Excerpt from Chapter 2
“How was work?” she asked, trying to prevent her voice from shaking. She deftly grabbed a few gauzy grocery bags of vegetables out of the fridge, not quite checking what she was actually selecting, and placed them on the counter.
Rocco shrugged, grabbing two paper-wrapped steaks from the bottom drawer and a half-eaten pack of capicola before shutting the fridge with his foot. “Eh, markets were up and down, I had a really good opportunity with this one option but of-fucking-course that’s exactly when Anderson decides to call me over cause he has a question about one of his accounts, but naturally one thing leads to another and I’m away from my desk for longer than I thought I’d be so I miss the peak and have to get out just under the high. So, that was annoying but not a major loss. And then later this inverse pick did not do what I was expecting it to do, but I managed to get it under control…”
He continued on, throwing out acronyms and economic jargon that probably made about as much sense to her as Shakespeare did to him. She had confessed to him long ago her lack of knowledge on — and interest in — the stock market, but once Rocco got started on a subject, especially one he was as passionate about as his job, silly things like his audiences’ interest did not matter to him. So long ago, Sofia had carefully honed her ability to fake-listen, curating a series of different grunts and expressions she could quickly interject at any pause without disturbing the flow of Rocco’s speech or the flow of her own thoughts. It was practically second nature now, she was conditioned to it; “futures” or “bullish” were like a hypnotist’s codewords to send her into a trance.
She wondered sometimes if it shouldn’t be like this, if she should feel eager and excited to hear about the things that Rocco was passionate about, if she should be impassioned by them as well. One would think that love would work like that, and at a certain point it had. She and Rocco had shared many years of mutual excitement, years where any little thing the other did seemed amazing and important to the world. But time and reality had dulled that sensation, leaving behind only a sober sense of familiarity and fond exasperation. That’s what married life was, she had come to accept: no more the giddiness and unconditional faith of puppy love but familiarity, comfort, quiet contentment. Those sorts of things.
She thought she heard a snort somewhere behind her and whirled around, but there was nothing there. Rocco didn’t seem to notice her startle as his tale wound to a close and he asked her, “How was your day?”
Sofia inhaled deeply, pushing down hard into the ends of the asparagus with her knife in an attempt to conceal the slight tremor of her hands. “Fine, fine. Got some editing done in the morning and worked a little on the manuscript in the afternoon. Other than that, nothing much.” She tried not to wince as she said it, consciously relaxing the rigid line of her shoulders.
Of course, she was being untruthful on multiple fronts. What she had said was not necessarily a lie, though certainly an exaggeration. She had been distracted from her editing much of the morning, trying to finish the book she had begun the night prior as she drank her coffee on the couch until eleven o’clock. After hauling herself through five pages of a mediocre memoir by a person who honestly had not done much to write about, she gave up and played Solitaire on her phone for an hour while she tried to mentally work out Ivy’s impending argument with Fitz. She had only actually sat down and wrote for about fifteen minutes before getting blocked and deciding to come down for a cup of tea. At which point, you know, her day took a much stranger turn.
That was the bigger lie, the lie of omission. She hadn’t even thought about whether she would mention Ivy’s apparition to Rocco until spoke, evidently having decided against it. As soon as she had said it, though, she felt that it was the right choice. After all, it had just been a hallucination, a momentary bout of hysteria. If she brought it up to him, it could go one of two ways: either Rocco would laugh and try to comfort her that it was just her vivid imagination, that she had gotten too absorbed in her writing, nothing more, and while this would come from a place of kindness, it would severely undermine how genuinely the event had affected her; on the other hand, he might take her too seriously and grow worried, he would want to find the root of the problem and fix it. But Sofia herself did not even know yet what the problem was or how to fix it. Maybe after a bit, once she had sorted it through in her own mind and parsed how she felt about it, she would share the experience with him, but right then it was too confusing, sounded more crazy. It would only worry him and irritate her. There was no point.
Rocco took her daily summary at face value, launching into the details of a phone call he’d had with his mother on the way home about his sister’s birthday dinner. He continued talking as he seared the steaks and she finished off the asparagus with a balsamic glaze. Sofia listened half-heartedly, attempting to remember the details of the plan but all the while distracted wondering if the swaying red fabric she caught a glimpse of in the window’s reflection was a crimson red dress or just a curtain.
