Simspiration - "How can you wake up with someone you don't love and not feel slightly fazed by it?"
Liv closed her eyes tighter and rolled on to her side as the increasingly bright light worked its way into her consciousness and forced her out of her sleep. She couldn’t decide whether to open her eyes - part of her felt curious, but another part felt deeply hesitant and was stopping her remembering everything she ought to. Either way, she couldn’t just lie there with her eyes closed forever, so she gradually blinked them open to the sight of her new husband, who was still asleep, and tried to ignore the way her stomach slightly lurched. For a few moments the curious part of her took in the details of his profile - the bumpiness of his nose and protruding lips, his still half-neat hair and facial hair, the way he was half-frowning in his sleep - before the hesitant part of her forced her to roll over and get up out of bed and think about something else.
Putting on her dressing gown, she looked around half-desperately. It was a very nice bedroom they had, and a very nice bed. In fact, she knew the entire house was big and beautiful and expensive and the kind of thing any woman - including herself - should want. And she didn’t even have to work to get it. And her new husband was respectable and hard-working as well as rich; he was a prime choice. And real, stable love was something that developed over time - all those things people talked about, where you got butterflies in your stomach and everything, were temporary and often ultimately painful, not that she’d had that anyway. But as she went over the logical reasoning she’d had for months, it still didn’t stop the way she was trembling slightly as she wound up staring down at him again. He was her husband, she was his wife. That was to be forever. There was no doing it again.
She looked around desperately again for something - anything - else to distract her, before she noticed her mobile part lit-up on the bedside table - she had a message.
Hey Liv, how are you after everything yesterday? Call me when you’re free, love Dad.
She stared at the message intently. Her Dad had never asked her to call him before the wedding; he always called her when he was free. And he’d never signed off with ‘love’ either. She became vaguely aware that she was smiling slightly and wasn’t breathing nearly so fast, and slipped quietly out of the bedroom and into the bathroom next door, which she locked before dialling his number.
“Liv?”
“Hi Dad,” she said nervously.
“I wasn’t sure how early you’d be awake after yesterday. How are you today?”
Liv had never heard her father sound entirely cold or disinterested or anything bad; he always seemed to be paying attention and to care, but somehow how he sounded now was still entirely different. It was like thinking you had a 40 watt light bulb and then discovering it could actually go up to 150. If she had been capable of thinking rationally about her father, she might have questioned what that meant about how he felt previously, but she never had been able to before and was even less able when on the receiving end of so much unexpected love that she had been longing for for such a long time.
“Great. I’m really great,” she said with a deep breath and a wide smile.