Nick pushed the covers down, then pulled them back up. Why the fuck couldn’t he get comfortable? He contemplated sneaking to the kitchen for the tequila he’d restashed, then decided against it. Tansy’s interruption of his pity-fest had been well-timed, and as long as he didn’t drink any more, he could avoid a headache tomorrow.
Aubrey’s letter, though... That still lay under the bed, its purple words shining from the pages like lasers, burning holes through the mattress and gathering into a hot ache in the pit of his stomach.
No one writes a love letter like you do, Nick.
Was that true? Maybe, but only because writing to Aubrey had once come to him as naturally as his own heartbeat. Evennow, words smoldered in his belly. Sentences swam in his blood. Paragraphs piled in his rib cage.
Directing them at Tansy had never felt right, so he’d spent seventeen years swallowing them down. Back when he’d first gotten married, he’d tried bringing his new wife flowers, instead. Fake it ’til you make it, or some shit like that.
The first time, Tansy had tolerated the gesture well enough. She hadn’t thanked him, but she’d arranged the flowers in the nursery, a welcome gift for the impending baby. When he’d tried again a few months later, though—after her eyes had gone bleary from lack of sleep and the constant soothing of a colicky newborn—she’d curled her lip, scornful.
“Is this really what we should be spending money on? You could’ve bought another baby bottle, instead. I can’t seem to wash them out fast enough.”
“I was trying to be romantic,” he’d said, stung. “It’s my way of saying thank you. For everything you’re doing.”
Tansy had made a face, then scooped up a wailing Paige from the baby swing and bounced on the balls of her feet in an effort to stop the crying. “If you want to be romantic, why don’t you try feeding our kid in the middle of the night? That’d be a lot more useful than bringing me something that’s going to be dead in a week.”
Her bluntness had shocked him, even though he should have been used to it by then.
But she’d had a point, so Nick had started handling Paige’s midnight feeding himself, at least on the days he hadn’t worked second or third shift. Even though it had meant concentrating twice as hard at work the next day in order not to topple into the blast furnace’s volcanic river and incinerate himself.
He’d never brought Tansy flowers again. Now, all these years later, he understood he should never have tried. The zenith of her interest had already passed, on the night she’d chosen himto distract herself with, for whatever reason. When he’d been so broken he’d unwittingly chained his future to hers.
Still, for all that, Tansy was a good mother—fiercely loving toward Paige, for which she’d earned Nick’s undying respect. But her emotional range didn’t extend beyond maternal adoration. Sappy love movies bored her. During their marriage, she’d forgotten their wedding anniversary every year. And she’d never once told Nick she loved him.
As far as he knew, it had never occurred to her to try.
Meanwhile, he bled inside. He pretended otherwise, mostly for Paige’s sake, and masqueraded through adulthood with his poker face firmly intact. But in reality?
He felt like a boy, sometimes. Like the scrappy kid from the wrong side of the tracks who’d given his heart away at seventeen and never gotten it back. Who still boiled with white-hot self-loathing when he thought about hurting a girl he’d once loved down to the roots of his soul.
Who now spent hours at the gym, silencing the words he still wanted to say to her.
Because if he’d married Aubrey, he would’ve penned her something every day. Spilled ink like so much lifeblood across the page. He would’ve written about her garnet hair and green eyes, about that look of hers, the one that made him feel like they were sharing a secret.
His breathing quickened. If only there was some way to alchemize this regret into a way to pay the bills, because lately, the stacked-up words had begun to fester, as if he’d stuffed his jagged crevices full and had no place else to stash the leftovers. He’d tried to feed the words to the blast furnace. Sweat them out, punch them out, anything.
But maybe they had another use.
He sat up in the darkness, this morning’s radio segment still heavy in his thoughts. Somewhere, someone was getting paidto ghostwrite love letters. Meanwhile, here he was, overflowing with words he couldn’t say.
He threw the covers back, then crept down the hall on quiet feet, past Tansy’s door to the cramped office, where he flicked open the sleeping laptop.
He typed a few words into the search engine.Ghostwriting love letters for pay. After scrolling through the results, he sat back. No job postings that he could find, but that didn’t prevent him from trying on his own, did it?
He navigated to one of those websites where freelancers could offer gigs to the public. After registering for an account, he typedNick Thacker’s Love-Letter-Writing Serviceand pieced together an ad. For four hundred dollars, he would personally craft love letters for someone for up to six months.
He erased the ad, doubtful, then wrote it out again and posted the damn thing. What was the worst that could happen? He shut the computer and sat amid the muted roar of the rain.
Yet the corrosive heat in his gut gnawed deeper, so instead of going back to bed, he ventured to the front door, then outside.
In the driveway, the chilly autumn downpour assaulted him, more like a hail of bullets than actual rain. He tilted his head back and gulped the icy droplets. Maybe, on the off chance that someone responded to his ad, he could finally free himself. Crack open his chest and let the words gush out until the flames died back.
Not that he’d actually be writing to Aubrey. But he could always pretend he was.
Maybe that way, he could finally say goodbye.
2.
