1A/N: I got the idea for this while watching Imagine Me and You, the most beautiful movie ever and then while listening to "Leaving on A Jet Plane" which is sang by Chantal Kreviazuk, though she didn't write it. I am warning you now, this won't get continued although I am a little unsatisfied with the end, so I may add to the end at some point. But here it is.
Hastily Scrawled Promise
By BoarderKC
She had left him with a kiss and her ring folded in his hand. She had left in the middle of the night, crept from their bed and disappeared without so much a whisper in his ear. He was a light sleeper and her body was a warmth that didn't disappear without notice. So, he watched her leave, the darkness hugging close to her naked body as he clutched to the tiny band of metal that still radiated heat into his palm. He closed his eyes against the sound of her dressing and the front door closing.
In the morning he found a note. When I come back, I'll wear your wedding ring.
He wanted to pretend he hadn't been expecting it. He sat at the kitchen table from which he could see the front door and waited. He played with the ring she had left tucked in his hand, waiting for hours in his bathrobe, hoping the front door would open and there she'd be. She'd look flustered, but she'd be laughing. She was always laughing.
It was why he loved her.
But he knew she wasn't going to just turn around. And he was a fool for waiting. But as the evening darkened his apartment, he turned away from the unopened door and left the ring on the table in plain sight of anyone entering.
He didn't want to admit that he had been waiting for this. When he had proposed, she argued. They laughed about it later, her voice thick and warm like honey, but at the time it had wrenched him apart as she begged him to get off his knee in a fragile voice he never heard from her. That wasn't the track they were on she had argued. She wasn't the marrying sort she had said.
But he hadn't let her off. She would roam around forever if allowed and he had already gotten her this domesticated, as she described it and he believed that he was enough to keep her settled. So he argued back with all the force his debate team training gave him and he weaved stories of dream lives, perfect homes, loves that lasted lifetimes like arguments until she said yes, as if it was the only way to make him stop.
And now she was gone, with only a hastily scrawled note as a makeshift promise to return. He didn't fear she wouldn't come back, what he did fear is what would be in her place when she came back.
He knew where she had gone. He could have even followed her if he had desired. Across the city, to the slums where the artists lived hallowed lives, in their bohemian style that he didn't quite understand. All rat-holed apartments, frozen nights with no food or heat and free love with no bounds and no genders. Back to her best friend, his rival to her affection, back to the warmth of only her best friend's bed, back to the life he had saved her from. He never could understand why she was so terrified to leave it.
She had made flights like this before. When things got too heavy, she'd run back, pulling on the street clothes she kept hidden from him in the back of the closet. A dirty hoodie and ripped jeans, souvenirs of shelters and youth centers, that she had managed to cover in paint and ink in her bohemian, impoverished lifestyle. And she'd return to the disgusting apartment that he had only seen once; back to that roommate, that friend, that lover that seemed to hold her hypnotized to the romance of disease and death and poverty. Things he didn't understand, but knew he would always lose to.
Please review, guys. It keeps my going.