Scarlet Rose

Chapter 68

The sound of the door slammed shut hit him with an intensity that made his body jolt.

It took him a few wide strides to reach the closed door. Grasped both sides of the door frame, felt the wood absorbing the strength of his grip. Leaned his forehead on the door; the muscles of his jaw twitched when his mouth tensed in an attempt to hold his anger within. He shot the air through his nostrils.

"You're crazy, woman." He shouted through the door.

He stayed there for a few more seconds, and then straightened his body and walked away without waiting further for her response. Without moving his suitcase from where she had dropped it, he left.

All Candy heard was his footsteps getting further away. The front door opening and closing.

Silence...

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More than anything else, an angry silence had filled the space between them and around them; it was a storm without a sound, and everything that otherwise was to be said, kept pilling up behind the walls both Candy and Terry had raised in order to avoid each other, avoid each other at all costs.

On that Wednesday afternoon, having the door slammed on his face, Terry left the cottage with his anger holding just by a thread. He didn't want to let that thread snap, that is why he left. He could have broken that door and grab her, and...

Like a reel from a moving picture, the frames of him entering the room played in his mind. He watched the words he'd say, the moves he'd make; 

how his heart could had taken over like a master making him move, making him a puppet under its command, and she would fill completely his field of view until leaving nothing else but her, in front of his hungry eyes;

and every time, however many times, he played that same reel, it ended the same way with the bubbles of his anger turning to steam, so hot, it would burn them both the moment he'd touch her, kiss her, hold her. 

He growled. He hated Rose, how he made him feel, pushed him to extremes; He lusted after her, wanted to conquer her, wipe out any other man that existed in her life for those ten years apart, make her say his name again and again, till it became so familiar on her lips as her breath was; and yet he missed Candy, the girl he knew, the one he saw only briefly and felt beside him on their cabin bed just the night before. He almost grieved for having lost her from the moment he set his foot inside that cursed Gallery. Like Hamlet, he felt he was descending to madness. He had to accept the time had moved on for the both of them. He wasn't the Terry she had left on the hospital steps and she wasn't Candy any more. In that month since the Gallery opening, he realised on his quest to get closer to Candy, he was falling in love with her from the beginning, he was falling in love with Rose. 

His steps wide and hurried, stubbed out the burning wick of his anger, as he walked towards the main village of Castlebay and port of the isle. Each breath he took, the Atlantic breeze swept his face, ruffled his hair. He felt the tension dissipating into the air like the dust of the narrow country road while he closed the distance to the village. 

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When he returned, it was almost dusk. 

Instead of finding refuge inside the pub where he would let on other occasions, his thoughts to be soaked into ample alcohol, he had sat at a bench by the Castlebay port. He wasn't a guy who acted on impulse, but as he sat there, watching the sailing boats, white sails billowing between the azure sky and the deep blue sea, looked like flying birds of the sea, he got up, rushed towards the seamen that stood by the marina and asked if there was any of those small sailing boats available for quick sail around the bay.