"Tempted" Ch 10 - Finished
Hi everyone, it's been a long time! The next installment of "Tempted", my John/Ellie fic, is
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Finished
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There were bruises on Ellie’s legs. This wasn’t so remarkable of itself; she often barked a shin on a corner of the nurse’s station, or a patient bed, or a large piece of medical equipment, while rushing around doing her job at the hospital. However, this morning she was careful to be up and dressed before Devon awoke. And that evening when she got home she pulled on long pants. She was stifling in the nearly 100-degree-heat, but she just didn’t want anyone asking about those marks. So she cranked the a/c instead of putting on cooler clothes.
After dinner with Chuck, she sat alone on the couch, Devon having worked a later shift today. She pulled her sore feet up onto the cushion and started to massage them, but soon found herself distracted by where she knew herself to be black-and-blue under her pants legs. She rubbed the area absently, staring across the room at nothing. Her thoughts were on the stone of the fountain from which she’d acquired the bruises, and the actions she’d willfully and knowingly participated in which caused them. She had spent too much of her time today fighting off memories of how John had felt - the length and breadth and warmth and hardness of him - and how he’d made her feel. And she’d spent the entire day guilt-ridden.
Because if what they’d done out there by the fountain hadn’t been cheating, and poaching, she didn’t know what was. It had been so wrong. And largely her fault, she felt, for the little game she’d been playing with John’s libido. It would have helped if she had some one to confess to, to mull things over with out loud. But she had no one she could share this with. She didn’t want anyone knowing this shameful thing about her. There was already John, who unavoidably knew, and who she was better off never setting eyes on again. Just the thought of what the two of them had done yesterday gave her palpitations, and to her shame they were not entirely guilt-spurred. Lust was pretty prevalent in there, too.
She planned to take extreme care not to run into That Man. And she was sure he would go out of his way to avoid her, too. But she knew by now that she wasn’t going to be able to get him out of her thoughts, and the semi-normalized contact she currently had with Devon wouldn’t help any. That day at work, Ellie had seriously contemplated moving. But she imagined bringing that up to Devon; “hey, honey, why don’t we look for a new place in, say, Nova Scotia?” She got an instant image of the “who-are-you-and-where-is-my-fiancee” look she’d see on his face.
So instead she tried enumerating, for the millionth time, the cons on her pro/con John list.
One was that he smirked a lot, a habit she detested in others. And he scowled. Yes, he had a beautiful smile, but he frowned way more often than he smiled; generally at her brother, who was supposedly his friend. Which, when Ellie took time to think about it, was a little strange. What was a guy his age doing hanging around with people the ages of Chuck and Sarah if he didn’t enjoy their company? The more she considered this, the more struck by it she was. It might even be kind of ... creepy. And then there were those moments she could almost have sworn that John and Sarah had some kind of mutual secret language ... they’d make eye contact, slight hand or eye movements, and the next thing you knew one or the other of them, sometimes both, had to leave. It was very, very odd. If anyone had a secret language, shouldn’t it be Chuck and Sarah?
That thought had occurred to her earlier in the day while she was standing at the nurse’s station. Ostensible perusing the chart of a patient she couldn’t, at that moment, have named, Ellie caught her breath. If Sarah had a secret language with someone who wasn’t Chuck, it was entirely possible she had other things with that person ... things she shouldn’t have with anyone but Chuck. It was an awful thought; but it put the blonde girl’s interactions with John into a whole new light.
Ellie couldn’t get rid of the idea; it had haunted her for the rest of her workday and on the way home that evening. She hadn’t thought Sarah was that kind of person, but she also knew that anyone could fall into temptation. More, Ellie knew intimately just how severe a temptation John Casey could pose. She didn’t like to think of him as someone who’d steal another guy’s girlfriend, either ... he’d even told her as much that day with the microwave malfunction, and she’d believed him. There had been absolute conviction in his voice. But then there was what they’d done out by the fountain. And what did she really know about John Casey? He was a big guy, he worked at the Buy More and didn’t enjoy it, he had a good appetite and was very sweet about helping in the kitchen. That was it.
Well, and that his kisses were like manna from heaven to the starving.
