Dead Flowers | H.S.

Chapter Eleven

It was routine to wake up by myself, still nude, soft with Harry's lingering kisses against my skin. I had grown so accustomed to it that I nearly looked forward to my time alone to rest before Harry and I would be rolling around the bedsheets again, reaching over into his cold spot and inhaling his intoxicating scent.

On that early morning in the middle of an August storm, I woke up with the cramping of my menstrual cycle. I stilled in my bed, staring up at the churning fan and the popcorn ceiling I had always wanted to prod.

My legs ached from my cramps and my head began to pulse at the thought of another painful cycle without any sort of relief. My mother hadn't let me take Asprin since I was a little girl and my fever reached 101.

"I grew up with my mother making me take shots of bourbon, Jane," she always sighed whenever I interrupted her magazine reading with my complaints of pain, "you'll live. If you cannot handle menstrual pain, imagine how shocked you'll be when you have children."

The thought seemed to make her smile each time she said it, a smile that taunted me and my weakness. She had done something-twice-that I hadn't ever done. I knew, in that way, she felt above me.

I peeked down quickly to make sure that I wasn't bleeding on my sheets and then stood up for a long, long stretch.

Each time I awoke after Harry left, I looked for the pieces of him he left behind like a trail of crumbs. That morning, he had left fat water droplets on the window sill from his sneaky escape. He had turned the record player off, although it had spun aimlessly all night, and even put the record back in the casing. Beside the bed, there was a wet spot where we had left our towels after a passionate hour and a half in the shower. He had hung them up, left my room spotless. Erased nearly every one of his traces except for a ruby ring that had fallen off on my bedside table. He had left notes in the past, hidden inside the bathroom in the shower or in the drawer where I kept my tooth brush-all places that my parents wouldn't look. He was smart like that.

I checked the time. 7:20 AM. I had time to call him before he went to his new job at the book shop on Sunny Side Road.

Dialing his number, I remembered each kiss he had pressed to my neck, each breath that had ghosted over my lips.

He answered on the first ring.

"Can't stay away, can you?" His voice was deep, rocky like gravel. He was tired, I knew. I was tired, too.

"I only called to tell you that your ring is here. The ruby one."

"You didn't call to tell me how much you miss me?"

Imagining him on the other side of the phone, rubbing his heavy eyes, taking a seat on a couch, maybe, listening to my voice with a smile-it was the only thing I could do to distract myself from the darkness under my eyes.

"To be fair, I do miss you. Very much, in fact. So much so that I'd like to see you right now," I teased, sitting on the tangled sheets in my bed. They were cold, but I tucked myself safely under them, distracted from the pain of being a woman by Harry.

"Oh, is that so?"

"It is," I poked my lip out, felt it with the same fingers that had felt his, "and I would like to kiss you and lie in bed naked all day."