They came back, but never the fucking same.
Setting the pictures next to me, so they were propped up, I found myself wondering, and not for the first time, why I’d taken those pictures with me.
She’d tried to snatch them back from me when we’d been packing up her small apartment in Paris, not long after we were first married. She said that she’d forgotten about them.
“Tell me,” I’d said, wanting to know the stories behind them.
She had, after she sighed.
Finding out the boy took the one of her on the bike, I kept it for myself. It was one of the only pictures of her smiling during the time we were apart.
The other one, simply, was mine. The blatant longing coming through the picture belonged to me.
“I looked forward to the ending of a new day, twilight, because it meant tomorrow was a new day. It was the promise of an oncoming clean slate. The new day held the possibility that next day might be the one when you came for me.” She’d shrugged, dismissive, but the weight of her words couldn’t be hidden.
Then she’d tossed the picture back at me.
We both had fed off the hurt and loneliness, almost tearing each other to shreds in that small room.
“Ah,” I said, clearing my throat, going for another deep drink. “Fucking reminders. That’s why I took those pictures.”
Even when I wasn’t around her, I needed to keep punishing myself for all the times I wasn’t there or did her wrong.
The bottle stilled close to my lips when the rumble-buzz of another dirt bike caught my attention. All became quiet again as the rider dismounted, until he started to whistle a familiar song by Poison.
Mitch.
He lifted his hand in greeting before he opened the gate, stepped in, and then closed it behind himself.
“You sure that lion’s gone?” He paused right inside the gate, hesitating, darting a look around.
I nodded once, taking the drink I’d been about to.
He narrowed his eyes at me before venturing further in and meeting me.
“I brought some raw meat for you to devour,” he said, taking hold of the wooden platform and lifting himself up, then swinging himself around to sit next to me.
“My wife,” I said.
“She’s okay,” he said.
I offered him the bottle. He shook his head but thanked me for the offer.
After a minute or two of silence, he sighed. “What do you think of Rosaria?”
Running my teeth over my bottom lip, the answer came without much thought. “I don’t.”
“Before the color came into your world—Scarlett, I mean—you wouldn’t have looked twice at her?”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
He kept his face forward but grinned. “That’s right. Brando Fausti usually went after the tall, leggy, buxom blondes. Then—Scarlett. The prim and proper little girl who tattooed your black and white world red.”
“Yeah,” I said, setting the bottle between my legs again. “You can say that.”
“I did and I always will. I was there from the fucking beginning, Fausti.” He snatched the bottle from me, the conversation flowing in this same vein.
He went on and on about how surprised he was when he realized how much I’d fallen for her. I let him ramble. Sometimes he liked to listen to his own voice. I didn’t mind all that much. Over the years, his voice became a familiar sound I could tune out when the shit he said became nonsense, but I knew when to listen again.
