Hello - thanks for all your kind reviews. I love to hear your own takes on characters and situations in comments, so do keep them coming... and writers amongst you... please update yourselves, ASAP! I need some new inspiration!
As usual: trigger warnings for references to self harm.
"But you'd never know...
That it took me months to step outside alone.
Because my body still gets tense when I walk home.
Past the spot where it all went dark...
It's like a movie flashing back in parts.
That cuts deep and slow.
Everyone said,
You look fine from the outside,
But in my mind, I was upside down and screaming:
"What the hell is wrong with me?"
Trying to make it make sense,
Making my head spin.
Now I pray to forget,
Cuz I'm still here screaming:
"What the hell is wrong with me?"
- "You'd Never Know" - Blu Eyes
Their increasingly loud voices had now cut out and breathless with exhaustion, it struck them both that there was an irony to this impasse… and a history.
After all, in the end, they had spent the collapse of their marriage doing just this: trying to, as they each saw it, shield the other from emotions they did not want them to see, for their own good… only it drove them so inward until neither felt they knew the other… and felt instead entirely alone.
Here they were again.
At the realisation, Charle let out a humourless laugh and perched, somewhat limply on the edge of the settee.
"Fuck…" he sighed tearfully, his breathing still stuttering with traces of his earlier tears.
Nodding, somehow feeling the cadence and emotions behind that one word more than anything in the last five minutes, she limply dropped herself down beside him, her muscles like jelly.
"Yeah…"
As she watched him for a long moment, he looked down at his wrist, at the scars, and silently shook his head from side to side.
"When I was ill…" he began, trying to clear his throat. "Really ill… I thought I was…infecting you with my sadness… Contaminating you with my bad decisions and my bad judgement and my awful moods… All I wanted was to be with you but all I seemed to do was hurt you… I felt I was dragging you down… I could see you were relieved sometimes to find me busy or sleeping. I knew you wanted my affections and yet it just became harder, somehow to give it, because I felt like a fraud; like someone who did not deserve you. And yet, fuck, I craved you. All those early days where I didn't want you to go abroad and I would barely let you out of my sight… I was… I felt like something was coming, some strange sense of deja-vu… when really, it was my own lack of coping, my own desperate, exhausted attempt to keep up the hamster wheel of this perfect version of myself, I think, beginning to catch up with me… And then… when Elvis…" His posture crumpled as he buried his face in his hands and his voice broke off entirely, rising an octave in deep, uncensored grief – his whole body sagging. "I'm sorry, Molly, I can't—."
Immediately, she forgot her pride, hearing the kind of relentless weeping that rose from him and the tone of absolute loss, she was unable to help but pull his face from his hands, wiping his tears from his cheeks, long abandoning the blanket she'd been holding around herself. "Please, no more cryin', please, I can't bear it—." She gulped a breath as he accepted her affections, still weeping. "Please—look—do ya—would you like me see me' tits, would that cheer you up?" She leant into his face as she said it to catch his eye and watched with a heart that expanded three sizes as he all-but choked on a strangled, tearful laugh at her offer. And, just like the naive Molly of old, who hung on his every reaction like an addict trying to get her next fix, it thrilled her more than she wanted to admit, still, to make him laugh.
"Wha—? Mol—."
She wiggled her bra-clad chest in a mockery of a seductive motion, making sounds of a rather awful impression of a typical 70s porno soundtrack as she slipped a bra strap from her shoulder. He was watching her now, wiping his eyes, sniffling and laughing in that heartbreakingly authentic but fragile way someone does when they've been crying, trying to tell her to stop, but she ignored him. She was unable to face his pain and thus fell into old habits: people please, distract with humour.
Seeing the pain, so distinct and loud in his eyes, she would do anything to never have to look at it again, which must have been why, in some strange autopilot she had all-but forgotten she had, she actually did undo her bra and begin letting it fall. "Once a breast man, always a breast man—."
Earnestly smiling in the way that always used to make her stomach turn over, the pain in his eyes had dulled, the distraction having had the effect she was hoping for. "Oh, Molly—God—I love you," he said, the words slipping off his tongue easily and without forethought in a sigh of post-laughter euphoria.
Immediately, her own giggling had completely ceased as the light, everyday way in which he'd said it stabbed a jolt of nostalgia and pain through her in equal measure.
The shift must have shown on her face, because he swallowed hard and immediately looked apologetic, hurt, sad and wistful at the same time – though he didn't try to take the words back.
He had been laughing quietly despite his tears, shaking his head a little at her in mock admonishment the way he always used to when he thought she was bonkers, but as her naked chest actually came into view, he was reaching for the blanket at her knees and immediately holding it to her chest, clearly not expecting her to actually take it off, looking almost shocked.
