(no subject)
Title: Nothing Compares 2U
Author: shadowlongknife
Rating: G
Spoilers: Up to and including "Sectionals"
Characters/Pairings: Terri, mentions of Terri/Will
Summary: Terri's on her own now, and adjusting is hard.
It's been seven hours and fifteen days. Since you took your love away.
She'd been singing along with the radio without even realizing it, while doing the dishes. Alone. Terri took a step closer, and turned the radio up louder, thinking of Will, how he'd always clear the table without being asked, how much better a cook he was than she'd ever been. She scraped at the burnt bottom of the pan that had contained what was supposed to have been a chicken pot pie, baked from scratch. She'd gotten distracted going through old photographs, and let it cook too long, and the crust had been black as soot when she scraped it off. She ate it anyway, in solitude at their kitchen table.
Since Will had packed a bag in silence, and left in the middle of the afternoon as she'd been leaving for her shift at Sheets N Things, Terri hadn't been able to face the bedroom they'd shared. She slept on a pallet of blankets she'd fished out of a closet, and layed out in the room that would have been the nursery for their baby. The one they'd never have now. It was hell on her back, but the bed looked so big and empty, the size of the Sahara desert, and when she thought about lying there alone, without the sound of Will's breathing filling the night's vast empty spaces, hot little tears prickled at the backs of her eyes, and she found herself blinking like a tree frog on the Nature channel trying not to cry.
Terri tried burying herself in work, but four hours a day, three days a week really wasn't nearly as much as she'd once thought. Howard tried to be supportive, and the look on his face gave her another quiet attack of the don't-cry-blinks in the restroom, after which she was mean as a cornered pit bull to Howard for the rest of the shift. She knew it wasn't his fault, so she made sure to bring lunch in for him the next time they worked together, feeling a wave of irrationally deep guilt.
Her therapist told her that deep guilt over little things was her mind and her heart trying to process what she'd put Will through. When the doctor said that, she'd looked carefully at the window and blinked rapidly enough that someone versed in morse code could have read the works of Shakespeare in the spaces between the flutter of her eyelids.
She found herself going out, just to not be in the house they'd bought together to raise their family. She started going to Kendra, but couldn't tolerate watching Phil quail under Kendra's force of personality, couldn't tolerate the uncontrolled chaos that was her nephews. Terri was having a lot of difficulty tolerating a lot of things these days, and it all came back to that one thing.
The lie.
The pregnancy pad still sat on a shelf in the kitchen. She wanted to throw it away, but an irrational part of her, the one she shouted at in her head, demanded it stay. An ever-present reminder of what she'd cost herself with her inability to deal with losing control. She glares daggers at it every morning when she sits and waits for the coffee maker to fill itself, that beginning drip-drip-drip threatening her sanity. Terri is a demon before she's had her coffee, and Will had known enough to make sure to start it for her every day before helping himself to a cup on his way out the door to school.
One of a hundred thousand little things that she misses terribly. They all add up to a hole in her heart, the kind that has you singing along to old Sinead O'Connor songs while you clean up the refuse of dinner, alone. When the tears trickle and fall over her lips, and she tastes salt, it simply makes her square her shoulders, and declare to herself that she will win him back. If it takes another 16 years, one year for each year of their marriage, then so be it.
When the cell phone rings, every single time, she hopes it'll be him, and when it isn't, when her eyes pick out her sister's name in the window, she huffs in disgust, letting it go to voicemail. Her therapist would complain that she was just transferring her anger at herself to Kendra. So be it. Maybe she was. Knowing that didn't diminish a bit of her very firmly held belief that the worst decision she had ever made, outside of a particular fondness for dressing like Joan Jett when she was 14, was listening to Kendra's advice on how to best control her husband. If she'd had the slightest clue...but of course, she didn't.
Which was a small comfort every time she woke up alone, her neck hurting from sleeping on the floor because she'd rather breathe her mother in law's bourbon breath all night long than face that empty side of the bed in a darkened house.
