The Bad Jokes #2: The Blonde

Chapter 7 (Wyatt): Forced To Witness

***TW for stalker discussion***

Thirty days. I'd been on the day shift of her security detail for thirty days and she hadn't spoken one word to me. Not one. She'd barely even looked at me. If I was in the kitchen, she wouldn't come into the room. If I was in the living room, she avoided it. She spent most of her time in her writing room, easily the coziest room in the tiny bungalow, which was saying something because every room in her little house is warm and inviting. It's pure Gracie. Sunny, open and so comfortable it just made you feel welcome. Her grey cat, Mouse, sat beside her computer much of the time, and I heard her carrying on conversations with him throughout the day.

Through the closed door.

She'd talk to the damn cat, but acted as though I didn't exist. If I said good morning to her when she made a brief appearance or asked her about her plans for the day, she ignored me. I'd taken to parking my SUV so her driveway was blocked because the first day I was here, she walked out of the house and to her car without saying a word to me. I stopped her before she could make it to her car, and gave her a safety lecture, but she acted like she wasn't listening she was so furious. So now, if she wanted to go out, she'd have to go in my car, which she probably thought was punishment but was actually protocol.

Unfortunately, Gracie hadn't gone on one single outing with me. I'd asked if she needed to go to the grocery store, but she wouldn't answer. I'd asked if she wanted to go anywhere, but she looked right through me and removed herself from my presence. Those are questions we're supposed to ask so we can plan our day and routes, but she thought I was just trying to needle her into talking to me. After the first week, I stopped asking. If she had any errands, she ran them with Hank as soon as he arrived for his shift, and I resigned myself to being the stay-at-home guard.

Alex had warned me the day I arrived that she wasn't going to like having her freedom to go out restricted and monitored, but I'd told him that she'd just have to get used to it. There was no way she could live the way she was used to living as long as Your Fan was out there watching her closely. But she hadn't rebelled at all since the first day I'd arrived, and even that wasn't a reaction to her restrictions but to the person who was enforcing those restrictions. Me. Gracie was letting me know, in case I hadn't already figured it out myself, that I'd made a huge, life-changing stupid mistake, and I was going to be suffering from the consequences of my pathetic behavior for a long time. Maybe forever.

I simply didn't exist for Gracie. Did I blame her? No, not in the slightest. I'd earned her contempt with my idiocy. I deserved every ounce of pain she was delivering since I'd dropped the bomb that had ruined us and started this.

When my second shift replacement arrived every evening around five p.m., she'd swoop out of her room and give Hank a big, delighted motherfucking hello complete with a big hug. If he wasn't fifty and happily married with his first grandchild on the way, I'd be jealous.

Fuck that.

I was jealous. Jealous that he got her smiles, her words, her laughter, her attention while I was just a non-entity to her, someone to ignore. Hank was the person she shone her warmth on and I couldn't even say I was the person she aimed her hatred at. That'd be an emotion I could work with, an emotion that would let me know she still felt something for me. Instead, I was getting completely blanked, and I missed her warmth that had always surrounded me. I missed Gracie to a degree and depth I'd never felt before in my life.

And whose fault was that? One hundred percent mine. When Sheena left with no warning and no explanation, I had a hard time with that. It was a huge blow that someone I'd spent so many years with, someone I was just a few months away from marrying, could just leave without some sort of why. At the time, I thought it was the worst way a relationship could end. Now, I could tell you without a doubt that Gracie's way was the absolute worst. Knowing that you were the cause of a relationship ending and not being able to make any headway to repair what you'd broken was a special kind of pain, but I knew what I'd done has caused Gracie immeasurable suffering.