Just Rose

35

The next two days literally dragged agonisingly by. He didn't try to contact her at all and she knew that he would have collected Morag and settled her at home as he had planned. She wondered what he had said to the other woman. If he had even bothered to keep trying to tell her that he had moved on and needed her to stop.

Did he really need to anymore?

It ate and gnawed away at her, tainting every moment of every hour, unsure what she even was to him now. If in his head, she had ended things for good.

Abby took her to the cinema on Saturday afternoon, to distract her and give them both some much-needed bonding time, seeing as lately they hadn't done much of it. Rob was giving both the cold shoulder it seemed and the girls left him out of conversation.

The film did nothing to lift either of their reflective moods, some romantic chick flick which was annoyingly engagement and drama based and full of family hilarity. Dinner at a cheap fast food place after was strained and they had to admit neither was in the mood to be sociable, both equally distracted by Rob and their own fights with him.

She dropped Abby at home later that night feeling the sinking ache at the absence of his car, the lack of contact. The dark lights of his rooms as she drove around the wide park to turn and leave; it was like he had just ceased to exist in her little world. His lack of presence was like a black hole in her heart consuming any light.

She pulled up his number a hundred times to phone him but could not bring herself to press call. She knew she should be the one to do it, after all, she was the one who had broken off their engagement in a flurry of female insanity. She just couldn't. He had his reasons to be sorry too, he had partial blame in this and the way he had pushed her out. Stubbornness setting in, Rose's worst flaw was this internal sense of injustice that made it impossible to be the one to reach out to him.

At night, she was restless in bed, sure every noise or creak was him driving up to the cottage, but it wasn't. She couldn't sleep. Crying sporadically and getting up a hundred times to get water or tissues, or to toss and turn. She must have readjusted her cushions a dozen times and even opened and shut her window and curtains a dozen more. Poor Muffin had even vacated the bed and gone to sleep on the couch away from her restlessness.

She left her bed when it was still dark, barely grazing morning, and built a fire in the lounge. Taking her mind off everything and hoping to warm the icy shivers that had been raking through her alone in the bed. The summer was ending and the colder nights moving in slowly; It just made her feel more depressed and alone. She just could not get him out of her head and it was slowly driving her into insanity.

Warmed by the flickering flames, she finally drifted to sleep on the couch. Finally finding some peace to her inner turmoil but dreaming restlessly, tossing and turning, yet again; only this time on a narrow couch and barely stayed still through into the early hours of the Sunday morning. Muffin had moved back to the bed in a bid to be free and he slept alone and in peace.

Getting up from another night without him made it feel even worse. Part of her always hoping he would appear; pulling her to him in the dark like he always did and wiping all of this away; but he never materialised.