Chasing Cold Sand

Chapter One

Chapter One

One Year Later

“Hello?” Nikki said into the telephone, gripping it closer to her ear when she heard the static in the background. Her eyebrows drifted together after several moments of it. “Hello?”

“Ni-”

That’s all she could pick out from the voice that was trying to speak to her. After a second, the static started to diminish and the man was easier to hear.

“Nikki?”

Everything inside Nikki grew with excitement at the sound of his voice. The loneliness in her heart started to clear away with the picture of him in her mind, hugging her and never letting her go. She could imagine him now, leaning against a humvee of sorts with a large telephone in his hand with a powerful signal.

“Matthew!” Nikki screamed excitedly, grinning from ear to ear. He had only been deployed for a month and already she was feeling so lonely without him. He was her everything since the accident, the only one she could talk to without having the insane urge to break down crying.

“How are you?” Matthew said, a light tone in his voice. Oh how good it was to hear his voice again.

Once he asked that, Nikki felt pain and frustration. Just the thought of thinking about her life made her want to be in a different world, a world where everything was normal and everybody was happy. Nothing bad would happen to anyone and you‘d live happily forever.

Unfortunately, things never worked that way.

“I’m okay… it’s are just different without you here. How are you?” she asked, trying to change the subject away from her.

“Things are going great. We came into a village today and have been helping them, bringing supplies that they need and some new technology we’re trying to show them. They’re friendly for the most part. Some of them are stubborn and don’t like us here, but I guess I know where they’re coming from,” Matthew said, a lingering in his voice. “What do you mean ‘different?’”

Nikki knew this would come up, and she didn’t want to talk about it. She had only been telling her two best friends about her feelings and even then, she always felt embarrassed. They didn’t know what it actually felt like to be in a situation like this, and now that Matthew was gone, it was almost like she was alone in this fight.

After the silence, she finally spoke.

“It’s… dad. He’s totally disconnected from me. It’s as if he doesn’t care about me, even you, anymore. He hasn’t made it to a single game this season and he’s already missed one of my concerts at school. If you were here, maybe he’d think about coming to my things instead of being with all of these women all the time,” Nikki replied, already feeling the anger rise in her voice.

His tone was relaxed, but also concerned. “Tell me about these women.”

“I don’t know… he’s seeing this lady now, and I know something’s wrong with her. She’s not a mother and she doesn’t know how to be one. She’s not right for him at all to be with,” she said, almost shouting now.

“Calm down Nikki. This is just his way of coping with the situations at hand,” Matthew explained. Her heart beat returned to normal as she fell back onto her bed, defeated.

Her words came out as a pained whisper. “I just can’t imagine dad being with anybody else except mom…”

All she could do was cringe with his response. The truth felt crushing as she heard those words again, words that had been repeated to her time and time before.