Ashley Powell was a live-life-pretty-much-as-it-comes kind of woman, her life a perfectly balanced knife-edge between chaos and the abyss of order. Things had a way of getting done, but only when they absolutely had to be done. Her apartment was a perfect reflection of her character, cluttered, carefree with just a hint of playful sensuality beneath.
She packed as she lived. Quickly, bustling about the empty bedroom doing a passable imitation of a decapitated fowl, she pulled seemingly random garments out of the closet and jammed them into the battered overnight bag on the bed. The afterimage of their bodies was still burned into the crumpled sheets like the radiation shadows of holocaust victims.
Ashley fumbled with the top drawer of the dresser, grabbed a handful of lacy black and stuffed it in on top of the wrinkled edge of her only C.K. blouse. As an afterthought she flattened the wrinkled surge of ripples away. She cast a quick glance back in the direction of the bathroom even though she could hear the primal tattoo of the shower water splashing down on the bathtub.
Okay, plenty of time, she told herself, digging through her make-up bag for a kohl coloured eye-pencil. Her hand trembled ever so slightly as it drew a line around her watering right eye, the blunt pencil painting its shades of colour in. She used a rubber band to put her hair up. Tried smiling at her mirror self from two or three angles with two or three different smiles, trying them on for size.
“Hey,” Gabriel’s sleep-filled voice called from the doorway. “Where’re you off to in such a hurry?” His reflection was looking at the overfilled travel bag on the bed. He still looked like warmed through shit, naked but for the damp-darkened towel wrapped around his waist. Red rimmed eyes heavy with more tears smiled softly her way. More than anything, Ashley found herself wanting to throw her arms around Gabriel and hug him so fiercely he split through the middle. She turned around to face the real Gabriel, look him in the eye, and felt herself wanting — when had she last felt like this? Too long ago was the answer — to cry for him.
“Nowhere without you,” the slight catch in her voice giving away more than she wanted to say. “Oh Gabe, I don’t know. After last night… I don’t want to be here for a while. I thought we could be alone for a while… Somewhere…” she let it hang, wanting to say so much more about ghosts. About his ghosts. The two of them that lived in every building, on every street corner in Manhattan and the Bronx. She knew he knew and hated herself for nearly saying it. He’d earned the right to mourn, as a father and as a husband.
She blinked back tears of her own as she watched the emotions jostle for position behind his eyes, wished she could take back every word, every thought until he stepped out of the doorway, arms held wide for her to step in to.
“I know,” he said softly, taking her in his arms, closing them around her. Gabriel brushed an errant curl back and touched his lips to the top of her head. “I think I might, you know…” he didn’t say it, couldn’t.
“Me too,” she swallowed, feeling the strength of his body against hers and the slow track of her tears on her smiling cheeks.