zugzwang

[scubatankfilledwithfarts]

She smiles with all teeth at the mutterings on the differences of butter knives. Slips back into the demure assistant as easily as her curves hug the transparent costume (and hard chunks) and the outfit hugs back like your mother after a fight you both know she shouldn’t have pursued. It’s easy if she just closes her eyes; it’s what she wants, what she needs after an explosive end like that.

[is it over? A part of her feels like it won’t be—waits for months for the familiar boot-stomping-nasally-whining to return

Guilt swallows her whole, anyway. There’d be nothing left by the time he gets out of there]

This is normal. This is relatively safe, and comfortable. It’s what she’s known from the beginning—he ruined her life, he made her what she is. Sheila doesn’t owe him anything, she doesn’t owe anyone a single damn thing! So what if she’s back to this? They’re adults, they can agree on a mutual reunion. She can hold him and not think a single iota about anyone he’s been with since they broke up.

[his side of the bed is wrong]

Business is relatively slow and she’s falling back into old habits. Chain-smoking on the balcony, leaving the butts for him to find and tut at her at. She’ll tell him he isn’t her mother. He’ll comment on her figure, she’ll tell him to jump up his own ass. His mustache will twitch with his rage, and once she found it so attractive but now it’s just odd.

[she ignores it, closes her eyes to his kisses and pretends the hair she rakes back with her fingers is crimson]

They will have little dinner parties [still in the damn costume because it ‘fits the vibe, darling’] and go to shindigs with gifts of chilled wine and the unbearable distance between them like a cavern she might jump off of at this rate. When he goes in for the kiss-your-mother peck she turns, lets it land on her cheek like a mosquito’s bite.

She’ll survive, like she always has. No one has to be happy about it. It’s like this, and it always has been when it comes to this: it’s always been the way Phantom Limb drools when she bends over and acts like he’s still sophisticated, it will always be the way he looks down his nose at her while still able to somehow not break his neck from looking at her tits, it will always be how her mother tells her repeatedly that she should have ridden those coat tails into the sun when she had the chance while judging her for it in the same breath, it will always be the way he’ll keep talking even when she tries to shut him up, it will always be his crooning sneer when he tells her he can give her the world and Monarch and Monarch and Monarch and Monarch.

It will always be Monarch.

So when Hamilton starts on that usual crap, voice dipping into that crooning sneer, she will excuse herself with a drink, cigarette pack crushed in her white-knuckled grip instead of slitting his throat.