The Unwanted Wife: Revenge After Divorce

DAMIAN

“Oh sir. You are back.”

Molly dropped the rag she was using to clean the cooker. She hurried over to me.

“Hi. You’re busy here I see.” She nodded, eyed the grocery bags I had just laid on the counter and reached for them. I shook my head. “Don’t bother. I will take care of this. Go home. You have the evening off.”

“Really? Thanks Mr Damian.”

I watched her hurry out the kitchen door. I turned to the bags of groceries I had picked up on the way to work.

“Here I go,” I muttered to myself as I rolled up my sleeves and began unpacking the groceries in preparation for making dinner.

On the menu tonight was Amelia’s favourite meal and of course, fried chicken. She was partial to fried chicken. I didn’t hurry the process, partly because I had come home from work much earlier than usual to cook, and also because I wanted the meal to be finger-licking perfect. Minutes later, the kitchen was filled with the aroma of delicious food. An hour before Amelia was due to come home, I had finished cooking. I put a bottle of her favourite wine in the fridge, changed the television channel to one showing a football game and settled down to wait for her. I found that I felt much lighter.

Talking myself into attempting to bridge the gap between Amelia and I had been hard, very hard. My ego had almost gotten in the way and frankly, no one could blame me because I wasn’t the one who had suddenly begun acting up in the first place. But now, I felt the effort I was putting into making things right was well worth it. At exactly 7p. m, Amelia walked through the door. It hurt to see that she wasn’t carrying the flowers I had sent. Whenever I had imagined seeing her at home this evening, I had always pictured her with the flowers.

“Hello, Damain,” she said, without breaking her stride.

“Hi. You’re back.”

She nodded. Without another word, she headed straight to her room. I couldn’t believe talking to Amelia these days had been reduced to exchanging greetings like we were strangers.

Still, dinner would set it right. I was sure of it. She would change, come down to dinner and then we would talk. I settled back into the sofa and waited. And waited.

Thirty minutes later it was freaking obvious that she had no intentions of dining with me. There was nothing for it but to go up to her room. I listened, then knocked. She opened the door just wide enough for me to see her face, and no further. By the look on her face, I knew she was going to ask if I wanted something.

“You wanted something?” she said.

“Typical,” I muttered.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing. Dinner is ready. It’s getting cold actually. We should eat now.”

I crossed my fingers behind my back. Chances were she would say no after all, and then-

“I’ll be down in a minute,” she said after a long pause.

She came down just as I laid out the food. Without a word to me, she sat down and began eating.

“I made the food,” I said to break the awkward silence.

“Oh. Molly-”

“I sent her home, gave her the evening off.”

She nodded. “Nice.”

Nice. What did that even mean? Was it nice that I made dinner for her, or was it nice that I had given Molly the evening off? Amelia certainly wasn’t going to make this easy for me. Still she was going to have to talk to me sometime while we ate, right?

Wrong.

Amelia’s phone beeped a minute later and she promptly began texting. I waited for her to eventually drop her phone, but the messages just kept coming in. Less than half of her attention was on her food. More of it was on her phone. Things continued in this vein for a while when I suddenly thought ‘Screw it! I was going to have to address the issue.’

“I thought you would be more focused on dinner,” I said, trying hard to keep the censure out of my tone. “Why are you focused on texting instead? You can reply those messages some other time, right?”

She gave me only a cursory glance and shrugged. “What else am I supposed to do? You don’t actually engage me in conversations. That makes me bored. I’m bored right now. So… I’ll rather text than just sit around eating.”

I bit my lip hard to keep back a retort. How was I supposed to engage her in a conversation when she was acting like there was this great, impassable wall built around her?

I took a deep breath and tried another tack. “Did you receive the flowers I sent to you this morning?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

I waited for her to say something else. She didn’t. Apparently, that was the only thanks I would get for that gesture. I had the feeling that if I hadn’t brought the flowers up, she wouldn’t have mentioned it at all. This made me want to ask her where she had kept them. This morning, after she left for work, I had peeked into her room and had seen the flowers she had gotten this morning. I was hoping that she would replace them with the ones I had gotten for her. It didn’t seem like that was going to happen.

“Amelia,” I said halfway through dinner. She reluctantly put down her phone. It immediately gave another annoying buzz. “I must confess that I’m very concerned about the turn our relationship has taken. You have been very aloof lately. Most times, it feels like you are avoiding me.” I paused, waited for her to deny it. She didn’t. “I would like us to go back to the way things were between us. Let’s both be close again.”

“Bad idea. Look, Damian the truth is this marriage would be much better if we maintain a formal relationship like we agreed to in the beginning. It will make things way easier for us when things eventually end, so let’s stick to the rules.”Material © NôvelDrama.Org.

“Rules are meant to be broken… sometimes.”

Something very much like anger darkened her face. “Why is it that you suddenly want a change in our relationship when you are the one who laid down the rules in the first place?”

“I- Let’s just say you’ve grown on me,” I confessed. “I have gotten used to having you around, to talking with you. It feels weird when we aren’t really speaking to each other. You are the only friend I have now.”

She looked at the hand I had stretched out towards her like it was a new specie of bug.

“Don’t patronize me,” she said tersely. “You’ve got Anton, remember?”

She scraped back her chair and the next moment, she was gone, leaving most of the food I had gone through so much trouble to prepare, untouched. Predictably, I could not eat another bite. Frustrated, I stormed off to my room. For hours after lying in bed, I couldn’t sleep a wink. Amelia’s words about me being boring and not being able to keep a conversation going played over and over in my head until I thought I would go mad.

She couldn’t be right, could she? There had been a lot of women before her. None of them had ever remotely referred to me as boring. Take Lora for instance. I had to keep threatening her to get her to stay away from me. That was how badly she wanted to be with me. That meant I couldn’t possibly be boring.

I had almost convinced myself of this when I recalled how Amelia kept texting all through dinner. Maybe the guy she was texting- and I was damn sure it was a guy- was more interesting than I was. I got off the bed and began to pace. In desperation, I called Anton. He was yawning so much that I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“Listen,” I said. “Quick question. Am I a boring guy?”

“Now, why on earth would you call late at night to-”

“Just answer the question, Anton.”

“Fine. What was it again?”

I repeated the question. Anton was just not taking this seriously.

“It’s a question that has a double edged answer,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Patience, my friend. Patience. Now where was I? Yes. Sometimes, you can be boring and too er… uptight. On the flip side, you can be fun when you want to be.”

“Thanks,” I said bitterly.

“Now, what-”

I hung up. I wished I hadn’t called Anton. Now, what I had managed to do was make myself more upset. If my best friend thought I was a no fun, then it probably was true. I lay back down and ended up spending the entire night thinking of ways by which I could engage Amelia in conversation.