Peter looked at Madeline differently. In the beginning of their relationship, there was love in his eyes. That’s how he hooked her. He would gaze lovingly at her for long minutes that they both got lost in and she figured it meant that there was something magical between them. When they held hands in the beginning, she would huddle close to his arm, interlocking her left with his right and gently caressing the back of his hand with her free hand. She liked being intertwined with him. He made her feel comfortable all mixed up together. They would whisper I-love-yous that danced around the other’s ears, delighting them for days.
“I love to hear your voice,” he would say.
And she would always respond, “You’ll hear it as long as you’re listening for it.”
After years together, he seemed to have stopped hearing her voice.
Peter began to twist Madeline’s words so that eventually, when she tried to express her concerns at the course of their relationship, she felt like he strangled her with her own words. In the beginning, he had told her that he wanted complete honesty.
“Tell me whatever it is you are thinking, it means a lot to me.”
And in the beginning, he made it true, swallowing his pride when she told him that he could be less controlling.
“It’s not that I’m mad, Peter,” she would say to soften the blow, “It’s just something I noticed.
He would smile his forced smile and nod.
“It’s ok, Maddy, I get it.”
But that was in the beginning, when he wasn’t sure how much she would take.
Everyone has their breaking point. Madeline had reached hers exactly two weeks, four days ago when she moved out of their apartment. Not that Peter was counting. He told himself that he didn’t really care. If she was gone, he reasoned while he was in the apartment alone, then there had to be some reason for it, and stressing over it wouldn’t bring her back. He would lay in bed at night, crowding his long body onto the left side of his king-sized bed that he wasn’t used to sleeping on by himself. He would wake up nights after rolling out onto the floor. He cursed his bed without her.
He had seen her a total of five times since the break up, not counting right after when she came back to get a change of clothes. He was in the other room and he heard her barge into the front door; he heard her walk heavily to the bedroom they had once shared; he heard her crying as she flung clothes into a bag; he heard her walk back out the door he assumed had been left open, then slammed. It was like an exclamation point at the end of a sentence of onomatopoeia that told him she was never coming back.
He sat in the kitchen, his long slender legs propped up on the table in the way he knew made her mad. In the beginning, he would slowly move his legs off onto the floor after she yelled at him. Towards the end, he had ignored her.
“Don’t worry about it, Maddy. When you buy a kitchen table, you can tell me not to put my feet up on it, until then just keep your mouth shut.”
She bit her tongue, thinking back to the time when they had moved in together and she had offered to pay for half the furniture. He had refused, knowing it would give him more power when it mattered.
He was never overtly hostile to her, just evenly stating the fact that she was living in his world. In the beginning, he made her feel comfortable that they would share everything. Towards the end he would rub her face in his dominance. But it was only to show her that he was taking care of her.
In the beginning, Peter admired everything about Madeline. He liked the way she filled out her clothes with curves, but he noted the places where she looked a little too curvy.
“I’ll tell her when she loves me,” he said to himself.
He loved that she worked as a teacher and he admired the hours she put in, though it seemed she was affecting little change on the days he would visit her class and saw fourth graders struggling with words he’d learned as a second grader. He didn’t say this to her early in their relationship, but towards the end, he found opportunities to insult her profession.
He saved up his notes until he knew she would be open to hearing it from him, when she would be less likely to take offense from it all.
It was about the actions for Madeline. She loved him, something about his cavalier attitude made him seem self-assured and she liked that. All she wanted from him was a show of love sometimes. When she brought it up, he would spend a fortune on roses and chocolates and whisk her away to romantic places where the bed was covered with rose petals and the room had so many candles that it made electricity obsolete. She would always be hopeful in the new places; maybe the fresh air will make him looser. But it was always the same, breaking the bank and not being there emotionally.
“Come ski with me Peter, ” she said in Aspen.
“I really don’t think I should be outside that much Maddy, I don’t want to get sick. I can’t miss work. I brought you here so you could get away, go have fun. I’ll be here when you get back.”
“Come swim with me Peter,” she said in Hawaii.
“I never learned to swim, Maddy. You go ahead, I’ll be here on the beach.”
She always felt alone. So she tried to mix it up, take Peter somewhere and show him how to have a vacation with someone you love. Planned a trip to New York one December and she thought about all the romantic things they could do together.
When she told him about the trip, he smiled and hugged her.
“Thanks, Maddy. I love the city. But don’t you think we should go in the summertime? It’s pretty cold now, I mean, it is the north.”
“So what Peter?” she said smiling because she thought he was joking. He wasn’t. “That’s the point, so we can snuggle up together. Let’s be close to one another for a change.”
She moved to him, wrapping her arms around his torso.
“I love you, let’s just be close for once. It’s been so long.”
He looked into her eyes, seeing that she was begging with her beauty.
“Maddy, it’s just not a good idea right now. Not with work and all. It would be stupid to take a vacation now in the middle of everything. Don’t worry about the tickets, I’m sure my parents would love to go. I’ll pay you for them.”
He kissed her forehead and left the room.
He had found her and promised to love her. Then he disappeared in his way and she chased him. He would not be caught. He is still alone in his apartment.
PRL Serials 