Ever always so polite and modest, he didn't even look down as he did it.
While once that would have told her he was caring for her in the way a good husband would be, her rigid, paranoid new self who was crippled by a lack of self esteem and the slight burn of rejection balloon inside her.
Before she could respond, he was leaning forward and adjusting the blanket properly around her as she sat, numbly limp. His touch as his fingers grazed the skin of her back as he encouraged her to cover herself jolted her back into the moment.
"You never need to take your clothes off to make me happy, you know," he said, quietly, pushing back hair from where it threatened to fall into her eye.
She felt her cheeks warm with a wave of embarrassment and wishing she could crawl into a hole, immediately feeling like a slag. "Great, well, sorry—."
"No, no, don't—It's not—," he hurried to correct himself, smoothing gentle hands over her hair, toying with the blunt ends with a tender touch. She held the wool tight against her naked chest now, looking up at him with a wary, tired expression. "I just mean… You're so much more to me than your body." Eye to eye, they shared a long look, an intense, tired, quiet moment of reflection in which she had no idea how to digest. "You always were – but I can't tell you how much I love how you would do almost anything to make me laugh."
While she knew the truth behind those words to be true at some point, to hear them said explicitly after years of estrangement, crushing self doubt and deep-rooted feeling she was never good enough, it left her dumb, fumbling for a response. Deep down, she supposed many women, silently, secretly, always worried that their husbands would not want them, once ageing, gravity and the familiarity of long-term companionship had done away with youthful bodies and novelty.
By the time Charles had moved into their spare bedroom in the depths of his PTSD, she had well and truly fallen into a depression of her own, once again more than ever assuming, just perhaps, that his sex drive, his desire to even be affectionate with her, had gone because she wasn't enough.
"That's why it hurt so much," she said, numbly, staring ahead as though she almost wasn't seeing him, instead reliving past pain. "When you… not only chose Her… but you… you wanted her, too… You wanted to fuck her… when, by then, you didn't want to fuck me."
His expression twisted into an impassioned, earnest frown. "No! It was never about not wanting you… or even wanting her."
"Wasn't it? Oh, forgive me, I jus' thought that's what a cock inside a woman meant."
Seeing the scepticism and doubt haunting her, it suddenly occurred to him that that was why, perhaps, her automatic reaction to try and raise his spirits had been to use her body: deep down, she wanted him to want her that way again. After all, historically, it had been her power over men, having given into sexual favours far too early in her teenage years by her own admission. She had grown up learning to give boys, and then older men, what they wanted from her physically, in exchange for breadcrumbs of their attention… or, in Artan's case, to placate them from turning on her with dominance and bullying.
In that respect, he supposed it wasn't surprising that she had been drawn to the army: a place where, in theory, the uniform, sweat, blood and dirt took away all the usual, sexualised societal expectations of being a woman.
Expect, of course, nothing was ever in fact so simple.
Despite how the army had given her a whole new purpose, it would always be her deep-rooted auto-response… and any rejection of it left her feeling entirely powerless, even after he had spent the healthy years of their relationship, then marriage, trying his best to show her she had so much more to offer the world.
"You are everything I have ever wanted."
"An' she looks remarkably like me," she quipped coldly, her voice hard with scepticism. "Only, with tattooed eyebrows, a better jawline, legs that go on for days and likely not an inch of cellulite anywhere on her body, o'course." Where once, in the days when their relationship was collapsing he would have met her doubt with frustration, then anger or even cold mocking and denial, now, he tried his best to just listen. "That's why I cut off my hair – I was drunk and out of my mind, after… and I felt like I saw her in the mirror."
"She's nothing like you," he murmured, absolutely, hiding his deep sadness at her confession. "I admit, there is the unfortunate and horrendously cringeworthy reality that you are both dark haired medics." His face twisted into a grimace. "But it was… When I was healthy, I would have never have—."
"You're telling me, if she threw herself at you, before you were ill, you wouldn't have even been the slightest bit tempted?" Sitting on the floor, blanket around her, Charles faced her anger with a deep breath.
"You knew I wouldn't have," he said, defiant. "You never once doubted me, back then."
"I have eyes though, Charles - and ears. I hear how the men talk about her: gym bunny, looks like a model, but loves to get down in the dirt and can operate a rifle. She's…the ideal woman—."
He slipped from the settee to meet her on the floor on his knees and grasping her limp hands with his own.
