DITW 14-26: Odyssey 21

In a long moment of silence after Kimmy’s proclamation, he struggled to frame meaning in her words. And in that long, dreadful moment, the look in Kimmy’s eyes showed there was no other interpretation than that she was going to leave him. Her lips trembled, her eyes shone with wet emotion. She looked weak. Frail. A cavalcade of retorts raced through his mind like the arrow clicking on a game spinner. Outrage was obvious. How dare you. But weakness of his own was there, too. Crumpling. Finally, at very long last, he could surrender to the burden of her sin and torture, and collapse on their kitchen floor in a sobbing heap, occasionally opening his eyes to verify her pretty, stocking feet were still there, and she still bore witness to the alchemical result of her nefarious and mythical experimentations. But in the middle of the spinner’s selections, the choices between the polar extremes, was a gamut of dull responses hard to decipher from one another. When he’d found her underwear in Devlin’s couch and fled to Rome, what struck him most was the vague shapeless form of his realized suffering. That cottony buffer that had maybe protected him from the extremes; ones where he would either swan dive from the spire atop St. Peter’s Basilica or cave his beloved’s cheating head in with the back side of a claw hammer. When the first in a series of marital detonations went off his mind protected him from harm, shutting down his reactions, putting him into a hibernation for his own safety. So while he could collapse, it wasn’t impossible he would explode in red rage and trash their apartment and throw all of her belongings out the windows.

He said, “You’re leaving? You? You’re leaving?” The clarifier. That’s what the arrow had settled on; the response of the tepid administrator who wanted the wretch to repeat their own words so that they were heard better, the hope being in a well-concentrated reconsideration nothing more would need to be said. Kimmy leaving was a ludicrous option, and once she said it aloud once more, she would recognize the error in her ways and amend them. Maybe when she repeated that she was leaving they would both look at each other and smirk and acknowledge how dumb that was.

But his voice was weak and crackly and not at all the sort of masculine foreboding he wished he conjured naturally. Why was he always the voice of reason?

All she said was, “I have to,” her voice soft, almost breathless, that sadness still in her eyes.

He laughed and threw up his hands, a man surprised such a cruel world had more impossible punishment ready to heap upon him. He jabbed a finger at her. “I could have done that. It would have been so easy. Leaving. But you do it? You’re going to leave me? You rob me of my pride and my chance at justice?”

Kimmy shook her head, eyes pleading. “I can’t hurt you anymore and I don’t deserve your compassion, I don’t deserve your support.”

He frowned, he grunted, he suffered more. “You can’t hurt me anymore? You don’t deserve my support? You’re my wife. We had a wedding. You were there. I was there. Kimmy, we’re married. That means something, that—” He stopped talking and his heart sunk. His mouth closed and he put a hand on his chest. “Oh no,” he sighed.

She asked him what, like she was genuinely curious. 

“The baby,” he said, his voice sounding a mile away. “You know it’s not . . . You don’t deserve my support? You know it’s not mine.”

She closed her eyes and fell toward him, trying to put her arms around his waist. He held her at bay, pushing her back and stepping toward the counter.

Kimmy retreated, features twisted in emotional hurt, and he hated how he liked it. Her hands came together over her stomach. “Don’t say the baby. It’s our baby. It’s your baby.”

Now he turned away from her and braced his weight with hands laid out on the counter. “I’ll never know.”

She said, “You’ll know.”

He admired the patterns on the counter surface, the splotches in the marble. He said, “Then why would you leave me after all you put me through?”

“I’m not leaving you, Josh. I’m leaving the apartment. You’ve fled, and you never should have—because I’m the one who’s wrong.”

He stood up again, lightheaded, leaning his butt on the counter and folding his arms. “Where are you going to go?”

“I’ll find a place.”

“Hyun’s?”

Kimmy looked down and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” he said.

Kimmy looked up. “What?”

“Where are you staying? Oh, I don’t know. You know where you’re staying.” Devlin’s.

“I really don’t, Josh,” she said. “Don’t accuse me of that.”

“Don’t accuse you of that?” He scoffed, finding sudden and gratifying amusement in her ridiculous statement. “After everything you did, I shouldn’t accuse you of the fucking obvious? Is it so crazy? Where are you going to stay?”

“It’s not what you’re thinking, Josh. Not that at all. I don’t where I’ll stay. I’ll figure it out.”

It puzzled him. None of this was expected. All of it was so strange. He said, “Just quit. Just quit, Kimmy. You don’t have to go anywhere. Quit and we can start over.”

“I did quit, Josh. I told you to let me handle this the way I needed to, but don’t worry, today I quit the brokerage.

There was something in the way she said Don’t worry that he didn’t like. An insinuation. “I wrecked it. I wrecked your plan, is that it?”

“No, Josh. You did everything right, I did everything wrong.”

“Are you patronizing me?”

“No, I’m not.”

“You told me to let you handle it your own way, you had a plan, but then . . . Then what? What’s the insinuation? You had a plan you never told me and I wrecked it by what? Falling into the lake? Is that it?”

A tear rolled her cheek and it surprised him. One long finger wiped it away like light rain on a windshield. She sniffled and raised her chin. Another tear was imminent. “I don’t deserve you, Josh. I don’t want to hurt you anymore. I never wanted to hurt you. Not for real. But everything I did ended up destroying who you are.”

