He pressed the button. Relief. I yanked open the door. Relief. I clambered in. Relief. I buckled my seat belt. Relief.
I checked the time: 10:00 P.M. I made it! I made it! Relief short-lived. I burst into tears and cried all the way home.
Erica and Noah left for Vegas four days later. We didn’t.
Reece watched her from the hallway. The door was cracked just enough to give him a view of his fiancée hunched over her desk, gluing the tiny pieces on her father’s model boat. This was her fourth month into the project, and he was feeling raging jealousy and abandonment. He offered to help her several times, but she wanted to complete it by herself. He understood it was a private matter between herself and her father, but that didn’t ease the growing frustration. He missed her. He wanted her back.
He couldn’t remember the last time they had sex, and then he felt guilty for even thinking it. Her father died. But he died months ago. And anyway, couldn’t sex act as a healing agent? Maybe that was what she needed, but he was too afraid to broach the subject. He didn’t want to offend her or make her angry.
Even now, he worked tirelessly to find his place in her new world. A world filled with more tics than he could ever imagine. It was a foreign world, and it frightened him. He stumbled about blindly, never knowing if he was doing or saying the right things, just hoping he wouldn’t set off another compulsion.
Where was the Bailey he met in the office that summer day so long ago? She gazed up at him and said cheerfully, “That’s me.” He swore he could hear her voice now: “That’s me” drifting out of the stuffy office, asking him to find her again. Find the happy girl who had learned to let go.
“Bailey?” he asked, knocking on the door tentatively.
“I’m starting dinner in five minutes,” she replied.
“No, it’s not about dinner. And anyway, you don’t have to cook. We can just order in,” Reece said. “Or better yet, let me cook.”
“I’ll cook,” she said, and he knew it was because she didn’t want him dirtying the kitchen.
“Bailey?”
She whipped her head around. “Reece, I told you I’d be finished in five minutes.”
He bristled. “Until when?”
“What?”
“Until the next time, which is when? How long will you be working on that boat?”
“Until I finish it,” she replied.
“Which is when?” he insisted.
“I don’t know!” Bailey snapped. She turned around and resumed her work.
Suddenly, Reece had the nagging suspicion that there wasn’t much work going on. She holed herself up for four months. Surely the boat would have been completed in that time. He walked across the room and hovered over her, glimpsing the lined up wooden pieces before she covered them with her arms and hands.
“Go away!” she screeched.
“What is that, Bailey?” he asked carefully, but he already knew. He hadn’t bothered to walk in this office space for weeks. Hadn’t bothered to see that there was no progress made on the boat. Hadn’t noticed all the pieces spread out on the table grouped and sorted and lined up.
“Go away!” she shouted again.
She fought him as he peeled her arms away, revealing what had been a perfect arrangement of short and long wood pieces. They filled the table from corner to corner, alternating in lines of three short, two long, three short, two long.
“What the fuck . . .” he breathed.
She hopped out of the chair and backed into the corner of the office like a trapped rabbit.
“What?” she said. “Why are you saying that?”
“You haven’t been doing a fucking thing,” Reece replied. “You’ve been doing nothing but sitting in this fucking office for months on end sorting and lining up little fucking wood pieces!”
She winced. He glanced at the boat. Nothing had been added to it since she brought it home from her mother’s house.
“What the fuck, Bailey?!” he roared.
And then his temper flared, turning the understanding, patient Reece into a monster. He whipped his arm out and slid it across the desk, flinging all the numerous tiny pieces across the room and sending the unfinished boat crashing to the floor.
Bailey gasped and dropped to her knees. “No, Reece!” she screamed.
“I can’t live like this anymore!” he shouted. “I can’t! I don’t know where you are! I don’t know how to bring you back! But you’re not the woman I fell in love with! You’re some imposter!”
She wept as she gathered the pieces in her hand, fingering the splintered boat that slapped against the wall before it hit the hardwoods in a crunching smack. It lay broken, irreparable. The only way to fix it was to start anew.
“Daddy,” she whispered, tears stinging and blinding. She dropped the pieces and grabbed the boat, cradling it against her chest as she rocked side to side. “Daddy.”
Reece sank to the floor. It took only a moment for his old self to return, and when it did, he looked on, horrified at the mess he made—the disregard for her father’s memory that lay crushed against Bailey’s chest on its starboard side.
“Bailey,” he pleaded, feeling the sting in his eyes. He’d never done anything like that, never let his anger consume him so completely, and it frightened him. It frightened her. “I’m sorry, Bailey. I’m so sorry.”
She shook her head and hugged the boat tighter.
“We’ll make it right. I promise, we’ll make it right.”
“No, Reece,” she whispered. “We won’t.”
***
Bailey, why are you holding on? the voice whispered in my ear.
“I can’t let him go,” I cried softly into my pillow. I didn’t want Reece to hear.
But you’re no good for him. You know it’s true. Your needs, your urges will always come before him, the voice replied.
“What?” I was momentarily confused. I thought the voice was talking about my father.
Reece. Why are you holding on to him? Why are you making him suffer? Don’t you know he deserves someone better?
“No,” I whispered.
Bailey, stop fooling yourself. You know you can’t love him. Not the way he deserves to be loved. You don’t know how. You never learned.