As they climbed into bed, Sofia watched Rocco set their alarm for the next morning with a dull sense of resignation. Their alarm, because they would of course wake up to the same alarm. More accurately, Rocco would wake up to the alarm, Sofia would sleep right through it as soundly as she would through a nuclear blast, he would get up and make coffee and then try to coax her awake as it was brewing. Most often she would be roused by the smell and the sound of the shower running, commonly accompanied by Rocco’s deep voice talking absentmindedly to himself, or her, and she would roll over to stare at the ceiling, as she invariably had for at least an hour the night before, and try to convince herself that she was a human being inside a human body and therefore it was necessary to do things like get up and be a person even though she would honestly much rather continue laying there as an amorphous cloud of stories and dreams.
She had exactly as long to convince herself as it took Rocco to shower, for as soon as he shut the water and poked his head around the doorframe of the ensuite, she would be expected to not only be a person but to be Sofia Marino, a person she did not quite recognize but who Rocco always smiled at as if he did. They would talk about their upcoming day or random thoughts from the day before as Rocco brushed up and got himself dressed, which Sofia herself would not likely do until much later that afternoon. Downstairs, Sofia would nurse a mug of coffee, made to match her olive skin tone with a quarter-cup of half-and-half, while Rocco whipped them up a quick breakfast. In all honesty, Sofia would prefer not to eat so soon after waking up; it always made her oddly nauseous and ruined her appetite until dinner. But Rocco enjoyed sharing that meal together at the start of their days, something his own family had never done which he wanted to change for their family. And Sofia enjoyed making Rocco happy, so she’d pick at her food and make sleepy jokes with him over coffee until six-forty-five rolled around and she’d have to remind Rocco that he had a job to get to.
The next few minutes would be a frantic rush of shoe searches and last minute checks and many, many goodbye kisses, as if he wouldn’t see her later that very day. And when Rocco had finally been bundled out to his car and she had waved him off and locked the door behind him, then Sofia would be left alone with the whole day stretched out before her like a death march. It was the same thing every morning. For Rocco, it was necessary to wake up at six a.m. and leave by seven, needing at least an hour and a half to get from their house in Woodsburgh to his office in the Financial District. Sofia, on the other hand, had no reason to wake up before noon besides the fact that her husband liked to have breakfast together. She rarely had enough work to fill the hours until he would be home, leaving her with abundant amounts of free time, ideally, to write and read and nourish her mind and body, or more realistically, to be disappointed in herself for not doing those things.
“What’s on your mind?” Rocco asked suddenly, startling Sofia out of her thoughts about the next morning’s offerings. She hadn’t realized how lost she had been until she found the lights had already been turned off and she had settled in next to her husband under the covers.
“Nothing,” she sighed, burrowing deeper into his chest. “Just thinking about tomorrow. Shit to do.” Her sleepy mutter was only half-affected; her tired body lacked the energy to produce much more, but she knew her mind would be awake for hours yet.
“You sure there’s nothing wrong, love?” Rocco asked, sounding more awake.
“What do you mean?” she asked in return, stalling.
“I dunno, you seem a bit… distracted today, ever since I got home. Are you sure there’s nothing bothering you?”
“No, nothing. I probably have been a bit distracted, I’m kind of rushing to meet the deadline for this edit so it’s on my mind a lot. Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. But that’s really all there is? You can tell me if something is wrong, I want to help you but I can’t if I don’t know what’s going on. Please, babe.”
He kissed her temple and the annoyance that had been building inside of her evaporated and recondensed into guilt. Of course, she had been distracted by more than just work that evening, but she had already made up her mind not to tell Rocco about her earlier hallucination. It wasn’t like there would be anything he could do to help anyway, but it still hurt to hear that pleading note in his voice. She reached up to cup his jaw with her bony hand, lifting her face to him as she tilted his down to her. “I’m fine, love. I promise.”
She kissed him gently, allowing him to deepen it for a moment before she tapered it off. They exchanged a few quicker, sweeter pecks before rolling in opposite directions. Sofia heard Rocco beating his pillow into an acceptable shape before he laid down on his stomach with a huff. It was only minutes before his breaths evened out into the tell-tale rhythm of sleep. Laying on her back, staring up at the ceiling, Sofia tried to match her inhales and exhales to his. Her lungs protested slightly as they were asked to change their natural pace to match his much deeper, slower one, and she wondered if this would actually make her sleepier or just send her into a coughing fit. Despite trying to keep them closed, every few seconds her eyes would open of their own accord and dart frantically around the shadowy corners of the room, anxiously searching for the sheen of onyx hair or the glint of amber eyes.
Eve Annajane Writes, LLC 