The Bed........ Magpie Tales#24

She lay on the bed and watched Steve walk from the shower room, the water droplets still on his thighs. He had told her last evening and now it didn’t seem real. How could it be that he was going? She thought back to the previous month when all was well and they had lain in that same bed together, their life raft he had called it, planning the week ahead. Their two children had been conceived in that bed, she had loved, laughed and cried with him in the same bed and now, he said he was going.

She knew when it had happened, she had watched him and their new neighbour’s daughter, when Elise had walked in that evening, Steve had stopped talking to their friends and looked at her, it was like electric. Claire had seen her too and watched Steve who stood as though he was in trance. His eyes followed Elise and she knew that he was watching. She flicked her hair off her face and tucked it behind her ears, it was the most graceful movement Steve thought that he had ever seen and he went towards her. From across the room Claire watched as her husband fell slowly in love with another woman and there was nothing she could do.

She turned on her side and watched as he struggled into his jeans his legs still damp.

‘Will we see you at the weekends, the boys will miss you?’

He turned and faced her, his face still the same face, but now to her a stranger.

‘Of course,’ he relied, ‘I ‘ll want to see them I will miss them too.’

It was on her tongue to say, ‘ So don’t go.’ But she didn’t, his heart was no longer hers and she didn’t want him without it.

From the bed she heard the front door close and with its closing, her life had closed too.

‘Perhaps I’ll get myself a new bed, this has too many memories,’ she thought.

But she knew she wouldn’t, if all she had, was memories she wasn’t going to give those up as well. She turned her face into the pillow smothering her sobs and wondered how she would face each day without him, perhaps he would remember how it was once, when she was the one that caught his glances, perhaps he’d tire of Elise, and when he did perhaps he’d come back, perhaps.......?

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