Rhapsody in Blue: Part Eleven
Part Ten
Part Eleven
(Jar of Hearts)
Ariadne, despite Arthur and Eames’ suggestions, had asked to be dropped off at Robert’s. The place was now her home and she wasn’t about to go home with Arthur and Eames just because she didn’t have any place else to go. Besides all of that, she had a few bones to pick with Mr. Fischer.
“Okay, what in fucking hell was that!?” Ariadne yelled out as soon as she spotted Robert sitting on the living room couch with a large novel on his lap. She walked closer to the couch and ripped her coat off. She threw it down on the floor, not caring what anyone in the house might think. She stared at Robert with an excruciatingly angry face. She bit her tongue for a moment, trying to be civil, and trying to give him a chance to answer her. She knew without a doubt that he wouldn’t say anything.
After about a minute Ariadne shook her head and bent over to tear the straps on her high heels apart. She pulled her shoes off one at a time and gave Robert another look. “What the fuck, Robert! WHAT THE FUCK!? Did it not even occur to you to be decent! Those are my friends! I’ll be lucky if they’re still my friends after the shit you just pulled! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU, ROBERT!”
She took a moment to pause. Quickly, she pulled her earrings out of her ears and tossed them onto the glass coffee table. They hit with a loud clank. Ariadne watched as Robert’s eyes went to the tiny pieces of jewelry.
Robert kept his eyes down and wouldn’t look at Ariadne at all. Ariadne smiled a grim smile. “ROBERT, what do my friends even mean to you!? Huh, why did you have to act like such a pompous ass!? Are you really that threatened by the relationships that I have with my male friends that you have be a fucking jerk!? Do you know what they are going to think!? OH MY GOD, ROBERT. I can’t even believe you would do that to me, of all people!”
Moment by moment, with every word that Robert didn’t say, Ariadne grew more and more enraged. She couldn’t believe him at all. She knew he hadn’t been himself, but at the same time she knew that he should have been able to act more appropriately than what he did. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut and opened it out of sheer anger. “Do you even care about this!? Do you even want us to happen? Because right now I get the feeling that you don’t. I get the feeling that you don’t even give a fucking damn what happens to me, or what happens to you, or what happens to this baby! I want you to fucking care! IT’S YOUR FAULT, ROBERT. EVERYTHING IS YOUR FAULT! We’re having a child and you don’t even give a fuck! What, will this be like another weird business transaction to you!? And at the restaurant! You told them that it was an accident! Why would you even say that?! It’s none of their business at all…. AND YOU DON’T CARE. YOU DON’T CARE AT ALL.”
Ariadne watched as Robert looked around the room. He looked like he was looking for something, anything to use as an escape. He looked down at the book in his lap. Quickly, he picked it up and held it in his hands. Just as Ariadne was about to open her mouth again she spotted the book resting between his fingers. That was the last straw of the night. She didn’t know how he thought she would react, but she knew exactly what she was going to do.
With anger and frustration seething from her every pore, Ariadne went over to where Robert sat on the couch. She took the book out of his hands and threw it down on top of the coffee table. It made a loud bang but thankfully enough did not actually crack the glass surface.
She stared at Robert, trying to read his mind. He wouldn’t even look at her. It was like he couldn’t look at her at all. She bit her lip in the silence. Then, without much thought, Ariadne stuck her hand out and slapped Robert in the face. It was a loud smack and caused Robert to flinch. He finally, in the moment after, looked into Ariadne’s face. Ariadne could see the troubled thoughts that festered underneath his skin. “You don’t even care!” She said loudly, trying in vain to hold onto the moment, to make sure that Robert would hear exactly what she was trying to say.
Robert simply stood up and pushed Ariadne away from him. The push was not a hard or extremely forceful. It was just enough to get Ariadne away from Robert so he could walk away. Ariadne let him go at first. She didn’t exactly know why, but when Robert was about ten feet from her and walking at a slow pace, she ran quickly to catch up with him. She felt a fire in her belly that told her that she needed to say certain things to Robert and that she was going to say them now before she regretted it. She knew in the pit of her stomach that Robert wasn’t right. It had been all too apparent; she was going to address it.
Ariadne caught up to Robert and first pulled him by the sleeve. When she had a hold of him she grabbed him by the collar and held on for dear life. She wasn’t going to let him get away and she certainly was going to make him listen well.
Robert’s face was pointed toward Ariadne’s but his eyes were bent down away from her. She tugged on his shirt front quickly, causing his eyes to shift directions. She gave him a pleading look when she finally got him to look at her.
“Okay fine, I know you’re not going to say anything to me, but I’m not going to leave you, alright. I, unlike most people, like to stick it out and see what’s actually going on. I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with you…. But I swear to god, if you ever treat any of my friends like that again we’ll have another more serious talk. But it really isn’t about my friends is it? It’s about me, it’s about respect Robert…. Please, respect me.” She then placed a hand on Robert’s cheek and felt his pale skin. Before a few seconds could pass she removed her hand and spoke again. “I’m sleeping in the guest bedroom at the end of the hall. Don’t come in, I don’t want you sleeping with me tonight…”
Ariadne turned back to the coffee table and noticed that the bottle of Merlot rested politely enough on it. It was unopened and she walked over to it. She took it in her hands and turned back to Robert to watch as he walked away. She watched him walk toward the stairs with an obvious purpose. When Robert had gone up the stairs and Ariadne knew he was not going to come back down, Ariadne took the bottle of Merlot and went to the kitchen. Once she was in the kitchen she went to the sink and ran cold water. She fumbled in the drawers surrounding the sink until she found the bottle opener. Quickly, she cracked the seal on the wine and unscrewed the cork. Throwing the bottle opener down on the counter, she took the large bottle in her hands and began dumping the very expensive wine into the sink. It took a few moments for all of it to snake its way down the drain.
