Star Gazers

CHRISTMAS STARS CHAPTER 4

CHRISTMAS STARS CHAPTER 4

Halloween night was heavily on his mind one night just a few weeks later. The ease between them, the old familiar happiness, seemed to have slipped away as fast as it had returned. If there had been signs, he had missed them, his first clue being a night shortly after Thanksgiving.

Jules continuously blocked his every seduction effort. First, deciding she needed to check on the kids, she left him to shower alone, despite the fact that he had been the one to follow her into the bathroom. After being gone for a quarter of an hour, she returned with a bowl of cereal and proceeded to eat while sitting in bed, laughing over Saturday Night Live. The mirth didn't reach her eyes though. When they finally lay together, she moved around adjusting the covers, and pillows, avoiding his hands. Before pulling them back into his own territory, he allowed himself one last touch of the smooth clingy fabric. Some type of long nightshirt. A sexy nightshirt. Why wear it if the offer did not stand.

Giving up, he fell asleep, but this phenomenon happened again and again. Only she seemed to have learned, and wore old faded tee shirts to bed. Like that mattered. He still put the moves on her. If she did give in to him, then that is exactly what it felt like, that she had conceded, and that her mind, heart and body were not into it.

Her mind was not into anything else either. Either ignoring or snapping at him and the kids, she went listlessly through the days, and early to bed. Many times he watched this depressed shell of his wife, wondering why she had spent only a couple of weeks in mourning after their loss, come out of it, and now seemed to be slipping into it again. His mother had stayed with them for Thanksgiving, as had become a tradition, and a couple of times over the years, her parents had come as well. He weighed that in, that this year had been his mother only, but it had never bothered her before. Her own mother had flown in for a weekend shortly after the tour ended.

It was Helen who provided the enlightenment. Desolately, Matt watched Jules go straight to bed after one of their few nights out. Pouring a cup of decaff and sliding it his way, the motherly, woman eyed him with sympathy as they both leaned a hip against the kitchen bar. 

"You going to be okay Da?" Sometime back, the woman began using Meg's first words, as nicknames, and tokens of affection, to him and Jules anytime things were tense. Da for Matt, Daddy. MaE for Jules, Mommy. Shrugging, he declined to answer, out of sheer depression, as he thought of how normal Jules had been around Halloween, and now she was anything but. Lately, with Jules hurting all the time, his own hurt was beginning to bleed again. "This time of year is going to be hard, especially the first time. But the memories will not be so sharp and hurtful in a few years."

Of course! All through her pregnancy they had mused, and made fun speculations about whether or not they would have a 'New Year's baby'. Jerking his head up in realization, he stared into the nanny's wise face, and she looked away with an apology, possibly thinking she had overstepped a privacy boundary.

"Thank you! Thank you so much for that," Squeezing her arm, he drained his coffee and went to bed with new purpose. To talk to Jules. To console her.

Jules, however, was feigning sleep, he had seen it enough lately to know the signs, and he pulled her close, whispering his love, before letting her be.

The next morning, his attempts to talk were thwarted by her insistence that she was fine, and to prove it, she shut his words off with a sweet distraction. It had been awhile since she had provided this particular distraction, and closing his fingers in her hair, he closed his mind off to anything but her, and the distraction.

Their once happy home continued to rapidly deteriorate, and though he had fought the feelings, he had lapsed into the melancholy again.

The kids picking up on the dark moods, fought more than usual between themselves. At present, Jacks was using Matt's leg for a hot wheels car ramp. Kicked back on the couch, Matt kept his glass of tea in his hand to avoid it being spilled, enduring the tiny car and the chugging noises Jacks made as he played.