Chapter Twenty Six- Heartache

                                    

                                          
"Goodnight Gage" I say bending down to the bottom bunk and sweeping his fair hair over his brow with my hand softly. His eyes are slowly closing after a few chapters of an adventure book I was reading the boys nightly. They didn't often make it past the second chapter. I stand up and smile at Asher. He may be older than Gage but he was still my baby boy when I looked at him whilst he slept. His fair lashes and button nose, soft cheeks and squished lips, his features were not yet changed by hormones. Changes that would come soon as he broached double figures.
I step out of the boys room slowly closing it and move across the hall to Jamesons room. I knock lightly "come in" she calls.
I open the door to find her in bed on her phone "no phones after nine" I remind her.
I reach out my hand to take it, and she hands it over begrudgingly. "Here" I say handing her the book from beside her bed "do what we did in the dark ages and read a book instead" I suggest with a teasing grin.
She rolls her eyes as she takes it from my hand and unfolds the corner half way through where she had stopped reading it last night. 
I lean down and kiss her forehead "love you Jamie"
She looks up "you too mom" 
I turn to walk out "mom" she says again.
I stop at the door, holding it in my fingers "yeah" I ask.
She frowns a little "I hope you're not feeling sad about Leah for too long. Why don't you go on a date with someone else and try and forget her"
"I'm not sure I want to go on any dates for a while Jameson... but I appreciate you looking out for your old mom... don't worry I will be okay I promise" 
"Okay... well I'm just letting you know and reminding you that it's okay with me if you do"
She says.
I blow her a kiss "love you my baby" and I slowly make my way back down the stairs, padding through the kitchen and grabbing a blanket from over the back of a dining chair, before sliding the back doors open and taking a seat out on the lounger. I laid back with the blanket draped around me as I tried to breathe a little easier through the pain. 
The truth is, I was broken, not a little, but a lot. I had to remind myself multiple times a day to breath, and although I kept up my smile at work and put on a front with Mia...I found it painful to just take a breath. My insides felt as if they had been removed and put back in wrong. My heart no longer felt like it beating beneath my breast. It was now in my throat, like it was slowly suffocating me every damn day, knowing Leah didn't want me. She had had cast me aside like I meant nothing to her, and for what?! To instead crack on with Spencer?! 
Love in my experience recently was not gentle or kind, nor much of the love I had felt the last decade. Annie had hurt me just as much as she had claimed to love me, emotionally, and physically. She had cheated on me twice, both times when she was away on business, and both times admitting it to me straight after, almost as if she wanted the reaction from me, to test my resolve under her thumb, and of course, I stayed. I made it worse, made the love more painful to feel, and it cut at away at the core of me each time she would declare it. I had felt love that was pure once before, and this, if it had been love, it was it's more dominant twin, it morphed into it, imitated it, impersonated it, to the point you fell for it and under its spell. Annie's love was love masquerading, and when I realised that, we were already years deep with three children and an infant on my breast. I've never felt so vulnerable. Although I missed Annie in part, I think I just missed the way that even though it wasn't the love I wanted or dreamed of, it was still love. This love was her normal. I missed being loved in any which way, being wanted, and she did that, in her own fucked up way, and to even hear my thoughts now I can feel the tears roll down my cheek, because my god I was so ridiculous to be so weak. I was so trodden down that I had accepted that kind of love instead of nothing. The thing was Annie could be as equally charming and wonderful as she was mean. She would make me doubt myself, all the time. One night in months it could be hell, she could be the devil, and yet the rest she was generous and loving. It was so messed up I couldn't think straight, which was she? The woman I loved or the devil in disguise?!
If Annie came here right now and forced herself upon me...I'm not sure I would even have the strength to end the encounter. The part of me that was riddled with darkness, in the depths of pain, it called out for that kind of self harm. It wanted me to let something I knew was bad, claim me back to torture my soul. Perhaps it was the only love that I deserved... the kind that bit and drew blood straight after a delicate kiss. 
Heart ache, it was messed up. It made you want a person you knew wasn't good for you just to fill that suffocating hole that is left behind, much preferring the habit and the comfort of what you know, even if it was wrong and you knew it. It's hard to walk away from a person who loves you, when you know deep down they aren't for you. Walking away from Annie and asking for the divorce took a lot out of me. To confess it to her and fear it's repercussions, to know she wouldn't allow it but to take the steps away regardless and close your eyes and hope as you stepped away, you weren't aggressively pulled back, kicking and screaming. She had tried, my goodness she had tried, but I was clinging to my own heart and desperately willing it to want more and take more, when more was terrifying too. After years of this I didn't feel like I was deserving, not of love. The love I searched the night skies for, the love in poetry, and in the stars. The love I tasted once before, before it left me for its true and fated destination...no I wasn't worthy of that love... nor deserving. The lump in my throat left by Leah Mitchell was evidence of that... 
Love, you get taught about it, read about it, watch it, you are encouraged to find it, all from a little girl watching movies about princes and princesses, but you're never taught one valuable lesson before you set off on your quest of it. How do you stop it, when it isn't okay, when it's toxic and when it begins to hurt. How do you stop it?!
Heartache... a suffocating sensation that both reminds me I'm alive and have not yet succumbed, but equally teaches me, like a child touching a flame and lurching backward with tears of panic and pain... don't touch that again... 
Lesson learned.