The Sea God's One-Night-Stand *Tides of Fate*

1)

"You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly." - Sam Keen

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They say fate does not always seek our consent.

Sometimes the road of life takes us on an unexpected journey. There will no preparing for where the destination will take us, we're simply expected to arrive and live with what's now presented to us. There's no say, no time for preparation, just living with the destination that fate has brought us to.
When I slid down onto the floor of my parents' bathroom, I held my knees tightly and cried as quietly as I could. For months I knew there was something wrong with my relationship, only today was it confirmed. So, was this really an unexpected journey for me...? It felt plenty expected.

Too many things had happened lately to show that things with my boyfriend of four years weren't what they used to be. Once upon a time, Tate and I had been so in love. Nowadays he paid as much attention to me as he did his old Gameboy. Considering the beat-up piece of technology was stored up high in the closet of our bedroom and barely looked at, that was saying a lot. With time, our conversations had weakened. We stopped going on dates. That was before our overall intimacy disappeared.

During this time, I tried reassuring myself that the distance between me and Tate was simply due to his stressful job as a paralegal at his father's law firm. He was overworked and underpaid. Surely that was what was going to stress any man. But as our kisses grew shorter and Tate's trips out of town grew longer than ever before, I started feeling our happily-ever-after was not as happy as I once imagined it was.

The two of us had met in college. It was a rather simple encounter; boy meets girl, both found the other attractive, and bam – we then morphed into boyfriend and girlfriend for the last four long years. Even though I felt I usually knew where Tate and I stood relationship wise, it had gotten to the point where I could no longer read him. We just weren't in sync, no longer clicking as we used to. No longer spending time as lovers much less as friends.
Four whole months had gone by where Tate stopped trying to place his leg over mine when we were in bed together. Now, we simply fell asleep at night. Tate immediately, me only after a couple hours of staring at the ceiling in silence, wondering where we went wrong.
He avoided my touch whenever he could; almost as if it repulsed him. Even when I wanted to engage in something as minor as a kiss, Tate was too tired or simply not in the mood.

I tried to control my tears so they did not transform into sobs. I was at my parents' house, in the only place I wouldn't have to deal with intrusive questions as to why I was here so late at night for a visit. But I struggled to form a deep breath, I was crying too hard. It was eleven-thirty on a weeknight. Odds were very much in the favor that my parents would be more than curious as to why I came back home instead of staying at the condo I shared with Tate in downtown Charleston, South Carolina.

Then I would have to explain the horrible news of why I drove forty-five minutes at night to see my family. I couldn't stop crying as the memory of three hours earlier suddenly washed through my mind once more. Luckily, I had just entered the bathroom a few minutes earlier; I would not have to explain herself to my family for a few more minutes at least.

Upon the pushing from my exuberant best friend Isla, I took it upon myself to fix the mend in mine and Tate's broken relationship. I bid Tate a goodbye for my own trip out of town for work, not revealing that instead of a three-day trip to New York for the wedding company I work for, I was simply going shopping to buy a few items to prepare for the revival of our relationship. Candles. Takeout from our favorite Japanese place. Lingerie...

In my mind, Tate was well worth fighting for. It didn't matter that my parents had warned me since college that nothing but trouble would come from dating the wealthy man who grew up on Martha's Vineyard. They claimed there was no way our backgrounds could combine. I grew up in a household that survived paycheck to paycheck. Tate had the opposite upbringing. Even though my family meant well in their warnings regarding Tate Mitchell, I lived with a more diverse train of thought. I didn't look at others and judge by the color of their skin or how much the money was in their wallets. I knew what it was like firsthand with personal experiences of racism. My family had often enough had others judge or even dislike us simply because of the color of our skin. Even though my family had warned me nothing but emotional harm would come my way dating Tate, I didn't see what my family saw when they looked at him. Perhaps that was why I missed the warning signs that our relationship was doomed from the get-go.
I had always figured my parents were judging on race; both mine and Tate's. I never thought that maybe they had seen something I hadn't.