All I Want for Christmas Is You (Short Story) (7 page)

“You know nothing happened.”

“I don’t know that, Billy. And I feel like a fool taking your word for it!”

“You’re not a fool.” He tried to touch her and she smacked away his hand. “You’re my family, Maddy.”

“And what are you to me?”

He flinched at her words, but she couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t help hurting him. This is what they’d come to. Every conversation was a fight, a chance to hurt the other. “I can’t keep giving you everything you need and get nothing in return. Nothing.”

It was unfair, she knew, it’s not like anyone had shown him how to be a family. Without her, he’d probably slide back into the dark hole his sisters lived in.

Not your problem anymore.

But it was still hard. They would eat him alive, his sisters.

“Once the season’s over—”

“How many times have I heard that? No, Billy.
You … you just absorb me. You need me and you suck me in until there’s nothing left for me. You always have. I don’t believe you anymore. I have no more faith in us. I have nothing.”

“Yeah?” He was getting angry, his default position, all his doors closing. They’d start yelling just like his parents had. It was so ugly, so not the way she’d thought their life would be.

I will never be in this place again
, she promised herself as Billy yelled, “That new house in Ben Avon Heights? The clothes? The car? That’s nothing?”

“I don’t want things. I don’t want money. Why can’t you see that? I want you and I’ve lost you. I’ve lost me. I can’t do this anymore,” she whispered, dry-eyed and hollow. “This sport is turning you into someone I don’t know.”

“That’s bullshit—”

“No. It’s not. Just because you don’t agree doesn’t mean it’s bullshit. And being married to you is turning me into someone I don’t know. I can’t do it anymore, Billy. I just can’t.”

Maybe because she wasn’t screaming, wasn’t crying and trying to hurt him, he finally got the message.

His face, so handsome, so very dear to her—despite the scar, or maybe because of it—crumpled.

“Please,” he whispered. He
begged.
If her heart weren’t already cracked, she might actually have felt something.

But she looked at the boy she’d loved since she was thirteen and felt nothing.

There was a God—the proof was that when she pushed the button the elevator doors opened immediately, and she stepped in.

Don’t look
, she told herself, staring at the white salt stains on her boots. But as the elevator door started to
close, she looked up and saw her husband, all alone. Nearly naked. Tears in his eyes.

But he wasn’t fighting. And she knew, right then, that it was over.

Really over.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

And the doors closed between them.

About the Author

M
OLLY
O’K
EEFE
published her first Harlequin romance at age twenty-five and hasn’t looked back. She loves exploring each character’s road toward happily ever after. She’s won two Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice awards and the RITA for Best Novella in 2010. Originally from a small town outside of Chicago, she now lives in Toronto, Canada, with her husband, two kids, and the largest heap of laundry in North America.

www.molly-okeefe.com