"Not mine," he implored, patiently. "I have loved you since the first day you disobeyed me up on that winch and every moment you made me laugh on that godforsaken tour. You are fierce and lyal and kind and you care too much and I love that you never give up, even when it might mean losing your own life. You taught me so much about a new way of looking at the world and you made me feel so loved… The first time you truly let me touch you—." A tremor ran through his body, thinking of the bliss, his eyes momentarily closing to think of their near-perfect first weekend alone. "I knew I would always be lost..." He touched her, a thumb catching her lower lip gently, before allowing the hand to fall lower, tracing the column of her neck to the sleek, perfect line of her collarbone where it remained exposed from the blanket. "Forever a slave… to wanting you… from the first night… all my life… until I'm grey and old."
Her breathing had changed, shallow and fast as he touched her in the tingling, terrifying way no one else ever had. She cursed her body for its reaction, given so freely and without any consideration for whether he deserved it, always so easily, so desperately, ready for him.
"I am a man," he said, even softer now, as though speaking to a horse that may bolt, any moment. "I used to like to think I was better than the cave-man stereotype so often seen in our profession, whose entire lives revolve around two things: adrenaline from violence and oblivion from sex, and repeat…" Watching her like a fascinating foreign animal, he noted how her breath shook as he thumbed the tiny, tantalising mole at the very top of her left breast, just visible before the blanket's cover. "The truth is, Molly – I am no better."
Her eyes were on his, then, no longer angry, so much as openly alight with hurt, surprise and intrigue.
"We do think about sex fourteen times a day – all of us, and any man who tells you they don't is lying or very poorly – and I would know." He swallowed hard as he reached to again play with the short, blunt lengths of her new hair. "That was always truer with you than it was when I was with any other woman," he confessed, honestly, looking down with a sudden tint of pink to his cheeks. "On tour, it becomes an impossible and endless mental exercise in restraint and distraction, as I know you know… When I was well, when we were out there together, I never found it hard to do, repressed and unhappy as I was… but once I knew you, once I'd had you…" His mouth filled with saliva as he gulped, still not looking away. "I was done for. I had to try every trick in the book not to think of you, so I could lead my men without a raging concealed erection for most of the day."
She giggled at the mental image, despite his serious tone, and he briefly smiled, unable to help it.
"And in that respect, when things went to shit, there is no greater ice water to desire than death and terror. I betrayed you in an unforgivable way I never would have done, had I not been entirely out of my mind – somehow conflating my guilt about E–Elvis—." Saying his name, he momentarily stumbled as he always did, having to concentrate to regain his composure. "-With my desire to…feel useful again, to be able to help Her because she didn't have Elvis anymore either… and my… desperate fear for you, need to protect you which I thought I was doing by letting you go…" He shook his head, trying to find the thread of his train of thought. "And like the typical man I am… I conflated all that with sex, in the end, like a cliche. I needed to feel close to someone, anyone, again… and she was… the only one I felt knew my grief…. She was there, and willing, and as broken as me…"
Molly physically flinched, opening her mouth to protest, but he tightened his hold, this time grasping her face to force her to look at him again and not to run away.
"And it didn't even feel good. I felt nothing, like I was out of my body… and then I felt shame unlike anything I'd ever felt."
"How can I believe you?" she whispered, harshly, her voice anger but trembling with upset.
"It's the truth," he said, without a hint of defensiveness – only sadness.
"You hadn't had sex with me in six months, by then – and you're telling me you didn't feel good when she let you—."
"-No," he said. "It was a relief, I'll admit, to finally allow myself to be touched again, to feel anything other than terror and guilt – but it's like I was underwater. I don't even remember it, beyond the fact I know it happened."
"I suppose I'll 'ave to take your word for it," she said, quietly, trying to move away. "I always felt so good," she said in a tiny voice after a long moment, sounding miserable and tired. "Before. To know you chose me and that you… That women would look at you the way they do and then look at me and know… I was the one you wanted." She looked up into his eyes, defiant. "They would have climbed over one another and offered themselves on a plate to you given half the chance and yet I was the one who got to have you inside me."
The atmosphere between them crackled with a forgotten, long dormant sexual tension at her bold choice of language – an energy Charles had all but forgotten the feeling of. At his side, his hand made a tight, repressive fist.
"I felt the same," he said, his voice suddenly sounding graveling, as though with disuse. "To be seen with you, to have my ring on your finger… and knowing that the world knew you were mine alone…" He swallowed, feeling shame wash over him. "The thoughts it would give me. God, it made me a caveman."
She shivered, though whether it was thanks to her state of undress or otherwise, he didn't know. Thumbing the boundary of the blanket she held against herself, he smiled self-deprecatingly.