Author: shadowlongknife
Rating: G
Spoilers: Up to and including "Sectionals"
Characters/Pairings: Terri, mentions of Terri/Will
Summary: Terri's on her own now, and adjusting is hard.
It's been seven hours and fifteen days. Since you took your love away.
She'd been singing along with the radio without even realizing it, while doing the dishes. Alone. Terri took a step closer, and turned the radio up louder, thinking of Will, how he'd always clear the table without being asked, how much better a cook he was than she'd ever been. She scraped at the burnt bottom of the pan that had contained what was supposed to have been a chicken pot pie, baked from scratch. She'd gotten distracted going through old photographs, and let it cook too long, and the crust had been black as soot when she scraped it off. She ate it anyway, in solitude at their kitchen table.
Since Will had packed a bag in silence, and left in the middle of the afternoon as she'd been leaving for her shift at Sheets N Things, Terri hadn't been able to face the bedroom they'd shared. She slept on a pallet of blankets she'd fished out of a closet, and layed out in the room that would have been the nursery for their baby. The one they'd never have now. It was hell on her back, but the bed looked so big and empty, the size of the Sahara desert, and when she thought about lying there alone, without the sound of Will's breathing filling the night's vast empty spaces, hot little tears prickled at the backs of her eyes, and she found herself blinking like a tree frog on the Nature channel trying not to cry.
Terri tried burying herself in work, but four hours a day, three days a week really wasn't nearly as much as she'd once thought. Howard tried to be supportive, and the look on his face gave her another quiet attack of the don't-cry-blinks in the restroom, after which she was mean as a cornered pit bull to Howard for the rest of the shift. She knew it wasn't his fault, so she made sure to bring lunch in for him the next time they worked together, feeling a wave of irrationally deep guilt.
Her therapist told her that deep guilt over little things was her mind and her heart trying to process what she'd put Will through. When the doctor said that, she'd looked carefully at the window and blinked rapidly enough that someone versed in morse code could have read the works of Shakespeare in the spaces between the flutter of her eyelids.
She found herself going out, just to not be in the house they'd bought together to raise their family. She started going to Kendra, but couldn't tolerate watching Phil quail under Kendra's force of personality, couldn't tolerate the uncontrolled chaos that was her nephews. Terri was having a lot of difficulty tolerating a lot of things these days, and it all came back to that one thing.
The lie.
The pregnancy pad still sat on a shelf in the kitchen. She wanted to throw it away, but an irrational part of her, the one she shouted at in her head, demanded it stay. An ever-present reminder of what she'd cost herself with her inability to deal with losing control. She glares daggers at it every morning when she sits and waits for the coffee maker to fill itself, that beginning drip-drip-drip threatening her sanity. Terri is a demon before she's had her coffee, and Will had known enough to make sure to start it for her every day before helping himself to a cup on his way out the door to school.
One of a hundred thousand little things that she misses terribly. They all add up to a hole in her heart, the kind that has you singing along to old Sinead O'Connor songs while you clean up the refuse of dinner, alone. When the tears trickle and fall over her lips, and she tastes salt, it simply makes her square her shoulders, and declare to herself that she will win him back. If it takes another 16 years, one year for each year of their marriage, then so be it.
When the cell phone rings, every single time, she hopes it'll be him, and when it isn't, when her eyes pick out her sister's name in the window, she huffs in disgust, letting it go to voicemail. Her therapist would complain that she was just transferring her anger at herself to Kendra. So be it. Maybe she was. Knowing that didn't diminish a bit of her very firmly held belief that the worst decision she had ever made, outside of a particular fondness for dressing like Joan Jett when she was 14, was listening to Kendra's advice on how to best control her husband. If she'd had the slightest clue...but of course, she didn't.
Which was a small comfort every time she woke up alone, her neck hurting from sleeping on the floor because she'd rather breathe her mother in law's bourbon breath all night long than face that empty side of the bed in a darkened house.