Not exactly fluffy, but with a soft centre. A piece for Shelle fans for Christmas.
I disclaim, but I also stand between you and perjury wielding a cricket bat.
Prologue
He didn't know how he was ever going to explain his actions when her blue eyes were staring him in the face, those blue eyes he had once loved so much, except that now he knew what he had felt had never been love. Infatuation, desire, obsession, attraction, sexual magnetism, any of those, or others, but never love. He was a coward and he knew it, but Shawn Douglas Brady couldn't bear to return to her and tell her that their engagement was off, that he no longer loved her, and to see the heartbreak in those sinfully beautiful eyes.
So he put pen to paper, and let his emotions flow. He left the heading blank, incapable of describing his emotions or relationship to her anymore and finding writing her name without further ornamentation was too painful.
'I don't know what to call you, for by the time you finish this letter, you may not be my lover, my fiancée, or my friend, though I hope this last you will remain.
'I don't want to do this to you, but I have no choice. I must tell you honestly what has happened and why we can no longer marry. I do not ask for your forgiveness. I would like it, but I will not pressure you to say what you do not feel and to forgive actions you can neither condone nor bear. I only condemn my own actions as far as regards you. I cannot regret the rest, except that I have caused you pain which I have never meant to do.'
He put his pen down and leaned back into the hard motel room wooden chair, staring at the rest of the blank sheet of white paper. He couldn't go on without feeling the memory of the last day run and rerun through his mind like a movie stuck on replay.
It had all started so innocently. He had been sent by his fiancée to buy a tuxedo in the only store that stocked the one she wanted for him in America. It was just like her to desire perfection in even the smallest details. It had been for their wedding, a wedding that would now never take place; and she had planned it to the last bud on the last rose of the guests' tasteful gift baskets. He had been charmed, at first, by the way she had organised their lives, making sure that nothing went unaccounted for and everything was where it was meant to be when it was meant to be, but sitting alone though not lonely in the motel room that was his temporary home, he felt that, for such a young couple, they had lacked spontaneity and passion. They had behaved as if they had been married for twenty years already, and were settled into their pattern of life, which in a way they were.
He had known her for as long as he could remember living, and he had thought he was in love with her for years, but at twenty two, he had come to realise that whatever he felt for her was not young love, but a kind of habitual liking that was based on nothing more than a shared life and was as shallow as her appreciation for well cut clothes. It was bitter to realise it, but it gave him a freedom he had not known could exist. If he did not love her, the vague dissatisfaction with their relationship that he had always felt was explained, and could be justified. That alone was a heavy weight off his broad shoulders.
Sighing, he allowed the memory of the last day to take control, and forgot all about the letter he was supposed to be writing his 'beloved'. She would have to wait for the explanation of why he wasn't ever coming home to her. He had other things to think about as he sat alone but not lonely in that motel room only twenty-four hours away from Salem.