Page 29 of Words Unspoken

“What? No like cake?” she asked innocently.

“Yes, to the cake. No to the sex. I stayed to be sure he was okay. I will be moving to the guest room today,” Ann was embarrassed.

“Okay,” FenLei said doubtfully as she dished up breakfast and poured refills on the coffee. She then grabbed the vacuum and humming, went to vacuum downstairs.

Ann put her head in her hands.

Michael ate a piece of bacon and watched her. She composed herself and started eating breakfast.

“I think you are right. She is bossy and nosy,” decided Ann.

He smiled.

∞

Michael stared at the paper in frustration. He wanted to throw the pen across the room. Instead, he set it down carefully, like it was a poisonous thing, on the desk. He had started by trying to script out the alphabet. He had beautiful cursive but that did not matter when it didn’t loop as it should, when letters went backwards, sideways, and not in the right spot. He tried small words. Dog, cat, bird. What stared back at him was gibberish.

He closed the journal, blocking the offending page. It all confirmed what he already knew. He rubbed his eyes. He now had a study that was entirely useless to him. Forty-two volumes of journals he had kept since he was eight sat on the shelves with all the other books, mocking him.

“Michael?” Ann came in with his medication and a glass of water. She set it down on the desk. “Are you okay?”

He nodded. As okay as he was going to be.

She gently took the book from under his hand and flipped through it. It came to rest on his latest endeavor. “Oh, Michael.”

He shrugged and took the medication. His head was beginning to hurt but he suspected that was from the stress of not being able to put his thoughts to paper, not from anything more serious.

She flipped through the book and paused, reading. “Is this poetry?”

He stood and gently took the book from her. The last thing he wanted was for her to read his many, many odes to her. They were boyish ridiculousness. He placed the book on the shelf with the others.

“You must have forty books here. Did you write them all?” Ann asked, trailing a hand over them.

Michael nodded. Forty-two. There would be no forty-three.

“Is it all poetry?”

He shook his head no. He was tired. He didn’t want to even look at them ever again. They only reminded him of what he had lost. Michael turned and left the room. His head did hurt. He was going to take a nap.

Ann followed him, hovering until she realized that he was going to lie down. She pulled the blinds, dimming the room and let him mercifully be.

Ann wondered if Michael had a headache or if he was just depressed at the failure of his efforts. He had known he would not be able to write but he had tried anyways. Her heart ached for him.

Drawn back to the study, she picked out a volume at random from the row of journals. Each were leather bound vellum, two inches thick. They were beautiful books filled with Michael is beautiful script.

Opening it to the beginning she sat in one of the comfortable armchairs by the window and began to read. It was a story. A children’s story full of creatures from the beach and ocean. Words were crossed out, rewritten and circled. A few pages later, the story started again, this time it was a perfect draft of the other story, copied painstakingly from the earlier draft. There were pictures of the creatures and their adventure. Ann enjoyed it immensely. She could not believe that Michael had written such a thing. He was always so serious and here was an amusing story of imagination.

How many times had she seen him writing at his desk during the early afternoon and she had thought that it was likely to do with the many legal issues the company dealt with? Michael had deceived them all. He was a writer at heart.

And now he could no longer practice his craft. It was incredibly sad.

She skipped a couple of pages and skimmed through journal entries about business at the company. This journal was old. The date put it a few months after she had been hired. She wondered what he had thought of her back then. She flipped through to find an entry with her name. There she was. The memory was detailed as if it had happened yesterday, and she remembered it.

He had asked her for a specific document that he needed for the afternoon meeting. She remembered having it on her desk but after a search, she had not found it. Ann had begun a mad scramble trying to find it. The old secretary had left, and it was now her job to know these things. To be organized and ready. Yet she could not find the file.

She panicked and gone through everything again. She made a complete mess out of what was on the desk, in the desk. She was in the middle of the file cabinets when Michael had asked her for the document because the meeting was going to start in fifteen minutes, and he wanted to brush up on a particular clause.

Ann must have looked absolutely horrified because he had knelt beside her and asked what was wrong. She admitted to misplacing the file. Then, like the wonderful man he was, Michael had calmly started the search with her again, going through everything like they had all the time in the world to find the file. It had stilled her nerves and Ann had been able to focus. She was certain she had lost her job, that he would fire her, but she was determined to finish the day and find the file.