Delores came undone.
Sobbing loudly, she dropped her coffee to the ground and the contents spilled out, leaving a pool of dark brown by her feet as if her wretched, devilish soul had slipped free from her body, escaping from her tortured body. She melted into large, comforting arms that wrapped around her shoulders and sunk headfirst into the misery and despair that was always there, just below the surface threatening to tumble out. She cried and wailed until she felt empty and she thought her head might explode. She didn’t believe she deserved his comfort, this stranger’s arms wrapped around her as if he knew her problems, as if he could help to wash away the pain and guilt. But comfort is a selfish thing, and now that it was there, she found it incredibly hard to let go of it, to bid it goodbye and walk away. Because she was a selfish, selfish woman, as all her previous actions had so blatantly shown.
It had been one cup of coffee.
She wanted it to be more, in this moment as he held her and made her feel like she wasn’t just a mountain of bad memories. A bad mother. A bad wife. A bad everything.
She didn’t know when she had stopped crying. Didn’t notice when the tears finally stopped and that she was simply staring into space now, her cheeks pressed against this stranger’s chest like a lover. The buttons of his short-sleeved shirt pressed into the side of her face, embedding their imprint onto her cheek.
Mark continued to hold her. At some point he had climbed back up on to the table and had sat down next to her, resting her head against him as if they were old friends, and he had continued to let her cry. He didn’t complain when the tears soaked through his t-shirt, or when his back began to ache. He didn’t complain because he was good and pure andshe wasn’t.
And for this one moment, she didn’t care, she couldn’t.
She needed him—this.
She was so lost, so confused. Nothing made sense anymore. Nothing at all. And she needed someone else’s strength to get her through the next part of her journey, because it was almost over. So close she could touch it. But she was scared too. Scared of the finality it would be bring.
‘You deserve this, Del.’
“I’m so sorry,” she finally said, her voice hoarse from crying. She didn’t dare look up into his face, knowing he must think that she was some crazy woman. And perhaps that were true, she thought. Perhaps her tangled thoughts were not so tangled after all. Perhaps they were as they were meant to be. “That was ridiculously embarrassing. Everyone must have been staring at us.”
“It’s alright. We all need a good cry now and then. And let them stare. Who gives a shit about people we don’t know? And who cares what they think? I certainly don’t. They’re just people we’ll never see again, so fuck ‘em. That’s what I say,” he laughed lightly, his words sounding sincere.
That last line made her chest hurt and her heart ache.
People we’d never see again.She sniffled, her body wanting to cry further, but it was gone now. The knot of self-pity she’d had inside her had been set free.
Acceptance. That’s what she felt.
“I believe in accepting the unacceptable, no matter how much it hurts. I believe in knowing when you’ve lost your battle,” she said, her words softly spoken.
Mark’s eyes widened. “And love, do you believe in love?”
Delores nodded and smiled. “Yes. I believe in love.”
“And what would you do for love?” he asked, his mouth agape at listening to this woman’s utter sadness and desperation.
He was buzzing with energy, his muscles in a frenzy as he tried to control himself. He’d never met anyone like this before. Anyone so full of pain. It was so vibrant, so real, he could touch it. And he had. He’d felt her tears soaking through his shirt, felt her body trembling. And he’d enjoyed it.
Delores’s mind travelled back to a time when she was loved. She remembered the arms of her children wrapped around her, their soft kisses upon her cheek. She remembered a lover’s touch, an embrace that held her tightly, and kept her safe. “For love I would do anything. Love is forever. Love is everlasting, Mark, no matter how fleeting it is. No matter what we do.”
“That’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one,” he laughed.
Delores finally looked up at Mark. His grey eyes watched her fondly, not an ounce of pity in them. And then she laughed. It started as a low chuckle in her chest that promptly escaped her lips. She stared at him, amazed at the sound that was coming out of her. It built into a full aching belly laugh, which she couldn’t control. She laughed and laughed, and then when Mark joined in she laughed some more.
She finally regained herself and smiled, realising that for the first time in weeks, her head had stopped hurting.
Chapter Eight
Delores
“My sister used to cry all the time after our dad died.”
She looked across at Mark, the man she had shared so much with this last hour. Probably more than she had shared with anyone in a long time. Her tears were the greatest truth she could give. She didn’t know him, yet she felt comfortable sharing her misery with him. Much more comfortable than she had ever felt with Michael. Another thought tugged at her subconscious and she tried to grasp it before it left her. It was a futile attempt though. She sighed again and thought about Mark’s last comment and frowned.
Mark saw her expression and pushed her playfully in the shoulder. “Nah, it’s okay, happens to us all in the end anyway. I was old enough to understand, but Gracie, she missed him like crazy.” He plucked another daisy from the embankment and twirled it in his fingers. “She’d cry and cry, and blame mom, blame me, blame herself. She never blamed him though. Like she knew it wasn’t his fault that he had to die, but somehow thought it was ours.” He shrugged. “It was weird.”
They had gone to sit on the grass at the side of the gas station, their bitter coffees long forgotten.