Another bloated moment of silence, battened with emotion and dread over what they would say next. All day he’d been chuffed, pampered by the unexpected care of his co-workers. More than once he’d heard the insinuation that Josh Waters might be on the market. And, boy, he’d surfed that wave in his mind, daydreaming at his desk, seeing himself with some of the girls he knew. Going on dates, showing a new woman all the good things about himself and imagining their cooing and positive reception. He’d thought about sex, too. Thought about bedding one or two, imagined getting his cock sucked. Every time he thought that way it would soon turn to Kimmy. Wanting Kimmy to see it. Wanting Kimmy to witness how he could move on, how he wasn’t the little thing she treated poorly. He could be a Devlin to another woman. And he wanted Kimmy to see it. To hurt seeing it. Now all that strangely sprung confidence seemed watery and useless. Lies. Fantasies. Facing the cold reality of a separation from his wife he felt no more reinforcement from those fantasies. Nope. He felt scared.

“Fuck,” he whispered as a tear fell on his own cheek. Tears came easier to him than to Kimmy. He wiped it away. “Don’t go,” he said. She said she had to and wiped the second tear from her cheek.

Now he was offended. He’d offered her reprieve, offered her a chance to breathe and reconsider and she was adamant she must leave. He asked her again where she was going to stay.

She didn’t answer. He watched her elegant hands hanging at her sides form fists and wiggle fingers, nervous tension acting like she had leaned on her elbows too long and her hands fell asleep. She said, “Not with him, Josh. Never again.”

Devlin had hurt her. He’d fired her today. He’d humiliated her. He’d punished her the way her husband should have. Good.

“It’s over. All of it is over.”

“Then stay. We’ll make dinner. You can tell me.”

She shook her head no and the rejection angered him. “Why not? Why do you do this to me? Why do have to hurt me? Every day it’s something new. Now you’re gone from the brokerage, the thing I wanted, the thing I asked you to do a hundred times, and you’re like, you’re not going to come back to me. You’re addicted to punishing me. What the hell did I ever do to you?”

She rolled her head aside and looked up, another tear rolling her cheek—and now he was convinced they were fake tears and she was making sure he saw them. He said, “Did he fire you?”

Kimmy huffed an amused sound and rolled her eyes. “No.”

“You quit?”

She widened her eyes, gazing aside and down, like in an act of remembering. “I burned the bridge down behind me.”

More silence. More staring and saying nothing. “Stay. Stay and tell me what happened.”

She shook her head no again and made like she would leave.

“Don’t fucking go, Kimmy. Don’t walk away from me. You wanted to cook me dinner and now you get me to agree, get me to soften, and you’re going to turn your back on me?”

She turned to regard him again. Fear shimmered in her dark eyes. She opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t form words.

He said, “Don’t you dare leave.”

Her mouth closed, she shook her head for the tenth time. “I have to go. I have to.” She turned again and went to the foyer. He followed. When she tried to put a foot in her high heel shoe he grabbed her upper arm and pushed her to the door. No words. Face to face. Kimmy wouldn’t meet his eye. The tears were flowing now. He let her arm go.

“You’re the cruelest person I know. I’ve never met anyone worse than you.”

Kimmy cupped shaking hands around her mouth and nose and breathed into them. She put that foot into that shoe and this tie he didn’t stop her. She put the other foot in the other shoe and now she was taller than him. Beautiful, stunning. But broken. Twisted, broken, ashamed. Afraid.

She lifted the hands from her face, fingers trembling like he’d never seen someone tremble before. Her hand cupped his cheeks, warm, tender. She looked in his eyes. A tremendous effort was under way for her to not break down. The trauma was obvious.

He said, “What happened?”

She cocked her head, showed him the weakest smile, and whimpered in her throat. “I started something I can’t stop, Josh. And now it’s out of control. I don’t want you to get run over. You’re the kind of man who’d step in the way to save me and I don’t want that. I want to burn all by myself.”

Before he could respond, she kissed him. The kiss was magnificent and filled his heart with surprise and passion. But he could never ever experience it the same way after all she’d done to him. Her love came barbed with hurt.

He pushed her back. “Don’t you dare leave,” he said.

She turned. She showed him her back. Opened the door, didn’t look over her shoulder. Walked down the hall to the elevator.

Fuck her.

He wouldn’t give her the pleasure of calling after her. Wouldn’t submit to her anymore. Not ever again. 

“Leave,” he muttered and slammed the door. “Bitch.”

But with the door closed it was over. The urge came on strong to fling it open again and chase down the hall, grab Kimmy at the elevator and kiss her, bring her back to the apartment and tell her they would make it all work. But why? For more pain? More rejection? How many times would she have to kick him in the balls before he’d leave her alone?

Instead he turned and laid his back on the door, like bracing it in case she returned, crashing barbarians at the gate, armored in beauty and wielding the deadliest blades of torment, eager to force their way in and sate their steel with his pain. He slid down to sit on the floor, staring up at the photo Kimmy’s father took when he was a married man with a wife and two daughters, traveling back to his homeland. Happy. Together. But all good things come to an end.

He covered his face and cried as quiet as he could.