Hello Again (a Tom Hiddleston fanfic)

March 2013: Perfectly Sober

It is strange how quickly a month can pass, especially when you’ve turned off everything.  All emotions.  All hopeful thoughts, all sad thoughts too. You just sort of exist.  Time goes by, and things move on, and you’re still there.  I spend the next three, nearly four weeks, in a strange sort of in between.

Go to work, come home, eat something, go to bed, repeat.  Sometimes I go out with Mary, who always manages to make me laugh.  I break and tell her the majority of the Tom story, and she listens with rapt attention.  She says she’s ever the romantic, despite a failed marriage of her own, and no real prospects for love at the moment (though she’s never alone for very long).  I admire her positivity, but I am just about drowning in my own confusion at the moment, so it doesn’t help much. 

I never really had Tom, so it’s a little easier to push him from my mind.  We were always just on the edge.  Those last few weeks after Christmas had been something a bit different, a bit more, but it had obviously been too much.  I’d only known Tom to do quick, flash in the pan relationships.  I don’t know why I thought I would be any different.  I suddenly knew what it felt like to be a Jenny or a Susie or a Serena.  I’d become one. A Gracie.

Embarrassment, fear of rejection, heartbreak perhaps, all kept me from really trying to contact Tom again.  So I buried myself head first in work, and I tried to forget the way he used to make me feel.  The feeling I’d get when he was around, like static electricity in the air.  When I thought about it, remembered it, it made me want to cover my face in blankets and disappear for as long as possible.

After one particularly cold walk home from the pub with Mary one night, I fell into a fretful, sweaty sleep in which I dreamed he wanted me back. Tom came to me and begged my forgiveness.  He said he was sorry, and that I was the one for him.  I woke up around midnight, sweating and disoriented, my heart in my throat.  It was like a punch in the gut.  Waking up alone, and the hole in my chest gaping.  How did this all start? With an innocent, carefree one night stand, culminating in increasingly confusing, spell binding meetings.

I manage to fall back asleep, after covering my face with my hands and counting slowly backwards from 100, trying to slow my heartbeat.  My respite is brief, as I’m awoken some time later, by a loud banging on my door, which is really only a few yards away from my bed.  I’m so out of sorts, and in a bit of a sleep deprived daze, that it takes me a minute to realize what is happening.  I throw the blankets off, my heart hammering against my chest anxiously. I’m worried it is Mary, and something has happened.  I’m wearing only underwear, so I quickly throw on a tshirt and shorts, and grab my old sweater off the back of my chair.

The banging starts again, and whoever is outside desperately wants me to answer.  I turn on a lamp and then rush over to the door.  I look out the peephole, and when I see who it is, I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.  Am I dreaming? Did I not just dream this exact thing?

I open the door, slowly, and come face to face with Tom.

He has looked better, to be honest.  But it has been so long since I’ve seen him, that I feel almost weak in the knees when I finally get to look at him with my own eyes.  He’s got a few days scruff on his jaw, and his light brown hair is messy around his face, tufts of it sticking up, curling by his ears from being just long enough.  He’s wearing a red flannel shirt, which is open at the throat, and a worn black jacket over that.  One look at his face, and I can tell he has been drinking, his cheeks ruddy, his eyes a bit glazed.  What he is doing in London, I don’t know.

“What are you…” I trail off when he looks at me because I feel it straight in my chest and then, between my thighs.  It’s confusing and infuriating that even after everything, one look and I am useless.  He looks angry, wounded, and yes, drunk.