"I do want you, even now," he said softly, wanting to take the traces of deep rooted self doubt from her expression for good. "On my knees, on the floor of my parents' bloody library, having cried enough tears to drown in and being a snotty mess…" He shook his head, laughing at himself. "You are irresistible to me… and that's why I can't let myself look at you."
She looked at him with a shy, but gradually evolving, surprise, clearly wanting to believe his words.
"If you don't believe me, drop that blanket and see how I embarrass myself trying to show restraint."
Refusing to break eye contact, a flow of words, unconsidered and uncensored, escaped from her mouth as flashes of the forbidden images of him in the shower came back to her.
"You were thinking of me."
She said more to herself than to him before she could stop herself and felt the hot flush of panic as he squinted, confused and intrigued.
"What?"
"Nothing."
She knew he did not believe her, but he didn't press her again.
"You couldn't touch me, for all that time. All those months I tried to reach you, before I went back to Afghan. You couldn't get hard. You couldn't even look at me, half the time. Then, just once, you'd wake me in the middle of the night like a man who knew his hours were numbered and, just for a moment, it would be like them early days… but it wasn't, was it?"
His cheeks rose pink again beneath his blotchy, teary complexion, but he didn't shy away from the topic, as he once may have.
"Typical for one with PTSD, yes," he said, someone robotically. "To go through a complete feast and famine in terms of affection. I was too in my head to enjoy sex with anyone… and the further from you it made me feel, the more insular I felt. A cycle, really."
"But not now?"
He looked at her then, dead in the eye, a bold look of absolute earnest – and, unable to help himself, almost smirked.
"Now?" He reached for her face again, and this time she didn't pull away, despite the almost frightening intensity of his expression. "I'm back to being tortured with memories of you, reduced to a trembling mess with aching blue balls like a teenage boy more mornings then I care to admit. It's been torture, all these months… but it means I'm not numb, anymore…so, it's strangely welcome. Is that honest enough for you?"
"Yes… Sorry," she said, though it ended up sounding like a question.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a loud, sudden bark of a laugh projected from him, throwing back his head with the force of it. "Oh, Molly, you do make me laugh." The sound made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. "Surely there's no need to apologise for making your husband hard. It's my burden to bear, darling, not yours."
There it was, that term of endearment again - the one he only ever used for her. She felt her cheeks warm and her heart thump against her better judgement.
"Don't you find some relief, somewhere else?" She said the words out of a sceptical, defiant self-sabotage, because the moment she had she realised just how much she may not want to hear his answer. "All women you meet want you."
"I'm a married man."
He said the words like the answer was so obvious - like she missed something so clear. The words sent a jolt through her, her mouth dropping open in shock and incredulousness.
"You have some nerve. I want to hate ya' for being so much stronger than me, even after all you've done to us." She was pulling the blanket taut with strength with which she was gripping the material, trying hard to strain her feelings. "You betrayed me, and yet you're now the tortured celibate, honourable one who only lets himself get off alone in the shower? And yet I'm the slag who's tried and tried and can't even manage to feel pleasure anymore and comes off looking like the slag—How is that fair?"
She had let too much slip – and she knew that by the shock on his face. However, his expression twisted with remorse and again his forehead was against hers, trying to coax her out of her rigid, locked posture.
"You saw me," He said, his words gentle and light with realisation, somehow un-accusing despite all the right he would have to be so.
Her cheeks burned red, looking down at her lap like a child in trouble.
"I didn't mean to. I came to borrow something from the bathroom… and you never lock the door—." She watched him struggle to look at her for a moment, clearly grappling with the loss of pride of being seen, as his cheeks burned a rare shade of red, previously so collected, in the old days at least.
He laughed hollowly at his own predicament, looking down and giving her a shrug.
"Well… What can I say? As I said, I am a man… and you looked wonderful in that bikini. If you wanted proof that it was never about whether or not I wanted you, now you have it."
She sat, unsure how they got here or what to say next.
"I know it ain't the same for women, really, because we don't…get backed up physically if we…ignore our needs for a long time—."
"-Molly," he tried to say, trying to interrupt, but she ignored him.
"I know it ain't the same… but, fuck, I've… felt sometimes like I might go mad… without that… I realised, once you were gone and I thought you and Her would be walkin' off into the sunset… that I couldn't…get my body to want anyone else."
Slowly, they locked eyes again.
"I'd told myself it was just because I was sad an' that someday soon, it would wake up, that part of me… but it never did… Only today, watching you and seeing you wanting, feeling, needing like a human being again…that I realised it's the first time in years that my body felt that, too. It woke up, watching you.. An' I have hated you for that. You – and Her — took any enjoyment in sex away from me."
