Disclaimer: Desperate Housewives absolutely is not mine, and I'm not doing any of this for profit.
Story Summary: Leaving is easier than finding his way back. Spoilers for the finale. Rated M for language and sexual content.
Maelstrom
By Ryeloza
Part I
i.
He buys cereal that doesn't promise him a healthy heart and eats it out of a too-white bowl with a spoon that will never be the child's one he had to settle for because the dishwasher hadn't been run the night before. The plates and knives and forks remain untouched; he grabs dinner at the office, sometimes comes home and eats soup that warms up in the microwave straight out of the bowl, or orders pizza and leaves the box sitting out on the counter for days. It is quiet there. He moves the television into his bedroom and falls asleep to the flickering light—old reruns of sitcoms where conflict is resolved at the end of a half an hour—and starts functioning on about three hours of sleep because he tosses and turns for hours before he finally loses consciousness. Tells himself it's not because the bed sheets don't smell like her perfume.
His clothes are still in his suitcase. He has to get up early every morning to iron, pressing off his pants and thinking about how he'll have to do laundry soon. It'll be the perfect excuse to finally fill up the closet.
He definitely doesn't think about how much he'd like to zip that suitcase shut and go home
ii.
The kids come on Sundays. The girls come on Sundays. Porter, Parker and Preston stonewall him like he's the enemy, and he's hurt enough to want to ask Penny if they're doing the same to their mother, but not desperate enough to lay that bitterness on her.
Yet.
It's probably just a matter of time.
The visits are indescribably awful. Paige is mobile now and he has to confine her to her highchair or the portable playpen because the apartment isn't baby-proofed and he can't bring himself to do anything about that for reasons that he won't admit but he knows have a lot to do with permanence. Sometimes he holds her and breathes in her baby scent and makes goofy faces just to hear her laugh, but it makes him ache all over because that used to be everything and now it's not. Now there's work and important clients and accounts that could mean his job if they're lost and it's so much fucking pressure that he feels it like a headache behind his eyes every moment of every day. Now that has to be everything because if he loses it, there will be nothing.
The first few times, Penny asks him when he's coming home. She talks to him with all the naiveté of a child and the pain of an adult, and he can see how they've broken her in such a way that it's never going to heal. This will be that scar she carries with her into adulthood that will make it hard for her to trust men or open up to people or commit in a relationship. It's so fucking poetic. His father is the reason he hopped from bed to bed in his twenties, never committing, never trusting himself or anyone else. His father is the reason that he spent so many years fearing to ever make one fucking misstep, keeping his mouth shut and trying so hard not to turn into that man. And it happened anyway.
And, of course, her mother is the reason for everything from the faint scars on her body to her control issues to her fear to give in to that urge to drink when she's depressed. Really, in comparison, their kids are walking away with minimal damage; they should be grateful.
He still feels guilty as hell.
iii.
There's this horrible realization that every song he hears reminds him of her.
He's listened to the same radio station on the way to work for years now because they play trivia games in the morning ("The average American consumes 759 of these a year"—soda) and he likes to guess the answers. But they play all these cheesy love songs and ballads and crap like Journey in between the questions that just get into his head for the rest of the day. It's like having a reminder of her on infinite repeat.
It's bad enough that his office is nothing but a sick joke now because it echoes with their fight, and he still nearly calls her every day to say he won't be home for dinner before he remembers that she doesn't fucking care.
iv.
He's always had kind of a natural charm, and he's not as naïve about his effect on women as he was when he was a teenager. Still plays it off as innocent, though, because for years and years and years that's all it was. So when he's somewhat accidentally flirting with Rita in accounting as he hands over his travel receipts, it's kind of a shock when she rubs his forearm and bats her eyelashes flirtatiously. When he pulls away like he's burned, it's not because he's thrown off by the attention; it's because for the first time he thinks he could do something about it.
The rest of the day he's useless as his mind keeps going back to that moment and he thinks about what it would mean to drive Rita back to the apartment that night and kiss along the long, tanned column of her neck and twist his fingers in her dark hair and make her moan. He thinks about how meaningless it would be to fuck her. He thinks about how her scent would get all twisted up in his sheets and he'd probably have to get new ones after because washing them just wouldn't be enough.
Betrayal.
That night he goes home so pent up that he immediately strips down and hops in the shower, stroking himself until he's hard, one hand braced on the tiled wall of the shower as he squeezes his eyes shut and jerks off. But it isn't dark brown eyes and artificially curled hair that he's picturing. Instead he thinks of her and how hurt she'd be if he had done what he could have done. He pictures her big blue eyes, broken like waves cresting toward the sand, and gets off on the thought that he could still cause her pain.
Every fucking day she's in his head, and it's hard to imagine that she—tough-as-nails, unbreakable, hard, unflappable—shares this torment in any way. After all, she let him leave. She was fucking relieved, like she was cutting off some cancerous tumor from her life. But that would break her. Betrayal would break her.
It's an indescribably sick turn-on, knowing he could still destroy her.
v.
He gets plastered on his birthday.
He leaves work early for the first time in weeks and sits alone in the apartment throwing back shots of whiskey. He keeps all the lights out. Not even the TV is on because it's in the fucking bedroom and he refuses to go in there tonight. He refuses to lie there imagining her lips and tongue and soft, soft skin and the sounds she makes when he touches her. Not tonight.
