Heaving a sigh, I felt some of the stress in me bubble away. Sure, I was still kinda married and had definitely done something monumentally stupid, but it was on the way to being solved already. In the grand scheme of things, it might have been the most cleanly solved of all my blunders, and that was nice.
All I had to do was wait until the next day, that wasn’t bad at all. And to be completely honest, I was anxious to get home and get back to work. When I was busy, I didn’t get into nearly as much trouble.
And boy, could I use just a little less trouble in my life.
Mickey
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk!
I peppered the punching bag with blows, concentrating on my form, my breathing, on concentrating on the target and nothing but the target. I was aware that I was punching it much harder than I really needed to for the particular exercise that we were doing, but I had so much coiling within me that I just needed to get it out somehow.
And at the moment, it seemed that beating the absolute shit out of gym equipment.
Thunk! Thunk! THUNK!
At my last cross, the chain snapped and suddenly the bag crashed into the floor a few feet away. I blinked at it, surprised by my own destruction, and my trainer clicked his tongue as he came over to see what all the noise was about.
“Is something bothering you?” he asked, crossing his arms as one of the assistants ran to move the bag. It wasn’t unheard of for people to accidentally snap chains, but it wasn’t exactly a common occurrence either.
“It’s nothing,” I said quickly, squaring my shoulders. “Just working off a little steam.”
“A little steam, huh? I’d hate to see you when you’re angry then.”
“Ah, you know me, I’m not the angry type.”
“No, no you’re not. And I gotta be honest, it’s nice to have a fighter on my roster who isn’t a hot head. But just because you’re pretty even keeled doesn’t mean that nothing is upsetting you. You can talk to me, you know that, right?”
I nodded but I wasn’t about to pour my heart out to my trainer. For one, he was employed by my boss and I liked to keep a professional boundary with things. Secondly… well I was a bit embarrassed by what was going on in my own head.
Because what was in my head was basically Amber and only Amber. She occupied every nook and cranny of my thoughts and it was driving me absolutely crazy.
It had been two weeks since our drunken hook up/marriage and things were going nothing like I hoped.
Monday had passed with the lawyer saying he would look into it. An anxious text from Amber that night was the only communication I’d gotten from her, and when I said the lawyer was looking into it, her response was one word.
Then, right before I’d gotten to the gym, my guy had given me a call. I’d answered, half expecting him to say that everything was fine and taken care of, but that wasn’t what he’d said at all.
Instead, he was going on his scheduled vacation and was having his assistants do the financial hunting for the little chapel and that he would file the annulment as soon as he was back, which would still be in a very easy window to get an annulment.
I’d thanked him for keeping me in the loop -he could have just pretended that he was working in the office after all- then immediately called Amber. I expected her to be a bit disappointed, maybe even irritated. I imagined calming her over the phone and making her feel better, maybe that turning into a deep conversation and then an invitation to talk about it more over dinner.
But instead she’d been half listening and clearly distracted, her answers along the lines of vague affirmatives. Finally, I asked if that was alright with her to see if this was some sort of strange, passive aggressive thing she had developed from the biz, but she just sighed and said that she was fine with it, she landed a huge project as it was and she needed to concentrate on that.
I’d laughed, made a joke about her always working, and then she hung up.
That was it.
I knew it was stupid of me, but it made me burn that I was such an after thought to her. We were married, for Pete’s sake! Since she was so insistent on an annulment, one would think that the whole matter would be able to actually hold her attention.
But that was how it had always been with us. She was always so fiercely determined, driven. Her eyes had always been focused on success and beating the hand that had been dealt to her. I suppose I was the fool for expecting her to change just because we’d finally hooked up.