Set Fire To The Rain

Honestly...

Ultimately, we compromised.

Instead of the couch, I got my pillow at the foot of our bed, and she got the head of our bed opposite to me.

Lying next to each other, my socked feet rested by her head, and her ankles crossed with her Marvin the Martian slippers next to my ear.

Yet even with the warmth of her body on my right side, I couldn't sleep.

Not while I felt her tensed up against me all night, knowing she couldn't sleep either as she stared wide awake at the ceiling.

"What are you thinking about?" I finally asked her.

"So many questions, I don't know where to start."

"Pick one," I invited her.

"How did you two meet?"

"Mutual circles...I was in the fire explorer program during high school, and she was the niece of a firefighter I mentored under. I'd see her at cook-outs, department baseball games, and trainings sometimes, but it was just a hello-goodbye kind of deal. Didn't even know she liked me until one of my buddies in the program called me a cunt tease for not asking her out. As a kid, I was just looking for my dad in the department, who had just passed away. I didn't really join the explorers for the girls, so it was all news for me."

"But she mentioned you two being high school sweethearts...Was that all through high school?"

"No, I didn't really start seeing her that way until our junior year. Even then, I was shy about having a girlfriend. I just liked being around her, because we both grew up around the firehouse, and she was fun. Dragged me right out of my shell, all the shit we got ourselves into."

"Sounds like she brought out the best in you then."

"Well, everybody liked her. She lit up the neighborhood when she came through. Spunky. No filter. Made friends with everybody in the room. She flirted with all the explorers though. It wasn't just me she hung out with."

"And you weren't a little jealous about that back then?"

"Nah...Like I said, I was too damn scared to approach a girl like that, let alone Alyson. If she was waiting for me to make the first move, it would've never happened. Most of the 'asking out' was done by her."

"You, shy? Bullshit."

"Believe it or not, I wasn't always this asshole you married. I was actually a genuinely nice, bashful kid who just wanted to do some good in the world," I defended my younger innocence. "But me and Alyson were like apples and oranges. That should've been my first red flag, but I was young and dumb. I don't know what I was getting myself into. She was about that life, going to all these crazy parties, getting guys at the station to sneak her and her friends into bars, staying out all night with said guys who were already too old for her.

"I wasn't the guy for her, and she was nowhere near the one for me, so at first I didn't understand why she liked to hang around me out of all the guys when I was on shift. I'd be trying to get shit done, and she'd be following me around telling me about her life story, and all the parties she'd got herself into, and how fake her friends were, and what she really thought of herself that she never told anybody else...So many times I just wanted to gag her with a gauze and some med tape."

"Sounds kinky."

"It's actually pretty tame, considering all the ways I fantasized about shutting her up for at least 10 minutes of my shift so I could get stuff done, but I couldn't even do that with her uncle around," I said. "She told me everything though. At first, I thought it was because I was the only one who would listen to her run her mouth all day. I didn't talk back much to her, which I guess she liked. She just wanted someone to hear her. Eventually, I guess she got attached to me, and gradually I wasn't as annoyed listening to her either. We graduated high school, and I started thinking about probie school. Told her I wanted to focus on that and not a girlfriend at the time, which she understood, but I knew it gutted her.