He was frowning in that way he did when he was feeling guilty, trying to reach for her.
"I'm sorry, Molly. I'm so sorry."
"Please stop saying bloody sorry," she sighed, pushing against his chest enough to meet his eyes. "I'm glad you're doing better – but I'm just so tired of pretending I am."
Charles' pulse leapt at the combination of elation and sorrow his body flushed with at hearing her ant for him and her deep sadness for herself. "Oh, darling." He leaned forward to allow their faces to touch, forehead to forehead, in the way that used to be their secret, little way of saying all while saying nothing. "Should you be worried about me in the way you once were? No." He tried his best to pull back a neutral expression. "But will I ever be the man you knew, a hundred percent better forever?" He looked at her with eyes so full of shame and rubbed them hard, making them red. "No, I won't. We're not all that different in that way."
Hearing the words, even though the reality of which she had suspected for years, rose a single, this time unsuppressed sob from her chest before she clenched everything to try and push her own despair back down. Seeing this, he pulled her closer, burying his face into the curve of her neck.
"Please don't cry for me," he whispered. "I do enough of it for myself."
The attempt at a tearful joke didn't fall on deaf ears, as she gasped out a sudden, reluctant laugh. "Ditto!"
She said the word without really thinking about it and felt how they both froze, momentarily, at the sound of it.
Immediately, he opened his eyes, taking in her bloodshot dark, green eyes as she was on her knees in front of him and feeling breathless at how much they, in this moment, were wide and transparent with hurt and fear, entirely baring her soul. "How can you ask that of me, when I—I was your wife—You were my—."
Immediately, he was trying to pull her to him, trying to explain. "Are. We are. You never signed the papers."
"—After what y'said today—after seeing these—."
He went to speak, thumbing her tear-damped cheeks and swamped in the guilt of how much she was hurting, only for him to lose his voice completely as she turned her face in his hold and, in one simple, intimate act, kissed the wrist that bared his scars. Suddenly, she had that hand in her own, and had very deliberately kissed him again, caressing the raised, brielle of the scars like they were something sacredly beautiful to discover.
Only the tears falling from her eyes told him otherwise.
"Molly—." He tried to say but her name came out so clogged with unshed tears that it was rough and an octave too low. Shame swamped him and told him, on instinct, to pull away, and yet all he wanted, simultaneously, was for her to never stop: the ultimate conundrum and contradiction of human trauma.
"Is this okay?"
Her quiet, unflinching, caring question pulled him up short, as he watched her touching him through blurry eyes with such gentle care, it made him want to weep, feeling so undeserving. In truth, this was a unique experience for him, having spent two years trying everything he could to keep his scars hidden from anyone close to him.
But here, now, it was so intimate, he suddenly felt dwarfed by her ability to face things head on, such kindness, such bravery. "Yes," he croaked in a whisper, leaning to tuck her head under his chin while he surrendered his most vulnerable body part for her continued caress and inspection.
Molly sniffed hard, thumbing the raised scars with increased curiosity.
"Do they hurt?"
She watched his hand momentarily make a fist, a no doubt subconscious reaction to her question.
"Sorry - Y'don't have to…"
"No, no, it's okay." He raised his other hand to stroke her hair, tucking it behind her ear and following it to its blunt end just above her shoulder, still such an alien sensation for him to not have her long locks to touch. "Not anymore." He found his body reacting, as she continued light touching of the sensitive scar tissue and he sighed, trying his best, with relief, to relax into it. "It feels so good to be touched again," he whispered, almost to himself. "I've not let anyone touch them. I don't even want Sam to see them."
She looked up, her expression demonstrating all the conflicted emotions that swirled up inside her, as clear as day.
"You shouldn't hide them from him, Charles," she murmured, sadly, "They're a part of you. Just like I'm sad you hid them and the…fact they happened…from me… He'll know you're hiding something from him… and he will think it's because of something he did."
He looked at her with a gentle, surprised introspection. "You see things so clearly," he said with a thoughtful smile, reaching down to take her hand and kiss the back of it, like he always used to. "You always did."
"Easy to see things clearly when you still have your twenty-twenty vision, old man."
"Oi, less of the old, you!"
Just like that, the tension between them finally cracked, momentarily forgotten - not nowhere near over.
He was sitting back and looking at her with that age-old kind of heavy intensity that only Charles ever did – the kind she would know even from five hundred yards away because of how it rose the hairs on her arms.
God, how she so wanted to hate him for how he managed to do that.