Tournament of Hearts

Chapter 7

Back to 2 weeks later
"Antonio, can we talk for a second?” Aine asked her future husband cautiously. Antonio sets his book down on the table in front of him and he makes his way over towards Aine, who is sitting outside on a large swing. Antonio closes the front door behind him and sets himself down beside her. Aine takes a big and deep breath in. Then she releases it. 
"Antonio, you need help. With your anger.” She bites her lip anxiously. Antonio furrows his brows at her suggestion. 
"What do you mean, 'do something about my anger'?” he looks into her eyes with a look of confusion and of rage. Like a lighter to a candle wick, his anger is very flammable. The slightest tiniest thing can set him off on a rampage. Antonio has always been like this, though it seems that the older he gets, the worse temper becomes once he is mad. Lately, Aine has felt that almost nothing can calm him down anymore. He gets mad at everything and doesn't calm down at all, like a fire to a dry tree. 
"I mean," Aine takes a pause to straighten herself up, then she continues, "You can't keep being mad all the time. I'm tired of being your punching bag" Antonio gives her a cold and heartless glance, his eyes stray from hers and look to beyond the horizon. 
He's not calm, his anger hasn't sufficed. In fact, Antonio is in a constant state of restless anger. He sighs, stands up and punches a hole in the wall behind them. 
He turns to Aine, then screams at her, "Control my anger is what you probably mean! But what you don't get is that I can't control it! It's a disgusting monster that's taking up more and more space in my subconscious! I can't handle this anymore!” He glares at her and walks off the porch. Aine gets up and follows closely behind him. 
"But- I can help you. I went to the market the other day, and I bought something that could maybe bring you relief. It might help you.” She smiled up at him. He looks at her, with the wrath of a hammer to a nail. He slaps her. Tears streamed down her face. 
Aine belts out to him, "Antonio! This isn't you! I can help you! I have a potion that can cure y-” He slaps her once more on the same cheek. He spits in her face, then says, "Y- you could never fix me. I'm unfixable. You're a liar. You are the scum of the earth, you're-" 
He stops, he can feel eyes on him. He looks up and sees a crowd of people surrounding him and whispering. Whispering. Their voices, whispers, judgements. 
They have no idea what they're whispering about. They wouldn't understand how I'm feeling. 
Panic hits him like a piano falling from the sky. The faces and voices of people whom Antonio had grown up with, he had seen these people from before he could walk to when they were getting their job and to their weddings. 
Did all those years together mean nothing to any of them? 
He saw the way that they looked at him, their eyes were speaking louder and more words than their mouths could ever do. Like a mouse in a maze, he looked for the fastest route of escape. Somewhere he could get away from all these suffocating stares and mocking words. A gap formed at the edge of the circle, a gap where the amount of people standing and watching him was significantly less. 
There. There's my escape route. 
He fled towards the gap and pushed his way out of the circle whilst everyone booed him. He didn’t want everyone to see, he didn't want them all to see the thing he's most ashamed of. 
Back inside the circle after Antonio left, so did everyone else. They had all left because the main action, the reason they were there to begin with, has left. Sitting there a mess, Aine picked herself up in search of Antonio. To her dismay, walking wasn't the easiest and painless thing to do right this instant. So she gave the potions bag she had brought to her winslet with her fiance Antonio as the directions. 
During its trip, our wanstle hero weaved it way through the confusing layout of the small sub-sectors capital. It finally found where Antonio was hiding and dropped down to him. Antonio noticed Aines winslet immediately and got happy thinking Aine might show up so he can apologize. 
Maybe if I can see her again, then maybe we might be alright. Maybe she might know how much she really means to me.. 
In a haze, Antonio notices a bag inside Chermyns mouth, and no trace of Aine anywhere except the scent on Chermyn. Antonio can feel his anger boil up inside him and try to come out. Like throw up he can't control if and when it'll come out. He just needs to distance himself from whatevers makes him. In this case though, doing that won't be very easy. 
A brown and shiny bag drops at Antonio's feet. Without another second of time to spare the whistle flies off back to its owner. Antonio picks up a handful of pebbles in a blind rage and chucks them at Chermyn as it flies off and screams at it, “You good for nothing winstle! I hope you never return to that bitch ass pleb of a wife I have! I hope you never see Aine again! She doesn't deserve you! You have such a temper! I’d be glad if she even can bear to look at you, to see who you've become!” 
Yelling to the whistle, quickly turned into yelling at himself. Antonio sighs angry and kicks a large dent into a nearby broken-down cart. He then sits down beside the bag delivered to him and reaches for it. His curiosity overwhelming him, it gnaws at his very core. It sucks his rage dry, subduing it almost. No matter how curious Antonio becomes, his rage will always linger. He’ll always be a bit angry, at nothing at all.