only light, as I sipped wine. Tonight I thought briefly of the gun in my nightstand upstairs. That night, six years ago, I had thought about it a great deal. But that night, just like every anniversary since, I always found a reason to say, "Not this year."
"Not this year, either," I whispered.
I stood and stared out at the night through the front window. The rain that had threatened most of the day was now falling, coming down in torrents. With the moon down or covered by clouds, I couldn't see the sheets of rain, but only hear it.
"Good night, Cindy," I said, lifting my wine glass in a toast, then draining it. "Wherever you are."
I looked at the pictures one last time. In the morning, I would wrap them, and the candlesticks, carefully in silk, just as I had done for six years, and delicately put them away until next year.
