Affairs Of The Heart

🌺U N O

Chapter 1

"Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory."

-Abraham Lincoln

LUCA

The champagne pops like a Beretta and I'm taken back to the days when I used to be in the field when gunshots rained like hurricanes and if one was new to the game, one might piss their pants with fear but for the veterans, there was a numbness to the scene.

It was a nostalgic feeling, one that seemed to come back to me right now, the feeling of anxiety and numbness, minus the piss of course, though I wasn't on the field, no, instead I was at my wedding seated next to the woman who'd I'd only just begrudgingly recited vows with.

She sat frozen in a state like a subject in a photograph. Pretty, she was like a present wrapped up all nicely in a tulle monstrosity of a white wedding dress. A doll she was with her primped and teased dark hair which was pulled up and away from her eggy shape of a head. The girl, Iris, my....wife, stared blankly as a new, sanded down canvas at the odd wedding centerpiece arrangement of orchids with their Purple Hearts. Crimson roses the shade of a fresh kill. And the innocently shaded lavender irises.

The tension between us was very much contrasting with the high paced blend of classical music that charged the room. Aged wine was drunk and course after course was served to the celebrating wedding goers that did not contain any close friends of either party.

I side-eyed the girl and her big, deer-like eyes, it was as if looking at a newborn doe, fragile and innocent. She was an eyesore, so pure it repelled me. And not for the last time I cursed my decision and my father.

"Would you like more wine?" A squirrely little waiter inquired, a bottle of aged Cabernet Sauvignon in hand.

I sent the bottle of wine a withering look. I did not drink wine.

I needed something stronger to deal with this affair.

"No, but you will be getting me a whiskey neat." I pinched the bridge of my nose as the formation of a headache brewed.

"Yes sir, right away." The wine was tucked away quickly by the man whose hands shook more than the earth during a quake.

The shaky waiter who was about to slither off for my request realized that there was indeed a bride by my threatening side.

He spared her and her half-filled wine glass, a hesitant glance. "Er ma'am, would you like more wine?"

Iris heard nothing. So I cleared my throat at the comatose bride I'd managed to get shackled on to me trying to draw her attention. That was ineffective.

"Iris," I said. Her name rolling off my tongue with more distaste than I'd planned. The waiter who stood to the side, watching the scene as if he wanted nothing more than to escape.

Iris' hand rested gently on the silk dinner table, and without much thought or care, I placed my hand atop hers and leaned in close to her ear, my lips just a few millimeters from brushing her pinna.

With a warm, deep and satiny voice I caressed her name. "Iris."

This produced results.

She recoiled with impressive speeds as if a jolt had brought her back to the land of the living. With eyes wide, she gathered herself quickly and like Picasso, paints on the most perfect smile, one learns from many years of practice.

"I'm fine. Thank you."  Iris tells the waiter though it's doubtful she knows what he'd said to her.

The squirrely waiter with the bucked teeth, as if finally freed from our odd pair, nodded and scampered off to get my drink. His speed, impressive. I moved back in my seat away from the girl who cradled her hand in her lap as if nursing it. You'd have thought she'd been electrocuted and not simply touched by the man she'd just been wed to.