Ruminations

Yesterday, a friend of mine found out that I'm back to writing and decided spend the entire night drunkenly babbling about her story ideas to me, so when I sumbled home this morning I wrote a drabble of one of them.

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Ruminations

The constant drip of the badly closed faucet was deafening, the cloying smell of cigarettes she’d let dominate the hotel room nauseating.

The wait was unbearable. Every second she sat there, another proof of her idiocy.

It had already been a while. She hoped that he’d come back empty-handed. She also hoped that he wouldn’t, that he’d come back up and rub her face in her sins to give her a taste of her own medicine.

And when had she started thinking like that? Probably from the start, she’d gather, as there was no reason she’d submit so easily if she hadn’t.

Maybe that’s all she ever wanted, and her trysts were a way for her subconscious to push her to get it.

And how ironic that would be? A renowned psychologist, led around the nose by her desires to the point that she only finds out about it after the fact.

And what she did to him! The perfect husband, who loved and adored her, was now someone who looked at her with hatred and contempt.

She knew she should have left him, that it wasn’t healthy for either of them to do this. But this was it for her. That day in the house, when she finally told him the truth, and he left to clear his head, when her thoughts constantly drifted to her father’s old gun, sitting locked and disused in the attic, she knew she’d do anything to stay with him.

She lit another cigarette, inhaling the toxic smoke like the lifeline it was.

The fact that he didn’t immediately leave her saved her life, but the conditions he put on that…

She shuffled, still unused to the metal at her waist even after months of using it.

It was better than the alternative. And maybe someday, both of them would be healed enough to go back to what it was, to what it should be, before she ruined everything.

But today was not that day, and as she heard the door unlocking, she took a last, fortifying drag of her cigarette, plastered a smile on her face, and got ready to pretend to the girl he brought that this was all her idea and how watching her husband be with another woman was a dream she’d finally realize.

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What did y'all think?