Love's Inferno

Chapter 24 - A Velvet Box

Dante

I was closing the front door on a fucking disaster of a day when she ripped herself from my arms. It was if being home, safe, reminded her how enraged she was (justifiably) with me and she couldn't stand to be near me. She didn't walk next to me as she scaled the steps. She didn't look at me. She didn't say a thing... experiencing her silence was complete and utter agony. I thought I'd begun to die a painful death when I realised she might have run away but this? This was somehow worse. She was in front of me, within arms reach and it was like she was a million miles away. Everything that had happened sat between us loudly - blocking any of the intimacy we'd shared outside. She doesn't let me touch her often. Doesn't let me hold her... and in truth? Why would she? Despite, what is becoming blatantly apparent to be, our shared intimacy... there are walls she routinely erects to shut me out. They're not the kind of firewalls I can hack or tunnel beneath... and I wouldn't dare attempt to dismantle them with force. 

We're gonna be married and while she might not know any of what that means to me... it doesn't look like whatever this is. It doesn't look like loaded silence and a woman I'll never be able to win over in the thick of it. She stood by me, literally, just then. She supported me in the one moment I needed her to hold me up, literally. Seeing Rosalie again, unexpectedly, weakened me... only because I had no idea what the  woman had said to Shi. Rosalie wasn't always like this... spider of a human being, I think time around the family had done that to her, but she had always been venomous. She was the type of person to pick the petals off a flower just because she was bored and I ached at the thought that Lou had been left alone with her. That Lou had been subject to her scathing scrutiny. It's not that I think she can't take it, hell she had... it's just that I'm failing to keep my promise - to protect her. I just never imagined I'd have to do it from Rosalie. I hadn't seen her since our engagement was called off... and that was a very long time ago. 

Time had aged her and doctors had done a great job of reversing it. She looked frozen in a place between twenty-four and thirty-seven - neatly immobilized by botox. Immortalized like eternal flowers - real but unreal at the same time. This is not to say she wasn't as beautiful as ever... she was, but nothing could convince my body of that fact. All of the want that used to surge through me, so violently in my youth, for something as simple as a stray glance in my direction was gone. All of the hunger I used to feel for her time, the sound of her voice, the ideas she could share with me were turned to dust- small particles of nothingness decorating the years between us. All of her demands for attention irritated me but nothing more so than the fact that Lou now knew we were once together. I wouldn't have kept it a secret from her but I wish she hadn't found out like that. I didn't know how to erase the idea that she had been someone Lou was now convinced I had almost married. I didn't want her to compare herself when there was no comparison to be made. I didn't want her to categorize them as being the same in some way. I didn't want... well there were a lot of things that I didn't want. At present it was mostly the aching silence that persisted as she unlocked her front door. 

I followed her in, needing to... begin to try and fix things. 

Surprisingly she let me. 

In front of me she began to unravel from one identity into another one I like to think I know a little better. She pulled off her wig and the hoodie. Massaging her now free scalp, she placed her hoodie on the hat stand in the corner and moved to pull off her sneakers, then her socks. All... in silence. When she stood up she looked at me for the first time ever with complete dispassion... with silent defeat. Chewing the bottom of her lip her eyes glanced towards my watch and chain. She was dismissing me... and I couldn't handle it. I put them back on before removing my hoodie and folding it. She began walking further into the apartment and I followed.