I may have missed the deadline for the 750-word challenge with this, my first submission, but it was fun parsing it down from the original 1100. Let me know if it works.
*****
"I love you."
Hearing Sally, I smile from the hallway of our greenbelt apartment. It had been an uphill journey--hell, it was climbing El Capitan freestyle for the last month--but marriage to my only love was recovering.
This was our fourth apartment. We'd met after my high school graduation, Sally starting her senior year and I earning better-than-lumber-mill money driving delivery truck 60 hours a week. The curvy blonde daughter of a successful lawyer, everyone recognized Sally was far above my station. Surprisingly she was clingy and grateful on dates while I was amazed and intoxicated. After months of makeout sessions in the Chevelle we slept together; my first (not hers as she'd been seduced by one of her monied neighbor's sons previously) and vanilla compared to later sex but jaw-dropping to me. A well-read dreamer, I placed Sally on my first-love pedestal as we spent every free hour together. Took her to the prom (damn that pre-prom photo still looks pathetic,) celebrated her thespian roles and put up with her catty friends.
Starting community college, Sally found a rustic studio apartment and moved in her cat, four boston ferns, new wicker furniture and me.
We grew closer as Sally explored business management, inhaling classes and exhaling top-drawer reports, projects and awed professors. After two wonderful years we moved to our next apartment in the university city upstate; a Victorian second-floor walkup across from campus. I found a better driving job while she dominated her computer systems major. We were young, in love and lust, bulletproof. Though our apartment life together was a few hours each night and maybe half a day on weekends it was just us and the cat. Often desperately jealous of her classes --really those well-dressed, smart-talking college men--I kept it to myself because Sally never offered more than conversation to fellow students.
We married spring of her junior year in front of half of our hometown. That summer the cat and ferns rode with us to a furnished white, window-air-conditioner, pool-in-the-back apartment in San Diego for Sally's executive-level summer internship she'd won. I found summer work, though part-time, and we visited Balboa Park or the beach weekends for the first six weeks. Not weekday evenings--she went to work early and came home after 8 most nights--but I trusted Sally and our love.
