AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What do you mean?” Marin leaned on her elbow, pulling up the sheet to cover her almost naked body. Fear and embarrassment flushed her face in strokes of pink and red.
Julia turned towards her–well past the point of feeling the need to hide her bare body from the woman who could identify every stretch mark on it. She held a hand up to Marin’s face, gracing it so sensually with her thumb before dropping it to the bed.
“All of those reasons,” Julia quietly spoke, tears clouding her vision once again, “all of those reasons you left before still exist. I’m still the same person who drove you away. Even if we do this–even if we allow ourselves this one time–they’ll always be there. I’m too old to fix myself.” A tear escaped her eye and plopped onto the disheveled sheet below her. “And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trying to fix us anymore.”
This was goodbye. It was the moment when all the chess pieces fell in line. The game was over.
Marin’s eyes were now full of tears, too. They glistened too brightly, making Julia too aware of all of the pain they held. She folded into her, their warm bodies pressed together as one while they clung on. Every year of happiness, every moment of pure ecstasy, every laugh, every smile was squeezed into that embrace.
It would be too easy to release into the comfort of Marin’s body–too easy to forget that it would mean something–and allow herself to take the skin that was once hers. But it would never mean what it used to. They could never have what they once had. No amount of plaster or putty would fix it.
“You will forever be my once in a lifetime love,” Marin cried into Julia’s ear, her hair soaked with years of regrets.
Julia didn’t realize how much she needed to hear that–how much she needed to know that she meant more than the exit Marin made from their lives.
“And you will forever be mine,” Julia’s voice broke, but she refused to sob.
She held onto the woman who was once the light of her life as she held her own breath, too afraid of what might break, what might crumble within her if she let it go.
The sun disappeared over the horizon and left them curled into each other’s arms in dusk covered darkness–their bare bodies still twisted into the other with nothing but a cold sheet draped over them as armor.
Somehow, laying there listening to Marin’s breath heave and fall–the warmth of her vulnerability wrapping her in such deep comfort–was more intimate than any love making could have been. For the first time in what felt like a never ending cave of blackness, she found home once again, but now for the last time.
Chapter Twenty-Five
As awful as it sounded while contemplating it in her head, she wondered if she made a mistake as she watched Marin drive away the next morning. If that lump was really something–if this was all the time she had left–why shouldn’t she spend it with the woman who knew her best?
She was too good for that, right? She was too mature to use someone just to not be alone in the end–just to not have to spend what could be a numbered amount of nights in an empty bed–or through a sickness that might take her body. Right?
As they slept in each other’s arms, they finally got the closure they both deserved. They said everything they were holding back–decades of wants and needs unmet–an entire outline of what they should have done.
This time Marin left for the right reasons, and that was okay. For the first time, Julia knew she would be okay. She knew there was no extension of herself within another being. She didn’t need her breath to continue breathing herself. Maybe she’d been okay for a long time. Maybe the cuts started healing long before she noticed the tug of scarred skin.
She stood in the entryway, staring out at the empty driveway. Tire tracks traced Marin’s departure. She wrapped her robe tighter around her body, noticing all at once how tired she actually was. Then her phone rang.
A moment of fleeting panic gripped her circulatory system as she picked it up–too afraid that her doctor’s name would appear across the screen–too afraid that it might not be her.
A sigh of relief escaped as she read Keegan’s name across her phone.
“Hello?”
“Jesus!” Keegan exclaimed. “You’re alive!”
“Oh, stop.”
“I’m serious. Do you know how worried I’ve been?”
“Why? Everyone gets sick. I just need a few days to recoup.”
“Recoup? Julia, you’ve come to the school with the flu, barely able to stand, and hid in your office fully available on Zoom if anyone needed you. That one time, you had your appendix removed in the morning and made it to the board meeting by afternoon. You don’t take sick days.”
“This is an especially draining bug,” she lied. “I’m still not feeling well, but I’ll be in shortly.”
“For the record,” she coughed playfully, “I know you’re lying. But get your butt in anyways. I need to see for myself.”
“Be there soon.” Julia smiled. She missed that voice, that fun banter, the feeling of family.
“Later, boss.”