It's just so fucking ridiculously unfair how much he still loves her. She's like poison in his bloodstream, slowly killing him, and there's no antidote. He thought this—moving out, distance, leaving her—would be the cure. He'd get her out of his brain and his heart and his soul and be free.
He's slowly realizing that's impossible. Doesn't want to admit it, but deep down knows it's true.
He's a masochist or an addict or something. Yeah, an addict. Addicted to her. Addicted to that ambivalent feeling of frustration and chivalry whenever she tries to micromanage his life. God, it drives him fucking crazy, and at the same time, he feels like he's some kind of hero when she looks at him with those big eyes and he knows that he's giving her everything she needs. It's such a big part of why he left—of why he thought he needed to leave—and it's so damn ironic that he misses that about her now. He misses the high he got when her eyes lit up and she smiled like he gave her the world just because he let her choose where they ate dinner or went on a stupid vacation.
What he doesn't miss is that low feeling when it went the other way. When she made him feel like a child that couldn't make a decision to save his life; when she made him feel like next to nothing in his own home.
She just can't fucking understand that. Or he can't communicate it. Maybe it's both somehow. What he does know is that taking that control away in those little ways that always made both of them feel good was not the solution, and he thinks if he could just go back and erase buying those plane tickets to Hawaii then maybe he wouldn't be sitting alone in the dark right now, miserable and alone.
He thinks about calling her, but he's too drunk to remember where he put his phone. Instead he just keeps drinking until he blacks out, until he's no longer thinking about whether he's ever going to be able to touch her again.
The next day, he won't remember that impulse, but he'll still feel that longing to talk to her.
vi.
He reaches the bottom of his suitcase on Monday. Finds a pair of her panties tucked into the pocket of his pants and spends twenty minutes cursing her because he wants to believe she did it on purpose, but knows deep down that she didn't.
He spends the day pretending it's not weird that he carries them in his pocket like a secret he's proud to keep.
vii.
She is routine. Part of that whole control thing—like the world will end if she goes to the grocery store on Wednesday instead of Thursday. Not that it doesn't come in handy, sometimes; specifically now that he's going through withdrawal. That's why he schedules a fake meeting on Thursday morning and drives thirty minutes across town just so he can accidentally-on-purpose run into her while she's picking out watermelons.
She looks better than he wants her to. Obviously she hasn't been sleeping enough if the dark circles under her eyes are anything to judge by, but other than that she's so her that it hurts to look at her.
"What are you doing here?" she asks when he sidles up next to her. He stares at her like a man parched with thirst after wandering the desert for too long, wondering what it means that she doesn't sound horrified or upset or happy or anything other than mildly curious. "Shouldn't you be at work?"
He could fly off of the bitterness behind that one word.
The thing is that he doesn't know what to say now that he's here. Mostly he wants to touch her. He wants to touch her so badly that his hands are trembling. He wants to see if his hand still fits perfectly against her hip and if her hair is still as silky as it's always been and if her nipples will harden if he brushes her breast with the pads of his fingers. And he should be able to do all of that because she's still his fucking wife, damn it, and the urge to push her against the fruit stand and remind her that they're still married is almost overpowering.
"I have to do laundry."
She raises an eyebrow, eyes cool, and he wishes there was some kind of emotion there.
"I don't have any detergent," he babbles. What the fuck is he even saying right now?
She digs into her purse, gets out her checkbook. "Here," she says, pulling out some kind of coupon. She's halfway to handing it over when she pulls it back. "Oh wait. I forgot. Money is no object, right? I bet it makes you feel like a big man, paying full price."
God fucking damn it all to hell.
He reaches out and snatches the coupon from her fingers, rips it in two and doesn't bother to watch the tattered pieces float slowly to the floor. They're glaring at each other and her breathing is shallow like she's turned on or something which is just too much because he is turned on, and the next thing he knows, his arms are wrapped around her and his mouth finds hers and they're making out in the middle of the produce aisle. Her hands are threaded through his hair and he nudges his knee between her legs and their tongues are practically at war and it feels fantastic. How has he gone five weeks without doing this?
She pulls away from him without warning, eyes flashing red even as her chest is heaving, her lips swollen and cheeks flushed. "What the hell are you doing?" she snaps, as though she was an unwilling participant. It makes him mad enough that he squeezes her hips too hard, hard enough to bruise, and he grins when she sucks in her breath. "Are you insane?"
"Yes." He rubs his thumbs over the tough denim of her jeans like he's soothing the wound he just created. "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing without you."
She pulls away from him, shaking her head and dropping her eyes. "No. No, no—You don't get to do this to me."
Like she's not the one calling every fucking shot here. "Do what?"
"This," she hisses, gesticulating between them with a sudden viciousness. "Kiss me like that and then go back to your apartment like nothing happened. Kiss me like that after you haven't talked to me in a month! Just—No."
She storms away from him then, and he doesn't go after her.
He just stands there and takes a sick pleasure in knowing she's going to have to come back to the grocery store some other time.
viii.
He does laundry that weekend. Hangs up his clothes in the closet and kicks his suitcase until it hits the wall.
It doesn't make him feel any better.