𝔸 𝕃𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥 𝕚𝕟 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔻𝕒𝕣𝕜𝕟𝕖𝕤𝕤 ➁

BONUS CHAPTER - ✭SEAN✭

I make my way inside the same building I've been inside more times than I can count. Being here is bittersweet and, by that, I mean it feels more bitter than it does sweet. Fuck my visual memory. Fuck it straight to hell. Because even though the name and scenery have changed, I can still see them here. I can still visualize Trevor and Monica.

Memories...

Memories of me acting like a fucking idiot and losing myself inside of my head just trying to forget. So much time spent here forgetting my shitty past experiences by losing myself in casual sex and amphetamines. If I'm completely honest, I feel like doing those exact things right about now. But although the compulsion is there it's not something I'm actually going to let myself do. Monica may be gone but her memory is still a constant beckon of light inside of my head.

I look over my shoulder at the remodeled bar behind me remembering all the times I'd worked behind it. I'd closed this club down when Seth was born not being able to sell the stupid thing. My old therapist be damned. There are just too many memories here to hand it over to anyone else, well, at least while I was still alive.

After I die I don't really give a shit what happens to it. I'll just be another hole in the ground. Just another headstone to mourn by. All of the shit that has been my life will be over and all of my memories here will die with me.

Stop going to the dark place, I scold myself mentally. The dark place is just where my head naturally goes. I'm a fucking pessimistic prick if there ever was one.

I glance around the space that just a few years ago had been completely rundown. After Monica died I began restoring it. I couldn't see a place I associated with the two people I loved most, other than my son, rotting away like their corpses in the ground. Again, fuck my visual mind.

But even though I hate the stupid thing at least I could see her here again. I can visualize Monica inside these four walls with her long flowing chocolate waves and matching eyes. I can picture her back when we first met, back when I was a shit-show of a mess and she helped pick me up off my ass. My lifeline. My saint. My Monica.

She'd been taken out by a god damn drunk driver on the evening of Thanksgiving. The one thing I thought would eventually take away my life took away the love of my life. Life is an ironic bitch and god is a fucking sadist.

I feel a painful tug inside of my chest that threatens to knock me over. I have to blink a few times and shake my head to try and rid myself of the other painful images. "Get your shit together, Sean." I repeat this mantra to myself several times a day. Scratch that, more like a hundred times or more. A constant reminder to myself not to fall all the way down into complete fuck-up land.

Get your shit together. Keep your head on straight. Repeat. Don't fuck your dead wife's sister. The later I definitely won't have a problem with, well, again.

Just the thought has me fucking infuriated with myself for about the millionth time since it happened. No sense in beating myself up about the past though, that's never done me any good. I sit on a stool by the bar and look around the empty dance floor thinking about the most recent mess I'd gotten myself into. I run my hands through my hair giving it a good hard tug, hopefully pulling out some common fucking sense by the roots.

Jenn had come over to pick up a piece of jewelry she said Monica must have had that belonged to their mother. She'd called me and asked for me to check at first and when I couldn't find the ring she asked if she could come check for herself. I'd thought nothing of saying yes at the time, but that turned out to be a huge fucking mistake.

Mistake should be my fucking middle name. Sean Mistake McCaslin. Sounds about right.

I'd gone upstairs to my bedroom, our bedroom, to get Monica's jewelry box for her. I had kept everything of Monica's, even a few years later thinking maybe, just maybe she'd walk through the front door. Maybe she'd shake off the snow on her cap from that night. Maybe...