Hitchhiker

Memories.

This isn’t how a woman coming from a vacation with her fiancée should feel, Olivia thought to herself

She looked at her boyfriend turned fiancée Freddy who was whistling softly eyes fixed on the road, the man he loved or rather used to.

They have been together for five years, right of collage and for the first three years things had been great, he asked her to move in with her in their second year of dating and she did happily, they had stupid fights but nothing major they couldn’t solve, they were happy together.

Then the fourth year came, things started to go downhill, those stupid fights turned into something more. He became so possessive that she couldn’t go with her friends without a fight, he yelled at her when she was even a tiny bit late while he sometimes didn’t spend the night at home and came the next day drank out of his mind, she’d take care of him and he would apologize a lot the next day.

They had a tradition to go out on a date every Saturday and then have a lazy day on Sunday, lazing in their pajamas eating junk food and watch movies but it all came to a halt. He wouldn’t give a her a space to breath when they went out his arm around her waist all the time, she would have been happy if he did it for the right reason but he did it only when a man paid her attention and every Sunday he had an excuse to go out.

She soon started to feel suffocated, on one of their Saturdays she pretended to be sick to avoid the torturous night out but he looked so happy that he didn’t pick her up the next Saturday, all decked out and waiting she had fallen asleep on the sofa only to wake up when he was stumbling drunk again and that’s when their tradition died and a new tradition began.

Every Saturday and Sunday he would come in the mornings drunk and she was there to help him cure the hang over, he even stopped apologizing, then the fight began. Those stupid fights from before turned into a full blown fights, whenever she addressed his behavior he’d start yelling at her, accusing her of wanting to put him in a cage, she’d get mad at those accusations and yell back at him but luckily things never got physical but those verbal fights were too draining for her.

But all this time she still loved and cared for him but it all stopped on their fourth year anniversary, she had prepared dinner, cleaned their apartment and decorated it with scented candles ready to patch up things with him but he came back drunk once again in the middle of the night, she was seating on the sofa watching him stumbling trying to hold himself upright, she had stared at him for a while and then he started calling her for help but she couldn’t anymore, she stood up angry at him and furious at herself for being so stupid all this time thinking he would have changed, stomped to the bedroom and locked the door.

That night was the first of many he spent on their living room sofa and the night she stopped loving and caring for him. The next day she had prepared breakfast as noisily as she could and it had worked when he groaned and stumbled to the bedroom, she had wanted to cry then but she couldn’t feel the tears, she never asked what happened and he never apologized or said anything and she made her mind then she was going to move out and break up with him.

She worked as hard as she never did before, saving up as much as she could to buy herself a small place, she found a small cottage down at the beach with a price she could afford, it was a miracle and she couldn’t be happier, but last month Freddy stopped drinking, she’d been surprised but she didn’t say anything and then gifts started coming in.

It was a shock when he came in one Friday with a velvet box, she’d been paralyzed praying for it not to be what she thought but turned out it was a silver bracelet, she couldn’t deny its beauty but she wondered what was going on but what shocked her the most was when she received flowers at work, the whole office had swooned, it wasn’t everyday a worker received flowers and she never received any in the four years of dating Freddie, she had wondered maybe he found out she was planning to move out and this was his way of wooing her not to do so.