Broken

Tommy needs to see her so badly, his guts hurt. He feels like there’s something inside him, squeezing the hell out of his guts and his intestines and his liver and whatever the hell else is in there. He lost track of her. He’d known everything about her, known every time she stepped out of the apartment, and suddenly, he’d lost her.

Night creeps up the street and leaves darkness in its path. From an alley down the block, Tommy watches the apartment for signs of life. She’d stopped answering the phone when he’d called. She’d long ago stopped talking to him, loving him. He couldn’t let her go. Shay Edwards was all he’d ever had that was good in his life, and he couldn’t stand to let her go.

He tosses his cigarette to the ground when he sees the light come on in the back of the apartment. She’s either in the bathroom—maybe sinking into a hot bath right now—or else climbing into the small double bed they’d shared for three years. That gut squeezing-feeling threatens to make him puke as he grinds the toe of his boot over the cigarette butt he dropped. The street appears empty as he crosses and hurries down the block to stand at the door of the apartment he used to call home.

Tommy knows better than to knock. She won’t answer the door. He knows he hurt her, but he thinks it’s time this ended. He wants to come home. There’s nothing he wants more right now than to step inside the warm apartment and shed his clothes and the hurts of the last six months and slide into bed beside her. He adjusts his jeans as they grow tight around his erection. Okay, so maybe he might want to feel her hot skin against his and push his dick high inside her and—

First things first, he reminds himself. This street has ears, but there’s no way to avoid this part of the night. He has to get into the apartment before he can do anything else. He turns his back to the door and then sidles down the wall of the apartment until he comes to the living room window. Just because he doesn’t see anyone watching doesn’t mean there isn’t a nosey neighbor somewhere with his or her nose pressed to dark glass watching his every move. Doesn’t matter. Once he’s inside with Shay, they’ll work things out, and everything will be okay.

He takes one last look around and then pops his leather jacket-clad elbow against the glass window. The breaking glass is loud, but it’s not as loud as he thought it might be. Quickly, he uses his arms to knock out the remaining shards of glass. He notices a deep tear in the left arm of the leather coat, but he doesn’t care. Nothing matters but Shay.

Using muscles honed through odds and ends jobs and ass-sweating hard work, Tommy hauls himself up and through the window. He eases himself down into the living room silently. There is no noise from inside or outside the apartment. For just a moment, he stands as if he’s frozen in place. Something’s missing. There’s something different, but he doesn’t know what it is.

After Shay had first asked him to leave—he’d known she hadn’t really meant they were over for good—he’d come at night like this and slide the windows up and climb through them. Mostly he’d just come inside to remember the good times. To remember how Shay always smelled soft and sweet, to remember her smile. Her smile is what drew him to her in the first place, when they sat side by side in the story circle back in kindergarten. Eighteen years ago, her smile had been missing a front tooth. Six months ago, her smile had been missing life.

She’d started locking the windows after she’d come out to the kitchen for a drink of wine and caught him there, just relaxing on the couch. She missed him; she missed sleeping by him or she wouldn’t need to get out of bed at one in the morning for a glass of wine.

The apartment doesn’t smell like Shay anymore. The realization hits him hard between the eyes. Makes that squeezing in his gut feel worse. What has she done? Tommy has always hated it when she changed things: her hair, her makeup, her perfume, the way the furniture was arranged in the bedroom. As he crosses the living room to the table and the lamp, he takes several deep breaths. He doesn’t smell any perfume or candles—those damned candles made him queasy.

The lamp is gone. So is the table. She must have changed the furniture around in here, he thinks. Irritated with her for moving things around without telling him, and irritated with her for making him feel this way when all he’d wanted to do was crawl into bed and hold her and maybe make love to her, he stalks back across the living room to the kitchenette. The walk takes all of three steps.

He notices the light he’d seen earlier is the bathroom light. She must be in the tub. Probably why she hasn’t heard him yet. He’ll go in and surprise her in a second. First, he needs to see what all she’s changed in here. His fingers slide up the wall and then flip the switch. Harsh yellow light floods the small kitchen.

A new dish drainer. This one is blue. Theirs had been yellow. A cheap bottle of red wine on the counter. Shay hates red wine. He wonders what or who is the catalyst for all of the changes. His eyes sweep over the room as a whole and then move on to the living room. She’s plastered over the hole he put in the wall one night over a year ago. It had been a silly argument over Jeopardy. Shay was so smart he’d always told her she could be a rocket scientist. She always laughed his comments off. She kicked his ass every night they watched the show together. Never bothered him unless he was drinking. That night he’d been drinking.

I honestly don't remember what the prompt was for this bit. It's actually 9 pages long, but I cut it here to make a quick, easy read. I feel like I was listening to the Bare Naked Ladies song "The Old Apartment" when I wrote this, but I can't swear to that!

#apartment #brokenwindow #brokenglass #broken #breakups #drinking