Happily Ever After? Chapter 2: Josh, a kim possible fanfic

Happily Ever After? Part 2

There are two sides to every story.

That was the theme of the painting Josh Mankey was concentrating on. It featured a beautiful young woman in a Victorian dress who looked like she had fallen victim to some unfortunate circumstance. The dress was very slightly torn, her hair disheveled and her face was smudged. Yet, on that face was a faint, wry smile that suggested she might have more to do with her predicament than it would appear at first glance.

Josh sat down on his stool, rubbing his chin with his free hand, forgetting that there was a dab of paint still on his fingers. He was like that when he was producing something that was purely his. When he was working on a commission, he tended to plan every step of the process out and kept both his work area and his person rather neat.

The commission work paid the bills, or at least the bills that Tara's writing didn't take care of. Enough of it came in that he could no longer call himself a 'starving artist.' It was enough that he finally quit his job as the manager of a local drug store to devote himself fully to his artistic career.

His personal projects tended to be hit or miss. He went into them telling himself they were art for art's sake alone, but he found it immensely gratifying when people would crowd into his friend's gallery to see his paintings. It was also quite gratifying when his work actually sold.

Reflecting on his work, he realized that the commissions felt more like selling out to the almighty dollar than when he had worked in the store. Still, he rationalized that doing so actually gave him more time to spend on his personal projects. The reality was that being the manager, he was the one who had to do everything in the store, but in a white shirt and tie instead of a navy polo like the rest of his staff wore. The hours were longer than he liked as well. One time he did the math and realized that he was actually making less per hour than some of his employees.

He had to be grateful, though. For a guy who dropped out of college to attend a local art school, that was just about the only kind of job he was truly qualified for. His garage band never really took off. In fact, the last time they had played together for real was a couple years earlier on the night he proposed to Tara. It turned out to be another expensive dead-end in his life, something that didn't amount to a hill of beans in the long run. Yet the job, which had seen him through school, had paid for his small apartment and later for his share of the little house, was there until his art was enough to support him…

…to support them, he had to remind himself.

Josh looked across his studio to the hallway of their modest, three bedroom, one and a half bath ranch style house. Of the three bedrooms, only one had an actual bed in it. The medium sized room had become his studio and the smaller one, the one meant for a child, was Tara's office. The door to that room was closed.

It was always closed.

To him it seemed like, at this point in their lives together, they would be spending as much time together as they could. They were still in the early side of their twenties and financially they were in a good position to start a family.

A family was one of the simple, honest things he expected from their relationship. He kind of figured, knowing her the way he did, that once they exchanged their vows, everything would fall neatly into place. They would spend their honeymoon and a few months beyond just enjoying each other's company. Then the kids would come, or at least that was what the thought would happen. He guessed it was his 'good Catholic' upbringing and, at least until the first year of their marriage, he thought that, even though Tara was raised protestant, that she felt much the same way.

Needless to say, it didn't turn out that way.

Josh Mankey had always thought of himself as an artist first and foremost. Everything else in his life, save his relationship with his wife, was subordinate to that end. The work he had done was to make a living, now his work was his life. He was utterly shocked, however, when it turned out to be Tara who would stay up late at night, staring at her computer screen, typing until all hours. It was just her children's books either. Like most writers, she wanted something beyond her normal bread and butter. She wanted to be a novelist. She wanted to put something out that was at least two inches thick and would be on the New York Times bestseller list. Her desire for that was so great she sometimes bumped up against deadlines for her paid work.

That Josh could understand. Her novel was, like the painting currently residing on his easel, art for it's own sake, and the other was simply a means to an end to support that all-encompassing project.

The only problem was, while Josh felt his artistic life and life as a husband were equal partners in his mind, Tara didn't see her own world that way. It seemed, at times, that he was like so much else in her life. Something necessary and comfortable shoved into the background while she pursued her dream. There were times when he felt she was married to that stupid computer instead of him. It sure seemed she spent the better part of her nights with it than him.

Somehow he couldn't keep a certain phrase out of his mind. Growing Apart. That's how Kim Possible described it when they 'broke up.' It just seemed so strange to him to think of it that way. They didn't really break up, because they never really were that together. Neither had ever said the words "Do you want to be my girl/boyfriend?" They were dating in the most technical sense, in that, from time to time, they went out on a date. Actually, the dating part was doing its proper job. For a long time he had been attracted to the strong, independent young woman he saw on TV and around the school, only to find out, when they were together, she transformed into the same giggling, moon-struck girl that every other woman his age seemed to be. It wasn't so much that they grew apart, as they finally recognized that neither was what the other was truly looking for in life. That, and it really was just a few fun dates during high school. As Kim would say, "No big."

Yet that seemed to be exactly what was happening between him and his wife. The first year had seemed so much like an extended honeymoon, at least when the two of them could find the time. It was nice to come home to her open arms each night when the store closed. She may have insisted that certain things would wait until they were wed, but that did not mean she didn't enjoy those things fully. She could be wild at times, wilder than he actually imagined.

More and more, though, instead of finding her in their room, ready to enjoy his company before they went to sleep, she was behind that door. What was worse was he didn't know exactly what she was doing. If she was working on her girl's stories, he would often see some of the early drafts. She valued his input, though he found a lot of it intensely boring to his male sensibilities. Still, he could value the artistic merits and sometimes had something constructive to say.

Her 'novel' was something else entirely. Part of the reason she did not like to be disturbed when she was in there was that nobody but her was going to see it until it was ready for the world. It had not been to her editor, nor to her agent. It resided solely on her hard-drive and whatever backup media she employed. It was almost to the point he wondered if there actually was anything there, as if she only used that as an excuse to be alone for whatever reason. He really didn't think that was the case, but he also could not understand how somebody could pour so much time and effort into something, only to let it languish unseen and unloved.

He put his brush down, realizing he had reached a wall that night. Perhaps later, once he had settled down in the den with a beer (the same expensive, imported Lager he once discovered in James Possible's garage refrigerator) he would be inspired to work on it further, but for the moment he was only wasting time considering something he just couldn't put his finger on.

Josh glanced at the door to Tara's office again, wishing she would come out so they could retire to the bedroom. It had been some time since they were together and he thought it would be a good time for that. Yet he could not bring himself to knock on that door.

Sadly, he shut the door and headed to the bathroom, leaving a single light on over his painting. He often left that one light on, so he could see his work first thing when he returned to it. He would never put it away until he felt it was finished, whether he had to go to his paying projects or not. It would be a while before that one was ready. There was something just not completely right about it, though he couldn't put his finger on it.

Perhaps it was because he was seeing it as he thought it should be, but he had not noticed something about the woman in the painting. She had dark hair and blue eyes, but as for the rest of her, the slender feathers, the round face, she looked like somebody else.

Somebody not Tara.

Somebody he thought he had grown apart from many years before.