“Mom! You should have told me, I’m sure I could have gotten used to having him around. He was always so good to me.”
“I know, I should have. I was scared. It’s the one big thing in my life I regret. Sometimes you only get one shot at real happiness. If you your lucky like me, you get two. Don’t waste them. Do you hear me you two?”
Katie got up and went to her mom and they hugged.
We continued to eat our lunch but the mood in the room was more positive somehow after Beth’s story. We all chatted freely, almost like we had been transported back to when Katie and I were first married and lived here with Beth, and we would all sit at this very table to have our meals.
After we finished lunch I said I should be going, but Katie again looked at me as if pleading me stay.
“Wait Greg, I have something for you. Have you got a few minutes?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“C’mon let me show you” Katie didn’t wait for my reply as she started walking towards her bedroom, the same one we shared when we were first married. I looked over at Beth with an almost questioning look, and she nodded at me in the direction of Katie. So I got up and followed her into what used to our room.
When I walked in Katie was reaching for a box on the top shelf above her wardrobe and was struggling. I quickly moved up behind her.
“Here let me do it.” Katie was right there in front of me, I could smell her.
“Thanks” as she gently moved to the side to let me pull the box down.
I placed the large box on the bed. And Katie started to open it.
“Greg, these are your things that were still in the apartment when I moved back here. I wanted to hold on to them for you, and it was kind of nice having something of you still here with me.”
I leaned over to look at the contents in the box, it was a random mixture of some clothes, trophies, mementos, DVDs and some photos in frames. All of the items I looked at reminded me of my time with Katie.
“You kept all of this stuff?”
“Of course, I couldn’t throw them away. Besides I was hoping one day you would come back for them.”
I looked into Katie’s sparkling grey eyes and the resistance to my desire to hold her in my arms was getting weaker by the second. It was if Katie could sense it. She slowly reached out her hand ever so gently to touch my hand and that was all it took.
I stepped towards her and embraced her with a long hard kiss. Her hands quickly searched out my face as we continued our kiss. It lasted probably two minutes but it felt like it went forever. All the anxiety, the emotion, the anger, the desire, all went into that one kiss.
When we finally broke our kiss we just stood there together in our embrace our bodies pressing against each other with our heads buried in each others shoulders.
Eventually I took a step back.
“Katie we need to talk about a few things.”
She didn’t reply, she just nodded.
“Do you mind if I put the box back?”
“You don’t want your stuff?”
“I do, but I can collect them later, Okay?”
“Of course.”
After placing the box back, I motioned for Katie to sit on the bed beside me so we could talk.
“First off, this, what just happened between us. I need to go slowly. I’m not sure where this is going, if it can work or not, if, I just don’t know.”
Katie took hold of my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.
“Can I as you something Greg?”
“Sure”
“Do you still have love for me?”
“Do I still have love for you? Yes. Yes I do. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t. I haven’t stopped loving you Katie, not for one day.”
Katie looked up at me with the warmest smile.
“Then I will go as slow as you need, give you as much time as you want. I’ll do whatever you ask of me.”
With that she leaned over and rested her head on my shoulder.
“Katie, you’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever known so I’m struggling to understand about you and the sleeping pills. You are scaring the hell out of your mom, Katie. Surely you know what you would have done to her if you had succeeded?”
Katie leaned forward and put her head in her hands.
“I just…, it’s difficult to explain and I have gone over these events in my mind so many times. I think that the only thing that was getting me through the way I was feeling, the depression the Doctors said I was suffering from, was that maybe you still loved me. That you would somehow come back to me.”
“So when you got the final divorce letter?”
“I felt that my hope was gone. Without the possibility that you would come back I gave up hope for myself. I let my guilt, my self-hatred, my despair of losing you. I let it get the better of me.”
“Was that the same for the other times as well?”
“Yes. When I found out you were dating someone, again, it felt like I was getting further and further away of ever having you back. I knew it was inevitable that you would find someone, but when I had to confront it, I was just, I just didn’t cope too well.”
“All right. Can you promise me something right now? That no matter what happens between us from today forward, that you will never try that again, no matter what?”
“Of course I would love say yes to that, but It’s not something I had planned ahead or did with a good state of mind.”
“What if we take away the reasons for it then? You said you felt guilt, self-hatred and despair of losing me.”
“Then I would give you a Master’s in Psychology because I tried it with two different doctors who had similar degrees hanging on their wall and it didn’t go too well.”
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