Robert, Her Billionaire Widower

Chapter 2

It had been a year since Marie had died but Robert was still in mourning. He simply could not get over the fact that his wife, the woman he had loved more than anything in the world, was no longer with him. He could not wrap his mind around this fact, not even now, more than a year after it had happened. It was life, his mind refused outright to accept it. He would see her everywhere he went. He would see her in random women and his heart felt like it had leapt out of his chest and onto the floor. He felt like all his life he would be seeing the ghosts of his dead wife surrounding him, and Robert was starting to feel like he was going to go insane.

He had been seeing a therapist for quite some time now but it hadn’t really helped him. It helped to talk, of course, but nothing his therapist recommended to help him get over the fact that his wife was no longer with him really worked. He felt like he would never get over it, and this really scared him. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life like this. He was thirty four years old, the youngest billionaire in the world, and he had the opportunity to live a long and happy life with someone else.

However, whenever he tried to get past the death of his wife and even think about seeing someone else it felt like something would go wrong in his mind. It was like alarm bells started sounding and he suddenly realized that he was a married man, even though he was not a married man, not any more anyway. His wife was dead. He was single. It was completely normal for him to want to move on yet he could not bring himself to even think about that for a moment. He wanted to be normal. He wanted to be happy. But the ghost of his dead wife was standing in between him and his happiness.

The sad part was that he knew exactly what Marie would say to him if he could speak to her right now. She would tell him to move on, she would tell him that he had to live life to the fullest, that he had a good five decades left. He could be with anyone he wanted and he truly deserved that.

He looked around his bedroom. It seemed foreign to him. It seemed like a place that he had never seen before, even though this was the bedroom that he had been sleeping in for over a decade now. Robert felt like crying, but he would not let himself cry. Not again. Not anymore. Not a year after his wife was dead.

It had been Marie’s death anniversary last week and Robert had cried his eyes out. He had not really wanted to, but he had rationalized it by telling himself that it would be the last time. He would use this rather arbitrary notion of the passage of time to move on. He needed a springboard, after all. Something to help him get off the ground. The only problem was that Marie’s memory was like an anvil attached to his neck, and he simply did not know how he was going to get past it.

He sighed. Everything reminded him of Marie in this room. The sheets he was sleeping on right now had been her favorite sheets, sheets she had gotten during their trip to India where they had made love in the silence of the mountains, among the crisp mountain air in a hotel that had been ridiculously cheap and wonderfully rustic.

He got up. He would not allow this. He would not allow himself to be sad. He decided that he would go out on that date that his friends had been trying to set him up on. He would go out and meet somebody and allow himself to be happy for once in his life. He would allow himself to feel joy, and if she wanted to come over then it would be all for the better because it had been months since he had felt the touch of a woman.

He had tried to have s*x a few months after Marie’s death in a desperate attempt to distract his grieving mind but it had all been for naught. He had only ended up more depressed than ever before after the s*x had been over. He had only ended up feeling like his life was going nowhere. He had felt the crushing weight of his grief press down on him, squeezing the very air from his lungs.

Robert called his friend and told him that he would meet the girl that he thought would make him happy. He would go out with her and, for the first time in a year, actually try to experience life, rather than escape the inevitability of death.

*****

The date had gone really well. Robert genuinely liked the girl that he had met. She was utterly beautiful, one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen in fact. Her lips were perpetually pursed and pouty, and he found this immensely attractive. She had gorgeous cheekbones and a very thin face that was framed perfectly by her adorable bob cut. He was starting to remember why he had liked women in the first place.