When the doors close and the lights dim | Cobert AU Drabble

It is probably in bad taste.

Of course, it isn't like they planned for it to be this way. But it hadn't been terribly difficult to fall into the same pattern, the same routines, when life had thrown them together after so many years apart.

It had been what? So many years, too many years since they'd last been together, and even longer when they had this – blissful, ignorant, careless happiness, teemed with lust that made their nerves tingle every moment their eyes even met. It's so much like that now, when they moved across the ballroom and stole looks at each other, while pretending to still hate each other, and pretending to pretend getting along, because when the doors close and the lights dim, it's an entirely different story. It's not very different when they glance at each other during the rehearsals or the endless parties or the never ending reunions, wishing they could get out of there…together…and then get naked…together.

That had been so long ago. News from yesteryear, ancient history, done and over with….

…yet, somehow, it's become current events.

As it is, stories hardly ever came to be without a beginning, and theirs had been a whirlwind one. They met at a party when she had been on a month long trip to London, and started going out casually. She had, idiotically now she recalls, fallen so deeply in love with him, that it hadn't really mattered to her when she had fallen pregnant with their eldest daughter, barely a year after they started dating. It hadn't even occurred to her then that at the precise moment she'd found out she's pregnant, they'd barely said I love you to each other. She'd pretended not to know that he had been forced to marry her out of honour and out of duty, and when their first child had come screaming into the earth, he'd been distant and aloof, looking curious but confused. She hadn't noticed because she had been overjoyed, over the moon to be sharing such special gift to the man she'd sworn, with her lovelorn 25 year old heart and love soaked brain, that she will be loving and staying with for the rest of her life. She'd been right about the former…the latter…well, not so much.

When he had finally told her he loves her, it was nearly a year after they married, and it was a glorious feeling…somewhat an explosion in her brain, and it is then that she'd realized how she'd missed out on that…on confessions of deep and amorous, irrevocable love, before her child had come along and she'd been too busy to notice the absence of it. She'd brushed it aside, happy enough to have known that he's finally in love with her the way she is with him.

Their second daughter came along after that, and two years later, the third one came. They had lived a happy, blissful life together. Fifteen, long married years together, all burnt down to ashes. In retrospect, she should have expected it. Theirs had been a story of uncertainty from the very beginning, and she had been holding on too much for it to have become a reality.

Fifteen years after they married, her father died. She had been too grief stricken to function, had fallen deep into depression that neither her husband nor her children could save her from. She'd pined and pined for the man who had loved her long before her husband had, and she had deep regrets over the fact that her relationship with her father had drifted when she married her husband and she moved to London to start a life with him. She had regretted so much that at the last moments of his life, she had not been there.

Then the will came, and she'd found out that her father had left her an incredible amount of money and a good chunk of the company. She had thrown herself in that then, had given it her all because she wanted to keep her father's legacy alive. She never forgot about her family, about her husband and her children, and she tried to make sure no one felt neglected, but she needed this, needed to keep her father's memory alive, if only in the company he's spent his whole life building. She had not realized how that would topple her marriage over. She hadn't realized how badly that would make her husband feel that he'd felt the need to find comfort in someone else.

The pain that shot through her heart when she found out had been intense, all consuming, but she refused to let herself be defeated by depression again. She pushed herself and pushed herself and made a life for her own.

And here they are. Seven years later, and their daughter is getting married. It would have been the first time they'd see each other since their bitter divorce. She thought she'd be stronger. She thought she could fight off the charm and the bright blue eyes that made her melt.

She thought she was over him, because the woman he had left behind had been burned into ashes and rose from the flame. And she's different. She is stronger, over him.

Except she's not, and it hadn't even taken her a few days before she'd fallen into bed again with him. It hadn't taken much cajoling or charming on his end to get her naked and writhing for him. She hates herself for it, hates that she cannot resist him, hates that she's 47 and still helplessly in love with the man who broke her heart and trampled on it like she meant nothing.

Maybe that's true. Maybe she never meant anything. Maybe the love they shared for 15 odd years was nothing but a lie. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But it doesn't matter now, because she's here, and she will continue to do this even as she hates herself. She'll tell herself that it's just an itch she needs to scratch, and he's familiar and it's easy with him, but it doesn't mean anything. She'll tell herself that when the party is over, the doors opened and the lights are on, it'll be over. After they give away their first child for marriage, it'll be over. They'll go back to their old lives, apart, and they will go back to not speaking again.

She'll console herself with the idea that is just for now, when nostalgia fills them up and the melancholy of their oldest marrying is real and poignant.

Then she'll go back to her old life, and he to his…but not till then, not when the doors are closed and the lights are dim.

FIN _(04/22/2019)

A little drabble requested from tumblr. Let me know whatcha think!