She looks so pretty, but the martinis are a bad idea. She hasn’t eaten all day and is already halfway through the second one before the waiter comes by for our order.
She’s in her ebullient stage, laughing out a story I’ve heard before. I laugh along, watching for the change. I know it’s coming.
I know that later all the forgiven arguments will come roaring back as though we’d never stopped fighting, all the healed wounds reopened and fresh.
The waiter opens a bottle of wine. She tells him to let it breathe, to bring two more martinis in the meantime. I smile, my palms damp on the tablecloth.
How will it end this time? On the drive home, her snatching at the wheel and screeching at me to pull over? Will she fling her rings into the gutter as before, stomp into traffic on unsteady heels, clutching her coat and yelling obscenities?
Or maybe she’ll she wait until we are back in our living room, the sitter gone home and the kids sleeping upstairs while she paces with balled fists, her face mottled with bottomless rage?
She lifts her glass. “Cheers,” she says, eyes glittering.
Stellar little piece of fiction. Artfully captures a toxic relationship. The ironic “Cheers” puts just the right twist on it (pardon the pun).
Pretty sure it was an olive, but I get you. ;-)
You have your martinis your way, I’ll have them mine. ;-)
Nice job of putting a reader on edge in record time. Love it.
Maybe she is drowning out toxicity in alcohol. Repeating the same stories draws both further in the dump. Good story!
There’s a relationship that’s the definition of a self destructive cycle.
If he already knows what’s about to come, I wonder about the nature of the relationship. Seems like a co-dependent one to me. A brilliant depiction of a dysfunctional relationship. Well done, sir.
Ow! I didn’t want to like this, but you’ve done it so well…what is hurting her so badly, I wonder? I bet her relationship with her parents is at the root of it.
I bet those poor kids won’t really be sleeping. This was very real.
You illustrated so well a utterly grim situation.
I wonder if he is telling the side only he sees or if there is much more underneath. Sounds like a very unhappy relationship. Good story.
Not a happy, or sane, relationship. Poor guy. Maybe he will come to his senses, take the kids and leave.