Sliced Trees and Dead Words

37 - The curse of being a woman.

- LUNA -

For the first time in almost four weeks, I've woken up alone in an empty bed, and I hate it.

I know Wolfe was going to work with Mason today, but he always wakes me up to kiss me goodbye if he's leaving before I am, and I can't hear any movement outside for him to still be in the house somewhere. He's notoriously bad at keeping quiet with his heavy footfalls and long-legged strides.

I got up to pee and deal with post-sleep period shitness, then searched my house just on the off chance Wolfe had learned how to be genuinely quiet, but he wasn't anywhere, and Medusa was gone, too.

My first instinct was to panic, anxious and disheartened that he'd done a runner on me. That my period pain and complaining was too much for him and he bolted. But then I saw his second pair of boots by the front door, and one of his jumpers hanging over the back of the sofa, which I knew he would never leave without because it's his favourite one. Then again, it's been my favourite thing to wear these past couple weeks, so he might just have left it to be sweet because he knows I like it, and those particular boots were so concrete splattered he may very well just have left them behind because he had a newer pair that served the same purpose and looked better while doing it.

I knew he was too good to be true. That this weird married life we'd stumbled into so quickly was too much for any man to deal with. Especially a man who's spent the large majority of the past four years in the company of another man, with only the occasional intimate female contact every now and then given how transient he's been. He wasn't cut out for the pseudo-married life with a woman he was forced into knowing only because he happened to be friends with the same man I was, who just so happened to take his own life four weeks ago.

I returned miserably to my bedroom and made a beeline to my bedside table to grab a couple tissues before the tears really started falling. When I reached for the weathered box of Kleenex, I found a note in Wolfe's messy scrawl, and assumed it to be an old one from yesterday when he left for work before I did, where he begged me to not go to work and stay home and rest instead. Obviously I didn't adhere to his request, but I did succumb to leaving early at Nella's insistence. She's had endometriosis for as long as I've known her so she knows better than anyone what the shedding of uterine lining can feel like.

I was about to scrunch up the abandoner's note when I realised it was a different one altogether, written on the back of a damn, unfolded tampon warning and instructions sheet which no one ever reads. It was like the son of a bitch was rubbing it in my face that the female menstrual cycle was the source of our downall from blissful coexistence. So, I scrunched it up into a ball without reading it and threw it angrily across the room, then stormed into my bathroom to have a shower and try to wash the madness off me.

It didn't work, and the angry had now mutated into a rage-meets-disappointment hybrid, which was a hell of a lot more dangerous than each of them individually. When I marched back into my room, stepping on the cursed non-relationship break up letter (because we weren't actually officially together, despite everything my heart has been telling me for weeks), I kicked it further into my closet, where all Wolfe's clothes were still folded on the chair I'd moved in there a couple weeks ago for him to use after getting sick of looking at piles of his clothes all over my bedroom floor.

Why are his clothes still here is he's bailed out? I gave up trying to think of an answer to this question after a few seconds and reached down to pick up the damn note, unfurling it to find my explanation:

Gone to work, and will be heading out for a drink tonight with Mase and my mate Ty (the one who lives in Byron) afterwards. Not sure when I'll be home. Might just stay at Ty's if it's late. Hope you're feeling better this morning, Luna. I left some ibuprofen and water on the bedside table for when you wake up, and there's some bircher muesli I made for you last night in the fridge for breakfast. Hope you're feeling up to eating something this morning, and that it tastes okay.
Wolfe