All in all, it didn’t amount to much. Sweet guys could be backstabbers, couldn’t they? Sure they could.
And there was one such sweet guy, possessed of heretofore unknown potential for dealing out pain, coming through the door into the house right now. Standing up from the couch where she’d been sitting staring into space, Ellie shoved her troublesome thoughts aside with an effort and gave her fiancé a determinedly bright smile.
He returned it, bright and breezy. But Ellie’s eyes began to narrow after he met them for about one second, then immediately focused on the kitchen. This was quite a switch from the past few weeks, during which he’d been ultra-attentive, buying her flowers and hanging around constantly and touching her at every turn. She swiveled to watch him make a beeline for the fridge, calling “‘how was your day?” over his shoulder.
He was trying too hard to be normal. When what would really have been ‘normal’ was for him to acknowledge that they had had, and still had, problems. Big problems. Perhaps, Ellie had realized yesterday, insurmountable problems. He had secrets of unknown gravitas; she had ones that were ocean-liner-sized. Given this, his current ‘nothing-could-possibly-be-wrong-with-this-picture’ attitude was grating. Especially considering that guilt was chewing a ragged hole through Ellie’s digestive system.
Devon grabbed bread and meat and began to throw a sandwich together.
“How was your day?” he questioned again, lightly. Easily, even blithely. While Ellie stood there with the marks of another man’s attentions on her body.
Suddenly, it was enough. Just ... enough.
“Devon.” Her words came out quiet but clipped. He slapped his pieces of bread together before looking at her questioningly.
“Sit down.” She pointed to the couch. “We need to talk.”
He frowned. “Can it wait, babe? I’m kind of hungry.”
Ellie grit her teeth. She shook head and sat back down herself, staring over her shoulder at him. Something inside had snapped. She was through fighting with herself, and Devon had run out of lifeline.
This was the end, one way or another.
“We’re talking,” she said in a low, measured tone. “You’re talking. Right now.”
He twitched, but her expression must have conveyed how deadly serious she was, because he walked around into the room and sat. Ellie folded her arms. On the couch, Devon seemed to become unable to look anywhere but at his own feet. One of his hands rubbed the back of his neck while the other hooked into his waistband.
“You’re right, Ellie,” he finally acknowledged, slowly. “We do need to talk ... I guess I just needed you to force me into it.”
Ellie watched him, not quite able to believe that she was at last going to find out what was going on with him. Despite the level to which her frustration had been ramped by his closed mouth, and despite the increasing difficulty of living with the guy when she was so hurt and confused and angry about his closing her out, she found herself contrarily tensing up now that it seemed the moment of revelation had come. Her mind raced with possibilities. He’d sold their house to Morgan and Anna at a quarter of its value so they could learn to be adults. He’d emptied their savings so he and some buddies could take a heliboarding trip around Nepal. His parents asked to move in with them after they were married, and he’d told them ‘yes’ ...
“Look,” he began. “I know you’ve been able to tell something’s wrong, and it’s getting to you. I’m sorry for that.”
. . . or maybe it was none of those eventualities. His voice was very quiet and more serious than she’d ever heard from him. Ellie swallowed. This wasn’t going to be good.
“I think ... I think ... no, I more than think.”
Ellie trained her gaze on his moving lips and said nothing. Devon swallowed and twisted his torso left, then right, before fully facing her again. His chest expanded in a deep breath, and then he just said it.
“I’m not in love with you anymore.” The words were bald and ugly in the taught air between them.
Ellie thought maybe her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak. She did blink, once, slowly.
“I don’t know why, and I’ve been so frustrated and confused about this,” Devon rushed on, as though afraid he wasn’t going to get all the words out in time. “I’ve been trying to carry on like I am, because I should be, but I’m faking it.” He met her eyes fully, but only briefly. “I’m faking it,” he repeated more raggedly. “I should love you. You’re the most perfect woman in the world for me. So I’m scared. Because if I fall out of love with you, Ellie ... well, how am I ever going to love anyone?”
Silence.
Was she supposed to answer that?
Once more, Devon wasn’t meeting her eyes. Ellie felt a sprig of emotion start to poke through the blanket of cold around her numb heart. There was something he wasn’t saying.
