DISCLAIMER: Everyone in this story is over 18, and everyone is faithful to their spouses. Maybe I take the name of the category too literally...
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I'd been thinking it was still too soon, but now that April had nearly brought me around to seriously considering getting back out there, I was starting to worry that it had been too long.
She almost had me convinced that forty-nine was not too late to start again, to build a life and start a...
"Relationship", that was the word I'd been shying away from.
I'd had a relationship, one that was everything I could ever have dreamed of. Saying it was perfect seemed too much like idealizing it. Saying Annie was perfect was easy to do now that she was gone. But, honestly, I had to work really hard to remember anything about her, about us, that was not perfect.
Even the few imperfections were perfect, just the right dose of reality to keep it from being... Being what? Too perfect?
My life felt over. I still wasn't convinced it wasn't, despite the utterly sound logic of April's argument to the contrary. I'm not in prison, or on death row, which would have been the case if the drunk driver who so violently tore Annie from me, tore my perfect life to shreds, had not died instantly.
It happened practically outside our front door. Annie left to pick up a last-minute ingredient for dinner. Two minutes later, I heard a crash. It sounded like it came from where our side street opens out to the main road. Something told me to run to that sound. I got there before the ambulances. It was too late, but just in time.
I wouldn't have hesitated. I would have torn him apart with my bare hands, right in front of the cops, and to hell with the consequences. That moment when I watched the life go out of Annie's eyes was the moment I had nothing left to lose. Sitting in a cell going through the motions of life wouldn't be that different from what I had done since.
"I need to know that you'll live," she'd managed to say just before the eyes that were my life stilled to stare into forever. I promised her, then stormed away to break that promise, only to find the man being covered with a sheet by one of the cops. He'd done to himself what I had come to do to him. I never saw his face.
So I lived, if you could call it that. Our only child, Claire, was my only reason for going on, though she hardly needed me anymore. She had just graduated college, building herself a life from scratch. She mourned her mother, but she took Annie's last words to heart, knowing they applied to her as well.
Losing a mother is a horrible thing, but kids are resilient, and they know, deep down, that it will happen eventually. They know, and Claire, intelligent as she is, certainly knows that they are expected to leave the nest and build something on their own. It hurts, but not like this.
I hope she never has to know what it means to lose someone who is that life that she'll build. Someone synonymous with home, someone you knew you could come back to every day, who would share your bed, your ultimate sanctuary from the world. Someone who you thought of as part of you in a way even a child could not feel for her parents.
It wasn't just the sex, though that was wonderful with Annie. Sex, with someone like her, with something like what we had, was an extension of a bond that made us like one person. The physical act felt like making the single whole we were together into a physical reality for a too brief, magical moment.
What's the proper period of mourning for something like that? A year? Two years? Ten years? A century? None of those answers seemed long enough, but April, she disagreed. Two and a half years was long enough, she stated without doubt, without hesitation, without leaving room for argument.
---
My best friend Mickey had a fantastic marriage the second time around. The first was rushed, a shotgun affair justified by one rash moment of carelessness and little more. Everyone around him knew it wouldn't last.
When the woman disappeared one day, leaving nothing more than a perfunctory note and a bawling infant, Mickey had felt relief more than anything.
After everyone was proven right, he met April and won the lottery. Almost as big a jackpot in his thirties as the one I'd hit with Annie right out of college. They had two kids now, the son that had been the impetus for his first marriage, had almost redeemed it, and a much younger daughter.
He was in his late thirties when he met April. At 25 and gorgeous, it looked like she would be just another fling, an older man reliving the glory days. But it quickly emerged that it was much, much more than that, that April was much, much more.
April loved their son like he was her own. In a way, he was. She and Mickey became the same kind of single whole that Annie and I had been, and a son of Mickey's was a son of hers, no ifs, ands, or buts. And a best friend of Mickeys was a best friend of hers.
Now, at forty-nine and thirty-eight respectively, it was clear how much more April was, and how much more their marriage was. They were the perfect couple, and April was a force to be reckoned with. She's a doctor, just for starters, an ob-gyn and urologist.
She was the kind of intelligent who could discuss the literary subtleties of Shakespeare one day and theoretical physics the next. She was no expert on either, but she knew a little about a lot, and at minimum could formulate intelligent questions when she encountered somebody who was.
So when she told me it was time to get back in the saddle, I had to listen. She could easily have overwhelmed me with a solid wall of impenetrable logic, but she didn't. She led me along a simple, gentle path that ended in what seemed like the most obviously correct conclusion in the world.
All that was left was the guilt. Guilt that my first, and so far only attempt to get back to life had only seated more firmly.
I'd made a lot of bad decisions. My attempt at self-destruction had taken varied forms, a full suite of self-sabotage that seemed guaranteed to produce a complete carpet-bombing of all my remaining chances at a future.
I won't bore you with the details. You could guess at them, and you'd be right. The one pertinent detail was my choice of... the only word I can think of is "vessel". That's all she ever was and ever would be. A vessel into which to pour my grief, my anger, my growing self-hatred, and the increasingly undeniable physical needs that could never come close to satisfying the one real need I had.
She was the opposite of Annie in every possible way. Dumb as a post, fat and sloppy, easy as a leer and a drink at the bar, and probably a Petri dish of every infectious organism known to medical science. And some not yet discovered.
Somehow, April had found out. She confronted me, a low boil of anger in her eyes. I'd seen her angry once before, also at me. A seething, roiling fury that time. I'd told her once that I was just hoping to stick around long enough to walk Claire down the aisle.
She slapped me. Not a playful slap, not a warning slap, but the kind of slap that left me flexing my jaw - honestly believing she might have broken it - and checking all my teeth with my tongue. The kind of slap that not only could leave a bruise, but actually did.
"Don't you dare do that to her," April hissed. I understood what she meant only later. I was thinking of myself, never seeing it from her point of view, what it would do to her.
I never want to see that look in April's eyes again.
Thus began the intervention. It wasn't the typical come home and find all your friends sitting in your living room to ambush you kind of intervention. It was more subtle, but no less a full-court press.
It was Claire's tears and her telling me that she still needed a father, even more so without her mother there, that eventually tipped the balance.
It was a miracle my dick hadn't rotted off. And if it wasn't for the trickle of royalties from my mid-tier novels and one moderate option from a movie studio that was probably never going anywhere, I would have been out on the street.
I haven't written a thing since the accident.
As it is, I'm still recovering financially, but the rest of it, it was the bottoming out that everyone says has to happen before you can start crawling your way back up. I was getting there when April made her proposal, the one that led to me getting a raging hard-on when she stuck a finger up my ass.
---
"Come to my office." April had said while the three of us were having a dinner together, long after I'd gotten over myself and had stabilized what was left of my life. "I'll give you the full workup, make sure you're good to go."
"To go?"
"To go, sexually," April stated plainly and simply.
