Resentment

The Cottage

Santa Monica, CA, September 8th, 1997
6:00pm

Afia had crashed through the doors of her and Michael's Santa Monica cottage like a hurricane.

As she bounded up the white stone stairs of the home, heels clattering, she couldn't even bring herself to wait until she was in the bedroom to start sobbing.

She knew Michael had cheated.
She knew it in 1992.

The years had been wasted.
The love had been wasted.

Whilst she played the doting mother and wife, Michael was stabbing her in the back.

As she flopped lazily on the huge bed in the centre of the room, Afia concluded that her husband was soulless.

No man that had a guilty conscience, or a heart, would allow themselves to commit the ultimate sin within a marriage.

Cheating, Afia had always thought, was simply out of the question for both of them.

He'd told her he loved her, so often.
He'd kissed and held her, so often.

He'd licked and sucked on the softest parts of her body, so often.

All the things she thought were secret dances between them, turned out to be a dance he'd done with someone else.

It felt liked she'd been stabbed.

The Santa Monica cottage resembled that of a home straight out of a Santorini holiday catalogue.

White washed walls, on the inside and outside, decorated with bushy palm trees and green shrubbery.

The home had Palladian style windows that let sunlight in whenever the Californian weather would allow it.

They'd gone house hunting together.
Signed real estate paperwork, together.

Afia curled and twisted her body, as tears started to pour out of her in restrained whimpers.

The crisp sheets smelt like the dryer, since nobody had been inside of the cottage in almost a year.

It was supposed to be something like a holiday home.

Not a refuge from her own husband.

How the story had turned sour so quickly.

In a matter of years.

There were so many promises in the beginning.

The marriage, was always going to be a risk.
It was always going to be hard.

But this was a new type of Michael.

The man who had allowed a woman to touch everything that was hers, was not the man she said her vows to.

Afia clutched at the sheets, rubbing her nose deep into them, trying to ignore the feeling of dizziness.

Exhaustion.

Her makeup was staining the sheets, in little brown smudges.

The door was suddenly knocking, like a terrible thunder, unrelenting.

Michael was at the front door.

His rough knuckles were rapping at the stained glass windows, his heart beating like a drum against his ribs.

"Affie! It's me!" He called, looking up toward the top window of the home, hoping that if Afia was in the bedroom, she could hear him.

She needed to answer.
She needed to move past this seven year old mistake.