“I think we need to break this off,” he finished.
Break it off? What, like a Kit-Kat bar?
And there was still something he wasn’t telling her.
“Is there someone else, Devon?” Her voice was so toneless it didn’t sound like her own.
Devon swallowed again, hard. “I haven’t - I haven’t! - cheated, Ellie. No way would I do that to you. But ...” he clenched his eyelids together. Shutting out the sight of her seemed to help, because his words came more slowly and softly. “There has been a woman at work. I’ve said nothing to her. But there’s something there ... something powerful. Something almost irresistible. So hard to deny, I don’t know if I should deny it.” His eyes popped back open. “I’ll always love you, Ellie, even if I’m not in love ... That doesn’t end for people like us, does it? But I just ... don’t want to marry you. I’m saying this badly, Ellie. I can’t explain it any way that you’ll understand.”
But Ellie shook her head, minisculely. Her mind repeated his words. Something powerful ... irresistible ... so hard to deny.
“I think I understand better than you think, Devon.”
His eyebrows drew together in concentration, before the light of comprehension dawned over his face. “Really? Who ... no.” He flung up a hand to stop her from imparting information she had no intention of giving him. “I don’t want to know.”
Good, because he wasn’t going to. Not today, anyway.
“I don’t want to, either,” Ellie told him.
“So.” Devon sank backwards into the couch beside her and bent his head, running his hands into his hair. “What,” he asked quietly, staring at the floor, “do we do now?”
Like she should know?
“I don’t know.” Ellie’s voice cracked a bit, and with horror she realized there were tears in her eyes. Blinking them back furiously, she trained her face away from Devon. “It’s pretty clear we’re not getting married, though.”
Silence descended, close and thick and awful. Devon let it lengthen. Ellie stared down at her hands, and there caught sight of the ring he’d given her. She watched her fingers move to tug it off with an odd disconnection, as though they didn’t belong to her. She held the cool metal band between her fingers, tremblingly, for just a moment. Then she held it out to Devon without looking. It seemed a very long moment before she felt him take it from her.
*******
The usual disclaimers apply! I hope you enjoy it!
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Finished
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*
There were bruises on Ellie’s legs. This wasn’t so remarkable of itself; she often barked a shin on a corner of the nurse’s station, or a patient bed, or a large piece of medical equipment, while rushing around doing her job at the hospital. However, this morning she was careful to be up and dressed before Devon awoke. And that evening when she got home she pulled on long pants. She was stifling in the nearly 100-degree-heat, but she just didn’t want anyone asking about those marks. So she cranked the a/c instead of putting on cooler clothes.
After dinner with Chuck, she sat alone on the couch, Devon having worked a later shift today. She pulled her sore feet up onto the cushion and started to massage them, but soon found herself distracted by where she knew herself to be black-and-blue under her pants legs. She rubbed the area absently, staring across the room at nothing. Her thoughts were on the stone of the fountain from which she’d acquired the bruises, and the actions she’d willfully and knowingly participated in which caused them. She had spent too much of her time today fighting off memories of how John had felt - the length and breadth and warmth and hardness of him - and how he’d made her feel. And she’d spent the entire day guilt-ridden.
Because if what they’d done out there by the fountain hadn’t been cheating, and poaching, she didn’t know what was. It had been so wrong. And largely her fault, she felt, for the little game she’d been playing with John’s libido. It would have helped if she had some one to confess to, to mull things over with out loud. But she had no one she could share this with. She didn’t want anyone knowing this shameful thing about her. There was already John, who unavoidably knew, and who she was better off never setting eyes on again. Just the thought of what the two of them had done yesterday gave her palpitations, and to her shame they were not entirely guilt-spurred. Lust was pretty prevalent in there, too.
She planned to take extreme care not to run into That Man. And she was sure he would go out of his way to avoid her, too. But she knew by now that she wasn’t going to be able to get him out of her thoughts, and the semi-normalized contact she currently had with Devon wouldn’t help any. That day at work, Ellie had seriously contemplated moving. But she imagined bringing that up to Devon; “hey, honey, why don’t we look for a new place in, say, Nova Scotia?” She got an instant image of the “who-are-you-and-where-is-my-fiancee” look she’d see on his face.
