The One That Got Away

Chapter 3

He wanted to touch her.

But when a ghost-like presence of fingertips brushed across the cold surface of her chocolate skin, she moved away and went into the next room. At times she did not show her face for days. He pondered if she ate or slept. He never raised his knuckles to the door and all the appeals that he wished to make for her to unlock the door and come out were silent and unspoken. But inside, his soul was screaming. There were times he was tempted to apologize and he longed for a reply, one-worded, or two. But it wasn’t his fault. None of this was his fault.

That is what everybody insisted on telling him since the miscarriage.

His parents and even his mentally challenged brother had offered their condolences but they were decidedly registered as naive in his obstinate mind.

None of them, not his parents with their barely concealed glee at the loss of what they perceived was the reason for his marriage, or his clueless brother (he could scarcely recall the last time he had seen his brother Jeb show the slightest interest in his life in any way) could grasp even the minutest fibers of the feeling that weighed down the body, mind and soul of losing a child. None of them.

He wanted to touch her.

Because he understood to the best of his rational ability and the ever-present emotion that had been entrenched into his heart what this loss means. He vowed on their wedding day to never abandon her and he reiterated this vow every day and every night. He could figure out from a moment’s glance that she neither ate nor slept. Sports were his forte, depression was not. Women were still a mystery to him. Married man or not, Oliver understood very little about love and treads the subject lightly for fear of spoiling what he shared with her.

He offered a casual but honest compliment whenever she sent a millionth of a second of a glance his way … he could see it barely registers in her mind. For weeks (or is it months? He cannot calculate with accuracy or precision) he neglected everything around him, even football and school. He wanted to make it better but he didn’t know how. He channeled all of his energy towards fixing his girl, The Girl.

But The Girl is no longer The Girl, the untouchable anomaly of an entity. She is now only a girl, a classification of her s*x rather than of her allure, and devoid of everything but the basic signs of life- walking and breathing, that is. She was once like a never-ending equation that racked and teased and intrigued his brain.

Now she is an untouched slate. He wanted to feel her silken dark locks slipping between his fingers as he caressed her hair in downward strokes. He longed to feel her pulse stirring on the calloused pads of his fingertips and her pupils dilating beneath his appreciative look. Being a god on the sports field was one thing. But Monique was unlike any form of companionship he had ever experienced because she personified the existence he was looking for.

He wanted to touch her.

But her absence caused him to unravel and fall apart on the inside. Because her fragility had grown so noticeable, he was subconsciously fearful of taking hold of her, because he needed her more than anything, more than his family, more than football, and more than anything else in his life. He wanted to touch her to reassure his self that she wasn’t evaporating and wavering between the subtle balance of life and death. He had already lost a child; he wouldn’t dare lose the one and only girl who mattered most to him.

At night the visions of the violent miscarriage tormented him. Oliver reached out for Monique unconsciously, gasping for air and choking out her name like a terrified adolescent in a black room. The nightmare subsided and he bolted forward. Sweat pasted his clothes to his flesh. He took a moment to catch his breath, wiping his brow with a trembling hand. Night after night, he cannot escape the memory of finding his wife with their child’s life blood spreading like cancer between her legs.

A scent fills the air. Someone was standing in his doorway. He glanced to his left and he briefly contemplated if the vicious nightmare had become a dream.

Monique’s hair was undone, as Oliver always admired, and she had his oversized blue dressing gown on. Her trembling arms struggled to stay folded across her chest and even her bottom lip was quivering. Her bright brown eyes are now glistening with unacknowledged tears that she cannot hold back. She was so much like chocolate now, smooth, fluid, and so easily broken in two. It was the first form of emotion that she had exhibited since that awful stupid fight. And it was the first time Oliver felt relief ascending through his body from his toes to his heart as Monique’s soft voice asked to join him in his bed.

He wanted to touch her.

Because every instance that he tried, she forbade him. She never physically pushed him away but her body language echoed high volumes of isolation. She never wanted him to touch her before because it carried a familiar senses of intimacy that she wanted to avoid.

But this time, it is she who touched him. She encased her body in his arms, sniffling with grief for all the pain she knew she’d caused him and she whispered into his hot mouth between firm but delicate kisses.

I’m sorry.

They remain in that position until morning. When the sun rose and seeped into the cracks of the drawn curtains. He glanced downwards at her dark eyelashes against the chocolate of her skin on her face. The road to recovery would be hard and unforgiving. But like all things Oliver approached, he wouldn’t go down without a fight. For her, he would fight.

He went to school with a lighter heart that day, optimism blooming in his breast. When he got back home in the evening, all traces of her presence were gone. She didn’t even leave a note.

*****

Monique didn’t want to leave. She just didn’t see how she could stay. Oliver’s words beat against her head in mind numbing repetition.

Why did I even marry you? Talk about damned fool ideas. You never wanted this; any of it! Well…it’s over now. You’re free. Happy now?”

They reverberated in her mind, whatever she was doing. And him watching her out of the corner of his eye like he expected her to either disappear or do something stupid was driving her around the bend. Then one day, her mother came. She’d thought she was hallucinating at first. She’d called for her father in the hospital and he hadn’t bothered to show up, even in her extreme distress. She’d figured she’d ruined that relationship beyond any ability of hers to repair it. But then her mother came to the door and at last she was able to fold herself into her mother’s lap and break down.

“What do you want me to do for you baby?” her mother asked inadvertently stabbing her heart with a thick shard of glass at the use of the word. “How can I take the pain away?”

Monique had just buried her head deeper inside her mother’s bosom and hiccuped.

“Do you…do you want to get away from here?” her mother asked.

Monique’s breath caught at the thought of being out of the suffocation of living with the fact that she’d lost her baby and her husband blamed her for that. But she still shook her head; she would not leave her husband. This was his loss too; and they’d said the vows, she would keep them.

The next week she had an appointment to go to the hospital for her six week check up. She had finished with the antibiotics weeks ago but there had been some stitching done…apparently she’d torn something when little baby Knowles had forced itself prematurely out into the world. She had to go get the wound checked. She waited for Oliver at the quad after school but when he hadn’t shown up and she had ten minutes to get to the hospital, she’d taken off without him. The waiting room was filled with mothers and their babies or their baby bellies and Monique felt like she would throw up. As icing on the cake, Felicity found her there, huddled in on herself. She gave her a sympathetic look and offered to sit and wait with her after inquiring as to Oliver’s whereabouts.