When it was done Ariadne left the bottle as evidence of what she’d done and went upstairs to sleep in a bed that she’d never slept in before.
*
(Lost)
Ariadne had known as soon as she lay down in bed that she had to make things right again with Robert. She knew that something was bothering him intensely, and that, as his girlfriend, it was her responsibility to figure out what it was.
Lying in the guest bedroom, she had called her parents to tell them that she was having a baby. Her mother, as she had guessed she would be, was over the moon with joy about the whole ordeal. She hadn’t even said a word about how ‘ungodly’ it was to have sex out of wedlock and had promised to pass the news on to Ariadne’s father as soon as he returned home from the weekly high school basketball game. She had also promised her mother that eventually they would get to meet the ‘mysterious Robert’ that they referred to him as.
That night Ariadne also dreamed of Robert. The dream didn’t really have a plot to it at all. It was less than a story and more like images and thoughts swirling around in her head. She let the images and thoughts come willingly without trying to stop them or understand them.
Ariadne woke up early. She was up long before she knew that Robert would get up. Sure, he might be awake, but he certainly wouldn’t have left the comfort of his room yet, that was almost guaranteed.
With her arms folded around her body, Ariadne crept down the hall toward Robert’s room. The door was closed and she paused at it to take a listen. She couldn’t hear anything and ventured to assume that Robert wasn’t still asleep. He was much too quiet to still be asleep.
She opened the door and stepped in quietly. Robert was lying in his bed. The bed was still made and looked as if it hadn’t been slept in at all. Robert’s back faced the door. She assumed that his eyes were scoping out the trees that rested outside the window.
Ariadne said not a word and walked herself to the bed. For a moment she took the time to smooth her hands across the comfortable blue comforter. When she had finished appreciating the color of the blanket she climbed into the bed.
The bed was cold and barren as it had ever seemed, not that it had ever seemed anything like that before. She watched as Robert tensed for a moment. She slid closer to him on the bed.
For a moment she wondered what she should do. Speaking wasn’t going to cut it. She wanted to show him that she wasn’t extremely mad, and that she would forgive him because she loved him. Then, her hands began moving, they knew what they had to do, she knew what she had to do.
She lovingly wrapped her arms around the businessman and smoothed his chest. She inhaled his scent slowly and scooted so that her chin rested on his shoulder. She gently kissed the soft skin in front of his ear and moved on to kiss just under his jaw.
She held him and loved him as if this would make everything in the world go away, as if this would erase all of the things that had happened in the past four days. It had only been a few days of insanity and already it seemed that Robert was getting ready to leap. It seemed to Ariadne that things could never be normal if he wasn’t okay. He had to be okay. A few days was what she promised to herself. Perhaps a few more days could do him good. Maybe that would fix him. She didn’t know how that would fix him, but she hoped that it worked. After a few days he would be okay. He would be okay. She thought all of this with extreme urgency. She needed him to be alright. Hopefully he needed himself to be alright as well. If not, Ariadne knew she was in trouble.
A few days went by. Little, if anything, changed at all. Ariadne went back to work to face the scrutiny of her peers. They were accepting enough. They asked too many questions, but that was to be expected. Some of the questions were harmless and about how she was feeling and that sort of thing. Other questions were harder to answer and consisted of judgments that were passed about Robert and how he treated Ariadne on a regular basis. Ariadne tried to shrug those questions off as best as she could. She tried and wanted very much to tell them that Robert was the sweetest man she’d ever been with. She just didn’t quite know how to tell them that after the events of the dinner.
Questions were also raised by Cobb. It was quite clear to the whole team that Ariadne couldn’t continue to work in the field as long as she was pregnant. Tests hadn’t really been done to test the effects of somnacin on developing embryos or fetuses. Cobb promised to work out a way for Ariadne to continue working with the team even if she couldn’t go into the field. Ideas were passed around that she could still design the layers and create them graphically. She could then show the images she’d created to one of the members who would then memorize it and take it into the dream with them. Ariadne liked the idea well enough and agreed to it as long as she would still be treated like a member of the team. The entire team promised that as far as they were concerned she would always be a member of the team, present in dreams or not.
Robert had also obviously gone back to work. Ariadne noticed that he spent less time in the office than usual. She often saw him bumming around the house. It worried Ariadne of course, but she promised herself that she would give him longer.
Among the working Ariadne had managed to schedule a doctor’s appointment and attend it without little trouble. Her doctor had informed her of the good, the bad, and the ugly as it applied to pregnancy and childbirth. She’d cringed through more than half of the conversation but she was at least glad that she would know some of what to expect. Her doctor determined that she was most likely about seven weeks along and that she had something like thirty-three weeks left to go. Ariadne thought for sure that it would be the longest thirty-three weeks of her entire life.