So instead she tried enumerating, for the millionth time, the cons on her pro/con John list.
One was that he smirked a lot, a habit she detested in others. And he scowled. Yes, he had a beautiful smile, but he frowned way more often than he smiled; generally at her brother, who was supposedly his friend. Which, when Ellie took time to think about it, was a little strange. What was a guy his age doing hanging around with people the ages of Chuck and Sarah if he didn’t enjoy their company? The more she considered this, the more struck by it she was. It might even be kind of ... creepy. And then there were those moments she could almost have sworn that John and Sarah had some kind of mutual secret language ... they’d make eye contact, slight hand or eye movements, and the next thing you knew one or the other of them, sometimes both, had to leave. It was very, very odd. If anyone had a secret language, shouldn’t it be Chuck and Sarah?
That thought had occurred to her earlier in the day while she was standing at the nurse’s station. Ostensible perusing the chart of a patient she couldn’t, at that moment, have named, Ellie caught her breath. If Sarah had a secret language with someone who wasn’t Chuck, it was entirely possible she had other things with that person ... things she shouldn’t have with anyone but Chuck. It was an awful thought; but it put the blonde girl’s interactions with John into a whole new light.
Ellie couldn’t get rid of the idea; it had haunted her for the rest of her workday and on the way home that evening. She hadn’t thought Sarah was that kind of person, but she also knew that anyone could fall into temptation. More, Ellie knew intimately just how severe a temptation John Casey could pose. She didn’t like to think of him as someone who’d steal another guy’s girlfriend, either ... he’d even told her as much that day with the microwave malfunction, and she’d believed him. There had been absolute conviction in his voice. But then there was what they’d done out by the fountain. And what did she really know about John Casey? He was a big guy, he worked at the Buy More and didn’t enjoy it, he had a good appetite and was very sweet about helping in the kitchen. That was it.
Well, and that his kisses were like manna from heaven to the starving.
All in all, it didn’t amount to much. Sweet guys could be backstabbers, couldn’t they? Sure they could.
And there was one such sweet guy, possessed of heretofore unknown potential for dealing out pain, coming through the door into the house right now. Standing up from the couch where she’d been sitting staring into space, Ellie shoved her troublesome thoughts aside with an effort and gave her fiancé a determinedly bright smile.
He returned it, bright and breezy. But Ellie’s eyes began to narrow after he met them for about one second, then immediately focused on the kitchen. This was quite a switch from the past few weeks, during which he’d been ultra-attentive, buying her flowers and hanging around constantly and touching her at every turn. She swiveled to watch him make a beeline for the fridge, calling “‘how was your day?” over his shoulder.
He was trying too hard to be normal. When what would really have been ‘normal’ was for him to acknowledge that they had had, and still had, problems. Big problems. Perhaps, Ellie had realized yesterday, insurmountable problems. He had secrets of unknown gravitas; she had ones that were ocean-liner-sized. Given this, his current ‘nothing-could-possibly-be-wrong-with-this-picture’ attitude was grating. Especially considering that guilt was chewing a ragged hole through Ellie’s digestive system.
Devon grabbed bread and meat and began to throw a sandwich together.
“How was your day?” he questioned again, lightly. Easily, even blithely. While Ellie stood there with the marks of another man’s attentions on her body.
Suddenly, it was enough. Just ... enough.
“Devon.” Her words came out quiet but clipped. He slapped his pieces of bread together before looking at her questioningly.
“Sit down.” She pointed to the couch. “We need to talk.”
He frowned. “Can it wait, babe? I’m kind of hungry.”
Ellie grit her teeth. She shook head and sat back down herself, staring over her shoulder at him. Something inside had snapped. She was through fighting with herself, and Devon had run out of lifeline.
This was the end, one way or another.
“We’re talking,” she said in a low, measured tone. “You’re talking. Right now.”
He twitched, but her expression must have conveyed how deadly serious she was, because he walked around into the room and sat. Ellie folded her arms. On the couch, Devon seemed to become unable to look anywhere but at his own feet. One of his hands rubbed the back of his neck while the other hooked into his waistband.
