Luna

🌕

2:39 am.

Again.

The clock on her nightstand mocks her with tall red numbers, carelessly ticking their way to dawn while she lies there, wide awake.

It's the third sleepless night in a row, three days since she agreed to the tour and then promptly hid herself away from anyone and everyone that wanted anything more official from her.

She just can't do it yet.

She can't sign her life away so easily.

A sigh escapes her lungs and the heavy arm draped across her middle flinches, then slides away with a groan.

"You're killing me, baby."

She winces at keeping Scott awake when he has his own issues to deal with. Most notably having to break the news to his clients that he's taking an extended leave so his wife can go play rock star summer camp.

"I'll go downstairs," she whispers back and carefully untangles herself from him and their white sheets, "Love you."

The house is wonderfully silent as she glides down the stairs and into the living room. It's still too early in the year for the sky to show any light at that hour and Lake Washington spreads out from their windows as an inky black dead space before the lights of Seattle stretch into the sky.

It's her favorite view.

Even after fifteen years she can't believe it's her's. Views like this aren't meant for people like her. They're meant for the generational wealth of Seattle. Old timber and fishing money, the Overlake Country Club elite, but now it's riddled with new money.

Tech executives, athletes, and musicians.

Scott had scooped the house up from Eddie, who had just built his wife's dream Georgian-style home only to find it too painful to live in. And Selene just had to learn to not pay too much attention to the dark spot across the water, to angle her deck chair a bit to the south or north and not directly at Viretta Park.

But now that she's thinking of it, she finds her eyes land on the black stain and stay long enough for her heart to hurt. To wonder, for the millionth time, why.

I miss you.

She closes her eyes and sends it out into the ether, hoping it will somehow reach him, before pulling away from the windows.

Her feet are cold on the wood steps that lead to the basement, but it's always colder in that part of the house. It's built into the rocky hillside that slopes into the lake with the west side of the house opening up onto their lawn and path that leads to the dock.

Another luxury she's yet to really come to terms with.

The unfinished part of the basement might be her favorite for that reason. She likes the exposed floor joists and raw plastic insulation on the walls, the concrete slab feels familiar under her feet. It's a lot like her little house in West Seattle, the one she still can't bear to part with.

She passes the furnace and hot water heater, their cat's litter box and rows of organized bins storing all their holiday decorations and years of report cards and school pictures. In the very back corner, the farthest point away from where she lives her day to day life, is an old green trunk. It's shoved into the corner with boxes of baby clothes stacked on top, ignored but not at all forgotten.

There are water stains across the top from so many beer cans being spilled across it, scars from when it was used as a coffee table in a little house on Pear Street. She and Kurt had found it laying on the side of the road somewhere in Tacoma, a hasty Free sign scribbled in cardboard beside it.