As I pull a ratty work shirt from another drawer and slide it over my head, all that I can feel is the thick tension hanging between us. I think there was a small part of each of us that had hoped that, if we could start talking and if we could finally make each other come for the first time in god knows how long, we could be back to normal this morning.
It would turn back the clock and we’d be exactly who we were before everything went south.
“Can you tell me what it is that you have to think about?” She probes.
“No,” I tell her, and her features fall in defeat. With a guilty nag in my chest, I cross the room to press my lips to the top of her head, and she brightens at that. “I mean, not yet. I just want to sort through it in my head before we talk about it.”
“Okay,” she smiles.
Her hands reach for my face, her thumbs trailing the length of my jaw as I meet her in a kiss.
“Do you know what I remembered?” She asks with a giggle. “You, jumping out of my bedroom window and knocking on the front door to pick me up for school. I heard you hit my mom’sflower bed, and I thought you’d definitely, one-hundred percent, broken your leg.”
I laugh fondly at the memory, not only of that morning, but also that she’d convinced her mom a week later that there was better sunlight just a few feet to the left, so I wouldn’t fall onto the flower bed again in one of the twenty-odd escapes that followed from that same window.
“Oh, I totally fucked up my knee, but I wasn’t about to let your dad know that,” I chuckle.
She holds the thick comforter over her bare chest as I press my lips to hers again. The tip of her tongue toys with the jewelry in my lip, and as I’m about to tear the blanket off of her and fall into bed with her one more time, the alarm blares from her phone to interrupt us.
With a groan, she silences the alarm, looking up through her lashes to offer me a soft smile.
As she hurries to hop into the shower and get ready for her day, I trek back down toward the garage. I start with my bike, making quick work of changing the oil and swapping out the chains before I roll it onto the driveway to give it a good scrub down.
I offer a friendly wave to the elderly woman who lives across the way from us as she steps out of her house and into her garden, and her lip pulls up with a shake of her head.
She’s never liked me, since the day we moved in. Not because I’d done anything wrong; I’ve never said a word to the woman outside of shouting a quick ‘hey’ while we were bringing in our stuff. She thinks I’m a bad guy because of the tattoos and the bikes. That sentiment is shared by just about everyone in her age group who lives in this neighborhood.
It’s honestly kind of funny to me.
I’m afraid of bees, Peggy.
With the bike cleaned, the garage picked up, and the first floor of the house given a good cleaning, I head upstairs and down the hall from our bedroom.
The door there is the same white, four-paneled door which marks every other room in the house.
Same knob. Same frame. Same size.
Everything about this door is identical to every other door in this building.
And somehow, at the same time, everything about it is completely different.
A layer of dust coats nearly every surface in the room, from the boxes leaned against the wall and haphazardly taped back together, to the knobs and slats on the closet doors.
A storage room for dreams not only unfulfilled, but decimated.
A nudge against the back of my calf alerts me to Drumstick’s presence, and as he stands on his hind legs to paw at me, I reach down to scratch him between the ears.
“Don’t tear shit up in here,” I tell him.
It doesn’t take me too long to get the boxes moved into the garage and tucked behind a shelving unit. I did a good amount of clean-up in here a couple of months after our son died; taking apart the crib and changing table, donating the diapers and other perishables that we wouldn’t be able to use.
And then I closed the door, and neither of us ever opened it again.
It takes a lot longer to get the room itself cleaned and the carpet vacuumed than it does moving everything into a proper storage space, but I can’t say that it doesn’t feel good to finally get it all done.
There’s a certain kind of catharsis that comes with this; one that a part of me wishes Jules was here to experience, but thatanother, larger part of me is worried she still isn’t ready for; even if I think she needs it as much as I do.
When I’m finished, I don’t close the door tightly like it had been before. I rest it against the frame, knowing that Drumstick will likely push his way into the room at some point and hide a toy in a corner or in the closet.
