Closer

“Hey.” Louis whispered when he slipped into the bedroom. He dropped his heavy luggage around him and shrugged off his jacket. Laurel sat up quickly and scrambled out of the sheets of maker her way to him.

“You’re here!” She squealed happily, launching herself into his arms. Louis stumbled back at the impact, but wrapped his wife in a tight hug.

“God I missed you.” He said, lifting her chin so he could place a kiss on her lips. Laurel smiled into his lips and pulled him closer. He tripped over the bags that were lying carelessly at the foot of the bed and allowed her to pull him back to the mess of blankets.

She leaned back and pulled him on top of her. He captured her lips in a tender yet urgent kiss. “Hmmm. I missed you too.” She said after they pulled apart.”

Louis pulled himself from the moment of passion to look at his wife. Her blond hair was messy and her cheeks were flushed. He gently placed a finger on the tip of her nose and traced it all the way down to her lips. He smiled at her before he whispered, “I love you.”

Laurel sat up. The dream felt so real, almost as if she was reliving it. But here in the tiny bedroom of her childhood home, she knew she wasn’t. She rubbed her hands over her face. Laurel was trying to pull herself back to reality.

To say it was easy to leave Louis would have been and outright lie on Laurel's part. He was her husband, the love of her life. Laurel loved him more than life. But she was fooling herself thinking that it was working. He was gone all the time, and she was alone. The gravity defying love wasn't enough to make it work. She resented him, she was angry with him.

Over the two years of their marriage she grew weak. The loneliness and the heartache was too much to bear. There wasn't enough time they could ever spend together that could compensate for the time they were forced to spend apart. Then it happened, the final straw. Once she suffered that heartbreak she knew she couldn’t do it anymore.

So she did the unimaginable. She filed for divorce. It wasn’t fair for her to feel like this all the time and it wasn’t fair for Louis to always feel guilty for being away. It wasn't fair for her to pretend like everything was fine anymore.

With ever fiber of strength that she possessed she packed her things. She knew that if she saw him, if she let him hold her she would change her mind. She couldn’t change her mind. It hurt her; it physically hurt her to do it. There had been a dull ache in her chest from the moment she pulled the front door to their home shut behind her.

Laurel tried to be strong. She didn’t want anyone to know how much the destroyed her.

A strangled sob fell from her lips as her phone started to buzz. She knew he had found the papers. She picked up the phone reluctantly and cried harder when she looked at his smiling face that filled up the screen. She just let it vibrate and play his custom ringtone. Her finger traced the outline of his face as it continued to ring. When the screen went black, she cried even harder.

A few seconds later, it started again. Laurel had been crying for days following her leaving. She was surprised she had anything left Eventually, her mother, Wendy, peeked into the room, a pained expression on her face. She had been watching her daughter cry for days, but she wouldn’t say why. She knew that she left Louis but Wendy couldn’t imagine what could possibly have happened to make Laurel leave. She loved Louis so much.

The sound of her own cell phone ringing pulled her out of her thoughts. She pulled it out of her pocket, seeing her son-in-laws face flash across the screen. Wendy gave her daughter one more glance before sneaking out of the room to answer the call. Once she was safe in her own room, she pressed accept.

"Louis, honey. What happened?" She rushed out before greeting him.

"I don't know. I came home and she was just gone!" He sounded frantic and scared. "She filed for divorce." He tried to suppress a sob, but it slipped out and filled Wendy's ear. "Did you know about this?"

Wendy was speechless. She didn’t know that Laurel had gone so far as to try to end the marriage. "I had no idea. She won't say anything." Wendy winced as Louis cried into the phone. It was obvious that Louis had no idea what was going on either. "What are you going to do?"

"I have no idea. I'm so fucking confused right now. She is divorcing me on the grounds of "unreasonable behavior". I don't even know what that means! I've tried so hard, I thought-" He trialed off, suddenly finding himself at a loss for words.

"I'll talk to her. Get try to get some sleep. You need to calm down before you try to contact her okay? Just give it time." Wendy wasn’t sure how much of the last sentence he had heard, the line went dead somewhere in the middle.