You Are My Light Part II

211 - Misery *reupload*

I'm taking James. This isn't going to work. My baby is not going to see you cheat on me.

She had snapped. I deserved every word of it, but it didn't make is any less painful. The pain of the whiskey burned my throat, I barely noticed the sting. The burn inside my chest was ten times worse than the pain in my throat.

My best friend, I thought, staring at the little picture of the Irishman on the bottle. He looked so happy. Why couldn't I still be that happy? I had smiled that largely once before. On my wedding day. God, was that only twenty-one months ago? When my love had looked so beautiful in white lace, had it really only been that long ago?

Mary is the love of my life, my entire world, along with our seven month old son. I would give everything I have to make them come back to me. But she won't. How long has it been since she left me? Two days? Three? The alcohol blurs my vision and my days.

From the first day I lay eyes on her, we were merely five years old. But I knew then she was different. I knew then she was different from any other girl I knew, so incredibly beautiful. I felt so protective of her, even more so since we came from different worlds. Even though we only lived a few yards apart. Big houses in the woods, beautiful and pretend, yet so different. But somehow, they couldn't be more the same.

My parents were rich, a union made by their own parents to secure financial gain. But they grew to hate each other. My father's infidelity and my mother's unresolved childhood trauma made them hate each other. It was a miracle that they stayed married for the facade they did before I was born, an even larger miracle that they had as many children as they did. A broken family and an illegitimate half brother who lived with my father and his mother part time soured any happiness any of us had, yet we were used to it, too young to know better.

But hers was different. Her father died when she was a newborn, he too was rediculously wealthy. She had eight half siblings from him, seven brothers and a sister, and two elder full blooded brother's. Her mother, already widowed once before had two children before Mary and her brothers. After her husband died, she lost her mind with grief. Regularly turning to the bottle day and night, marrying and divorcing a stupid amount of times, popping out several more children to abusive, addicted men who used her children and step children as punching bags and sources of abuse. The children had to raise each other and themselves whilst going to school, it has been hard, but in each other we found our refuge.

How could I have ruined that?

She was perfect. We had transformed from playmate's to teenage lovers with ease, and I adored her. She was perfect. So beautiful and so perfect.

She had imperfections, of course. But they made her even more perfect. Scars from the decades of abuse, tattoos from drunken rebellion, black hair that was always raggedy and knotted. She drank. She cussed. She fought. But she was perfectly imperfect. And she was mine.

The abuse didn't stop until she was almost twenty one. We had every opportunity to leave and start anew, but she couldn't abandon those children who needed her. She stayed for them and regularly visited them in their uncle's home after her mother lost her grip upon them. Marie de Guise drank herself to death that night in November. My fiancé didn't cry one tear when her mother died.

I took another glug of whatever was in my bottle. It made the pain lessen. How could people say alcohol is bad for you?

I looked towards my phone when she refused to answer my call again. James' sonogram stares at me. Tears budded to the surface once more. I hissed in a breath, father told me never to cry.

Why did I have to cheat on her? How could I have ruined such perfect happiness?

My baby boy looks just like my wife. Her eyes and her black hair, but his black waves were starting to curl. His dimples appeared more mine than hers. My face, her eyes. The perfect blend of us both.

We tried to give him a family neither of us had ever had. But I don't know how that's even possible anymore.

I didn't mean to, I repeat, as if that makes it any better. I didn't mean to sleep with her.

I had played doting expectant father and doting husband as the weeks of her pregnancy went past. She grew and grew. I felt my boy kick from inside his mother. And on the night he was born, I had never known such happiness as he let out his first cry.

Our family and friends had gone out to drinks in celebration. We got drunk, I looked into her eyes and one thing lead to another.

I cheated on my wife. She had given a perfect baby boy. And I had betrayed her.

Now that I said it, I felt better.

I awoke that morning with a horrid ha over, and saw one of my wife's friends laying bare beside me. We hadn't meant to. She had cried when she awoke, feeling wracked with guilt over what we had done. We swore not to speak of it again. I would go on with my life with my two loves and she would get in with a budding relationship with one of my father's friends.

And for a while, that was what we did. Lola and Stephané lived at his home on the other side of the country for four months. My baby grew and grew and I adored my wife, being adored in return.

Until a few nights ago, Lola came to our door. She was pregnant.

It wasn't Stephané's child, like they thought it was. It was mine.

My love had cried and screamed at me, our baby crying when he realised his mother's distress. I begged on my knees for forgiveness, but she didn't grant me it. Why would she?

She took the baby and left, going to a maternal family home two states over. She drove in a storm, not once getting back to me. I would worry for their safety if Kenna hadn't came to me earlier, ready to scratch my eyes out after Mary told her what I did over the phone.

I cry. I finally cry. I let all of it out in the bar we had spent much of our time in, in the past. My brother and her friends, we made a family. And Lola and I had broken it.

I cry for James. He doesn't deserve to see his mother cry into his hair each single night. He doesn't deserve to have his family broken because of one drunken night.

I cry for Lola. She still has Stephané, thankfully, but she was disowned by her friends who had been closer than sisters for many hears, and disowned by her family because of the baby. And our son John Phillip Valois-Anguléme will be born in two months. I don't wish he didn't exist. His existence makes Lola happy, and I had came to care for her like a sister or a cousin in the years all of us had been each other's family, Mary and I, Bash and Kenna, Greer and Leith, Lola and Aylee.

But most of all, I cry for Mary. She didn't deserve this mess. She only gave me her love.