“You’re right, Ellie,” he finally acknowledged, slowly. “We do need to talk ... I guess I just needed you to force me into it.”
Ellie watched him, not quite able to believe that she was at last going to find out what was going on with him. Despite the level to which her frustration had been ramped by his closed mouth, and despite the increasing difficulty of living with the guy when she was so hurt and confused and angry about his closing her out, she found herself contrarily tensing up now that it seemed the moment of revelation had come. Her mind raced with possibilities. He’d sold their house to Morgan and Anna at a quarter of its value so they could learn to be adults. He’d emptied their savings so he and some buddies could take a heliboarding trip around Nepal. His parents asked to move in with them after they were married, and he’d told them ‘yes’ ...
“Look,” he began. “I know you’ve been able to tell something’s wrong, and it’s getting to you. I’m sorry for that.”
. . . or maybe it was none of those eventualities. His voice was very quiet and more serious than she’d ever heard from him. Ellie swallowed. This wasn’t going to be good.
“I think ... I think ... no, I more than think.”
Ellie trained her gaze on his moving lips and said nothing. Devon swallowed and twisted his torso left, then right, before fully facing her again. His chest expanded in a deep breath, and then he just said it.
“I’m not in love with you anymore.” The words were bald and ugly in the taught air between them.
Ellie thought maybe her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak. She did blink, once, slowly.
“I don’t know why, and I’ve been so frustrated and confused about this,” Devon rushed on, as though afraid he wasn’t going to get all the words out in time. “I’ve been trying to carry on like I am, because I should be, but I’m faking it.” He met her eyes fully, but only briefly. “I’m faking it,” he repeated more raggedly. “I should love you. You’re the most perfect woman in the world for me. So I’m scared. Because if I fall out of love with you, Ellie ... well, how am I ever going to love anyone?”
Silence.
Was she supposed to answer that?
Once more, Devon wasn’t meeting her eyes. Ellie felt a sprig of emotion start to poke through the blanket of cold around her numb heart. There was something he wasn’t saying.
“I think we need to break this off,” he finished.
Break it off? What, like a Kit-Kat bar?
And there was still something he wasn’t telling her.
“Is there someone else, Devon?” Her voice was so toneless it didn’t sound like her own.
Devon swallowed again, hard. “I haven’t - I haven’t! - cheated, Ellie. No way would I do that to you. But ...” he clenched his eyelids together. Shutting out the sight of her seemed to help, because his words came more slowly and softly. “There has been a woman at work. I’ve said nothing to her. But there’s something there ... something powerful. Something almost irresistible. So hard to deny, I don’t know if I should deny it.” His eyes popped back open. “I’ll always love you, Ellie, even if I’m not in love ... That doesn’t end for people like us, does it? But I just ... don’t want to marry you. I’m saying this badly, Ellie. I can’t explain it any way that you’ll understand.”
But Ellie shook her head, minisculely. Her mind repeated his words. Something powerful ... irresistible ... so hard to deny.
“I think I understand better than you think, Devon.”
His eyebrows drew together in concentration, before the light of comprehension dawned over his face. “Really? Who ... no.” He flung up a hand to stop her from imparting information she had no intention of giving him. “I don’t want to know.”
Good, because he wasn’t going to. Not today, anyway.
“I don’t want to, either,” Ellie told him.
“So.” Devon sank backwards into the couch beside her and bent his head, running his hands into his hair. “What,” he asked quietly, staring at the floor, “do we do now?”
Like she should know?
“I don’t know.” Ellie’s voice cracked a bit, and with horror she realized there were tears in her eyes. Blinking them back furiously, she trained her face away from Devon. “It’s pretty clear we’re not getting married, though.”
Silence descended, close and thick and awful. Devon let it lengthen. Ellie stared down at her hands, and there caught sight of the ring he’d given her. She watched her fingers move to tug it off with an odd disconnection, as though they didn’t belong to her. She held the cool metal band between her fingers, tremblingly, for just a moment. Then she held it out to Devon without looking. It seemed a very long moment before she felt him take it from her.
*******
The usual disclaimers apply! I hope you enjoy it!