I Love You Always

Can a man's dead wife save him from his abusive girlfriend?

          I longed to hold him, to feel the warmth of his skin as it brushed against mine. I wanted the security of his embrace, the feel of his muscular body wrapping around my own slight frame. I wanted to see his smile, hear his laugh, and feel the love in his eyes once more. 

It had been two years, two years since the accident that changed his life and took mine. 

            He met a girl named Caroline. I was there the day they met, when she stumbled into him, dropping the folders in her arms and spilling their contents everywhere. I saw how he watched her as he helped pick them all up. From the beginning, there was something about her that I didn’t like. She would hit him every time there was the slightest disagreement between them: sometimes playfully, sometimes not. However, as their relationship grew, I saw the light return to his eyes and a warm smile return to his lips, and I ignored it, at least for a little while.

            More time passed and Caroline began to grow worse. She expected things from him, things that he could not do or give and every time he failed to fulfill that expectation, she degraded him. It wasn’t long before the yelling started, then the beating.

            I watched with growing sadness and anger as he hid his bruised arms and torn pride from the world. What he could not hide he laughed off with his friends, claiming to have picked up one kind of sport or another. But no matter how big the bruises, he always went back to her. She was like a drug to him, intoxicating him as her poison slowly tore him apart. No matter how hard he tried, he could not strike her back, could not walk out the door and out of her life. 

            One night, he brought Caroline home with him. They sat on our couch, they watched her movie, and they ate carrot sticks. After awhile, he got up to get them some glasses of water. While he was gone, Caroline began to walk around the room, inspecting its contents. She stopped when she saw the picture of me. Her smile disappeared and something came over her as she stared at my smiling face, something dark, something evil.

            Caroline asked him a question when he walked back into the room, to which he replied in confusion. She got angry and started yelling, jabbing an accusatory finger at my image. He tried to calm her down, but she only grew worse. Caroline knocked the glasses of water out of his hands, shattering them on the ground. She shoved him against the wall, kicking and scratching at his tender flesh in rage.

            I ran up to Caroline, yelling and screaming in fury. I kicked at her shins, scratched at her face, and even tried to bite her arms, but to no avail. My blows passed through her like air and my screams were merely whispers of wind in her ears. I cried in frustration but there was nothing I could do to stop her.

            Suddenly, Caroline stopped and walked toward the front door. I ran to his side and tried to help as he began to push himself off the floor, but my hands just passed right through him. Before he could make it to his feet, Caroline appeared again, holding the nine iron from his golf set he kept near the door. As he looked in her direction, his hand slipped on the mixture of blood and water on the hard wood floor and he fell heavily on his side. She lifted the club above her head, preparing to strike the love of my life.

            Desperate, I lunged forward; reaching for anything on her I could get a hold of. Tears slipped down my cheeks as I closed my eyes, expecting to fall uselessly through her, but as I reached out, my hands grabbed on to something. I opened my eyes to find my slender fingers curled like a deadly snare around Caroline’s neck. She coughed and gagged and clawed desperately at the air around her neck, but her hands pass through me harmlessly. I grinned maliciously as I felt her begin to succumb to my grasp. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted her to pay for what she had done to my love.

            Caroline dropped the club as she collapsed to her knees, still trying desperately to breathe. As the life began to leak out of her, I reluctantly released my grasp on her neck. I wasn’t like her. While I was busy with Caroline, he had managed to crawl into the office, and he locked himself in as Caroline pushed herself to her feet.

            I watched as Caroline took slow, unsteady steps toward the mirror hanging on the wall. She watched as her fingers gently caressed her neck as bruises began to form where my fingers had held her. When the bruises began to take shape, her back stiffened and she slowly turned toward the mantle where my picture lay. With a smirk, she walked over to it and studied it a long while before tipping it onto the floor with a bone-chilling crack and walking out the door.

 

***

 

            The police arrived soon after Caroline left. I followed as he was taken to the hospital in an ambulance and watched as, piece by piece, the doctors removed the glass from his bloody hands and forearms. They never found Caroline.

            He never told anyone the truth about the bruises or what had happened that night. Who would believe him? Who would believe that a big man such as himself would let himself be so utterly destroyed and beaten by a woman? Even if they had found Caroline, who would believe his word over hers if she claimed that he had provoked her? Nobody. So Caroline became a nameless thief and the truth became a secret only I knew.

            A few days after he left the hospital, he came to visit my grave. He gave me a fresh bouquet of flowers and cleared away all of the weeds that had grown around me. He stayed with me for hours, talking and crying. I sat next to him and whispered words of comfort, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me. I held my arms in place around his shoulders, not wanting to let them fall against his skin, not wanting to face the truth as they passed through him, unfelt and worthless.

            After visiting me, he went home. He popped a bag of popcorn, the movie theater butter kind, my favorite. He put in our movie, and plopped down into his spot on our couch, wrapping himself in the blanket I made him. He grabbed a small bag that he had left lying on the coffee table earlier that day and dove his hand inside, producing a beautiful picture frame. The frame was square and made almost entirely of silver that had been masterfully shaped to look like a forest of delicate vines growing out of its glass center. At the top of the frame was a blue flower, a Forget-Me-Not, made entirely of colored bronze. The piece was breathtaking.

            He inspected the frame for a minute before gently turning it over and opening up the back. He crumpled up the useless demonstration photo of a model in a wedding dress and threw it carelessly into the dark spaces of the room. He reached into his pocket and took out a photo, my photo, the one Caroline had destroyed. He gingerly placed the photo into its new frame and secured the backing in place. He inspected his handiwork and then satisfied, laid a gentle kiss on the glass. He placed the photo next to him on the couch and hit play on the remote.

            As the movie began to play, I reached my hand out to him, but stopped myself. He couldn’t feel my caresses nor could he hear my words of love and comfort. I let my hand fall back to my side and I leaned forward, brushing my lips against his cheek. “I love you forever” I whispered before leaning back against the couch.

            Suddenly, I felt something warm against my skin. I looked down at my hand, gently held in his. Our eyes met and a smile grew on his face. Love filled his eyes and I could tell that for the first time in two years, he could see me.

He leaned over and brushed his lips against my cheek. “I love you always.”

Author's Note

This was a competition piece for another site and it did very well in that so I extended it. I'm not looking to do much more with it but please note that the choppy style of writing is ON PURPOSE.

Reviews

[Sami Khalil]

Good write ... Thank you for sharing.

[Kaylor Mason]

This is absolutely, positively, supremely, sublimely beautiful! I haven't read many love stories that were as good as this! This is . . . I don't have the words. Just, yeah--IT IS WONDERFUL!!

[Lauren Smith]

Thank you so much! Your comment means a lot! :-)

[Chris]

it read well. good style and story.

[Lauren Smith]

Thank you!