the beach

the paper that kept us apart

She loved the feeling her black pumps gave her. They elevated her. They were shiny. They were brilliantly tough. 

The way she aspired to be. 

He used to love them too. She would model them for him half dressed, him worshipping her naked body in the early morning hours. She would tease him, slowly unbuttoning her blouse, then re-buttoning the blouse. 

"God you're perfect," he would say as he would sweep her down into the bed, shoes and all, pressing his body up against hers. 

"I have to get ready," she would whine in-between kisses. 

"Give me five minutes," his lips would already be on hers, silencing her. 

She relented, obviously. And without complaint too. 

They would have their quick morning sex filled with laughter and quick glances at the clock. Then they had the kinky mid-day sex with her sneaking into one of the bathrooms of the restaurant he worked at, him close behind. When he was feeling risky, he would show up to the library she studied in and they'd sneak off to the back. Then there was the quiet night sex where he stroked at her hair and stared down at her with eyes dripping in lust. 

Lots of sex. 

But that was the beginning . They were twenty one; her getting into Georgetown Law, and him with the idea for his own bar. They were so promising. They were the it couple. Everything was right. 

Then it was wrong. 

She got pregnant a few months into law school. Both knew it would be hard, but they so desperately wanted this baby, they decided to keep him. She never once thought about an abortion. Even when a professor of the girl with tight pink lips and round spectacles told her that it was impossible to be a mother. With clogged eyes and a swollen stomach, she told her, "Somehow I will find a way." Skeptically, she nodded. 

That was ten years ago. She had graduated law school last May, when Mason had turned one. Now he was nine with overgrown brown hair and the brightest of blue eyes. His father's tired dream of owning his own bar bellyflopped a few months after Mason was born. So that left Taylor, the father of her child and now husband, still working at the same bar they met at when she was twenty one, her stomach filled with possibility. 

Now it was filled with coffee and plain salads. 

"You are never here," Taylor yelled one night. 

She had just gotten home. It was eleven fifteen at night. Mason had a school play she missed. "You think I don't know that?" she spat. 

"I think you don't care." 

She ran my fingers through her hair, twisting the strands around her rings. "Taylor I care more than you could possibly understand." 

"Do you?" 

"Yes!" she screamed as she stood up. She peeled the black pumps off her aching feet, throwing them across the room. "Damn it Taylor I care so fucking much."

"You missed his play, Beth. You missed it." 

She looked away, her mascara running down her cheeks in ashy rivers. "I tried to get off. I really did. I'm on such thin ice right now," she tried to say. 

She had lost a case. A gimme case. A case that she should have won with eyes blindfolded and a scorched tongue. But the veteran Caucasian man with the perfect hair and pressed suit flashed his smile and spoke in a smooth  voice. He objected to everything Beth tried to say. He asked his questions fast, making her client look suspicious. He gave his client a cookie on a platter, handing him his alibi and whenever her voice cut in, trying to object, he side stepped it and fixed it. 

And the jury. Christ, that poor jury. 

He hypnotized them. 

And she lost. 

She lost brutally and almost lost her job. She talked her way out of that, just like she talked her way out of everything else. 

But here she was, unable to talk her way out of an argument with her husband at 11:15 and on the verge of losing a job she had been dreaming of since she was ten. 

The tears came naturally. Usually she forced them so Taylor would hold her cheeks and kiss away the tears. Tonight however, they poured from her eyes as if she was a waterfall.

Her job didn't just take over her life in one meager day. It was a mold that took over slowly, but she was conscience of its existence the entire time. She didn't want to believe the pink lipped woman would be right, but here she was, believing her warning. Finally, heeding it. 

She didn't sleep. She got in her car and drove. Her make-up smeared, the blouse stained, her feet bare. The lights led the way, and soon she found her feet pressed up in the sand, the breeze curling her hair. 

The beach.