"I'm sorry." Julia said. "I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me." She bent over the purse she'd dropped onto the floor and started packing its spilled contents back inside it. "I guess I just wasn't ready… I wasn't ready for you to look at me." She started crawling across the floor on her hands and knees, following the lipstick that had rolled under Scott's hospital bed, until her head disappeared underneath it, too.
Scott shook his head slightly. Julia had been coming to visit him for days, but their conversations had always been stilted and formal. Suddenly, Scott was seeing a very different side of the woman who claimed to be his wife, and it was bizarre.
Her voice continued, muffled by the bed. "I mean, it's been so long and then you woke up, but you wouldn't open your eyes and I thought there was something wrong with you or me and I just didn't know what to think."
She crawled out from under the bed, and sat back onto the floor with a huff of breath. She again lifted the strand of hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. She looked up at Scott with her shining brown eyes and she smiled an infectious smile. She held up the tube of lipstick, and laughed. Her cheeks reddened with embarrassment, and she dropped the tube into her purse. Looking down, she shook her head. Her hand went to the bridge of her nose, and her shoulders started shaking as she broke into a silent sobbing.
Scott didn't know what to do or say. He didn't recall ever seeing this woman before in his life, and here she was crying her eyes out before him, overjoyed that he'd opened his eyes to look at her. As strange as the situation was, as before, Scott couldn't help but empathize with the woman. Her emotions were so raw and her honesty so intense that Scott was overwhelmed by them. Her actions reminded him of Jean, but Jean had always been more refined. Or was she… less real? Scott asked himself.
Quickly banishing the thought, Scott focused on the matter at hand. He had a job to do. He had to pretend to be this woman's husband, and he was going to be convincing. He reached his hand over to Julia's, which was resting on the bed, and laid it gently on top of hers. Julia's fingers wrapped around his tightly, and she raised her now blood-shot eyes to look at his. "I'm sorry," she said, sharply shaking her head, trying to force her tears to stop. "You don't need this. It's just been really tough without you, and today's been a bad day." She threw up her free hand and it landed with a thump on her leg, curled under her. She took a deep breath and let it loose slowly.
Scott found himself remembering all of the times he'd been there when the woman of his life was suffering. He knew it was in a woman's makeup to feel intensely—more intensely than he ever would. How often Jean had asked him to try and understand how she was feeling. Scott had sincerely tried, but he didn't often deal in emotions or feelings. During those times, though, he'd always been Jean's support. He wanted to be her rock. The stability she could find when everything else was sweeping away like sand.
Fighting down the pain from his memories, Scott's rubbed his mouth and chin roughly with his left hand. He, too, took a deep breath, trying to stop the tide of mourning he suddenly felt. Wiping a tear from his eye, Scott finally got into character. Swallowing hard, he lifted his hand from Julia's and placed it on her cheek. With his thumb, we wiped away the tear stains. Julia closed her eyes and touched his hand.
"I missed you," Julia whispered.
Seeing an entirely different face than Julia's through his teary eyes, Scott whispered back. "I missed you, too."
--Author's note.
I know this is a short entry, even for me. But I felt like I would lose some emotional impact if I kept the chapter going longer. My apologies, and I will continue to strive to keep the story moving.