Robert, Her Billionaire Widower

Chapter 5

Today was the second day that Vanessa would be interviewing Robert. She had a feeling that this session would be just as productive as the first one.

After Robert had finished telling Vanessa about the first time he had ever met Marie, he had started to answer her questions and Vanessa got to understand a lot of things about their relationship. What she felt stood out about their relationship was the fact that they liked so many of the same things. They liked the same music, the same food, the same people. Marie was present in every aspect of Robert’s life and the same was true for Robert.

She thought back to that day and realized that she had started to gain an understanding of their love and she had started to envy it. She had started to envy the love that Robert had shared with his wife because it was the kind of love that she had always wanted to have with somebody. She had wanted someone to share everything with, someone that took an interest in every single thing she did. She wanted somebody that would take an interest in what she was doing and encourage her, someone that she could take to the literary parties where she would meet the people that she was going to be interviewing soon. She wanted someone that loved her that could read the first drafts of her columns or, if she was so inclined after completing the book she was currently working on, first drafts of the book that she was writing.

She found that in listening to the story of her boss and his deceased wife she was starting to become envious and this concerned her because it was not very professional behavior. She couldn’t be envious of the person she was writing about, after all, she had to remain unbiased otherwise the bias would start to show in her writing and the book would be ruined.

She went to Robert’s place and found that he was quite depressed. “Are you okay?” she asked him. He had been trying to act normal but had been failing miserably, because when one is truly depressed it becomes rather difficult to pretend like nothing has happened.

She thought of how he had been speaking of his wife, how he had been remembering the day he had first met her. She thought of how he had reminisced about her, how he had started to look wistful. She realized that this was probably not very easy for him at all.

“Is it talking about Marie?” she asked. “Is that what’s upsetting you?”

“I guess,” said Robert, his depression showing clearly in his voice now. “I don’t know. I thought that this would make me feel better but… talking about the day I met Marie just made me realize that moment is gone, that time that we shared is now over and I will never get it back. We will never be able to do the things we did. We will never be able to have that first moment ever again. I just wish that I didn’t regret everything so much. I wish I didn’t think of things in this light.”

“It’s okay,” said Vanessa, stroking Robert’s back. She was sitting next to him, quite close to him in fact, and she was starting to realize that their physical proximity was starting to arouse her. She was suddenly disgusted with herself. She couldn’t believe that she could feel this way about somebody that was grieving the loss of his dead wife. She couldn’t believe that she could be so utterly callous.

She wanted to move away so that she would no longer feel these inappropriate things but she didn’t want to move away from Robert. She wanted to comfort him, to make him feel like everything was going to be okay because he was a good person that deserved to be happy.

She continued to stroke his back and said, “We don’t have to do today’s session if you don’t want to, you know. We don’t have to reminisce about all of that. It’s not that important, you can just talk to me about it some other day.”

“No,” said Robert, sitting upright. She could practically see him steeling himself. “I need to do this. I need to do this for Marie. I won’t give in to my depression anymore, it’s been so long since I’ve felt happy I deserve to get over it now and this is a part of it. I… I think that this is just a natural part of talking about my wife. I think it’s inevitable that I will get depressed about it. At the end of the day, she was one of the most important people in my life, the single most important person in fact. She was everything to me. It’s natural that in remembering her I will get sad but I think that by the end of it I will gain the strength to go on. It’s like taking off a bandage, right? It’ll hurt but once it’s off, it’s off, the more I delay it, the more severe the pain will eventually become. I feel like she would have been happy to hear me talking about her like this and that makes me happy. It makes me happy, and that is something.”

“Alright,” said Vanessa. She wanted to hug him. She wondered if it would be appropriate. She decided to throw caution to the wind and hug him anyway.

He hugged her back and smiled saying, “Thank you for that. I really think I’m ready to talk now. I think I’ll tell you about our first date. We decided to go out on a date the first time we met, you probably remember. Now I’m going to tell you about how that date actually went.”

Vanessa sat down opposite Robert and he began to tell her about the first time that he went out on a date with his wife.

*****

It was a lovely spring day and Robert was feeling very good indeed. Today was the day that he was going to go out with the woman he had been absolutely crazy about for quite some time and there was absolutely nothing that could bring him down right now.

He cleared his throat and smelled the air. It smelled flowery and fresh. It smelled like sunlight. It smelled full of life. It smelled, all things considered, like the most beautiful of spring days and there couldn’t have been a better day for the two of them to go out.

Robert picked her up in the afternoon. They had decided to get out at around one and have lunch together. It was a no pressure sort of date. Marie had been on dates before but she always made sure that they were low pressure dates that she wouldn’t really have to worry about. She had had enough of that, she couldn’t really deal with the thought of going out with somebody and having it end up in a situation that was as intense as the abusive relationship that she had just gotten out of. She genuinely liked Robert and she wanted things to work out with him. She wanted to be with him properly, so it was important for her that they have a no pressure date to start off with so that she could get used to being vulnerable around him.