She fumed. She screamed. She stomped her feet.
She was livid with him.
‘So, you’re going on a trip with your friends from work the last week of the year again this year? Leaving me alone on New Year’s Eve again? For the second time in a row?’
He simply shrugged.
‘Yes, I am.’
She fumed some more. She screamed some more. She practically put her feet through the ground and into the apartment below. To no avail. He was going.
***
The weeks leading up to December were pretty uneventful. He took her out for diner, celebrating their three year anniversary. She took him to see an orchestra that was in town.
She decided to see if he was still going to go.
‘So, when do you leave?’
‘The 26th.’
‘That’s still Christmas.’
‘Yes.’
Her blood began to heat up.
‘So, you’re going to be away on Christmas and New Year?’
‘So it would seem.’
She tried the teary eyed approach.
‘Don’t you want to spend the holidays with me?’
‘I don’t see why those days should be any more special than any other day of the year. Besides, that is the only week everyone could get off of work.’
She should have known he would say something like that. He would never know sentimental value if it jumped up and broke his neck. So she fumed. So she screamed. So she stomped her feet. To no avail. He was still going.
***
Christmas came. They exchanged gifts as usual.
She couldn’t help but notice the packed suitcase that stood waiting.
She said nothing. After all, what was there to say? She had fumed, she had screamed, she had stomped her feet. Nothing had helped.
He wouldn’t listen, didn’t care that the holidays did mean something to her, that she did want to spend them with the one she loved most. Now she found herself considering even that.
But that didn’t matter. He was most certainly going.
***
She didn’t see him off. She refused to acknowledge that he was leaving her alone for the rest of the year and some days into the new one.
She wanted nothing to do with his getaway, where he would no doubt get drunk to the point of going into a vegetative coma, make a complete fool out of himself and completely forget about her.
She smiled wryly. Well, at least one of them was going to have some fun. Because he had gone.
***
The last day of the year had come. She sat in their apartment. Alone. With a bottle of wine. Unopened. The phone lay beside her. He hadn’t even called. She refused to call him.
She had been the one doing the concessions last year. She had gone out of her way to visit him on New Year’s Day, surprising him with her visit. He hadn’t seemed very thrilled at it.
So, this year, she had resolved, it would be his turn. All through December she had been entertaining the idea that maybe he would come back on new Year’s Eve, to be with her in spite of their arguments about it.
She looked at the clock. It was now officially January. She uncorked the bottle of wine and took a swig.
He wasn’t coming back.
***
New Year’s day found her in a state of dishevelment. He hadn’t called at all. Not to wish her a happy New Year, not to enquire how she was doing, not to tell her that he would be coming home soon, that he missed her.
Her cheeks were crusted with old tears. She stood up, wobbling a bit, and went into their bedroom. She tore open the closet, threw everything she owned into a suitcase, and left. If he wasn’t going to comprise, than she wasn’t going to do it anymore either.
All those days of ignoring her gut feelings, things he did that she didn’t approve of, things she told him and he would promptly forget, thing he didn’t do that she would have been happy with, things he did and said that hurt her. They had been building up for far too long. She knew she should have said something, but she never had the courage.
And now, she was going.
***
2nd of January found him in a state of shock. His apartment was half empty, and she was nowhere to be found. He had expected her to be there when he got home, to welcome him back with open arms, tell him that she had missed him, that she still loved him even though he had gone.
There was a note in her handwriting on the fridge. Silently terrified, he read it.
“Dear Sesshoumaru,
I trust that your holiday was a blast, and hope that you had fun with your friends. Then the changing of the year won’t have been entirely wasted on us.
It wasn’t wasted on me, anyway. It served as an eye-opener, you might say.
I wondered if you recalled last year, when I came halfway across the land to be with you on New Year’s day. It didn’t seem to matter very much to you, but I had secretly been hoping that you might have come back on New Year’s Eve, to be with me. Even if I was the only one who cared about it.
But, as you know, you didn’t. And to me, it was the straw that broke my back. I can’t keep on giving, Sesshoumaru. Sometimes, I need to receive.
Don’t come looking for me. I won’t be there.
Kagome”
He fumed. He screamed. He stomped his feet. To no avail. She wasn’t coming back.
***
The entire weekend he spent inside. He sat on his couch, that she had picked out, and pondered.
He was angry with her for assuming she was the only one that ever gave anything in their relationship.
He had given her plenty.
Did she forget about the times when she came home, sore from work, and he would give her a massage? About the times when she was having one of her sour moods, and he would be the one to listen? About the times he would make her body sing? Wasn’t that enough for her, as it was for him?
‘Apparently not,’ he said to himself before downing his glass of vodka.
Then, he was even angrier with her.
What did she expect of him? To just throw away his life to dance to her silly little whims? To be her puppet? He was nobody’s puppet, no matter how much he cared for her. He was not going to change just because she didn’t like certain things he did. She would just have to accept him the way he was.
He poured himself another glass.
Had she not accepted him? In the beginning, it didn’t matter what he did, she would laugh about it, shrug it off and think it would be better next time. Only to be disappointed.
For a while, he thought he had changed, and so did she. She was happy then, he could tell. But, somehow, somewhere, he had reverted back to being who he was before she had come along. He wondered when it was.
Probably around the time their trust in each other shrunk somewhat.
She was the one that started it, he thought bitterly. She had no business looking through his email. She didn’t have the right to open it. She should never have seen the ones sent by his former love interest.
It wasn’t his fault she was so distrusting of him. It wasn’t his fault the wench had sent him some pictures of her in skimpy clothing. It wasn’t his fault she assumed he was still actively seeing her, when he obviously wasn’t.
He sighed. None of that mattered now. She was gone.
***
He didn’t hear from her as the weeks passed. He thought she would at least send him a message. She always did. She was always the one that crumbled first whenever they were in a fight. He wondered briefly if that was one of those things that she thought he should have given her, but quickly lost his train of thought.
There was a knock on the door.
Rushing to open it, he nearly cried at the sight of her.
She was a walking corpse, black lines under her eyes and a lot thinner than he remembered her. Her eyes were the only thing that remained alive. Fire burned within them. She smiled wryly at him.
‘I see the year has been good to you so far.’
He looked at himself in the hall mirror, and discovered he didn’t look so very much different from her. He ignored this, and stepped aside to invite her in.
‘Don’t flatter yourself, I only came to pick up some stuff I forgot.’
He stared after her as she moved from room to room, filling the bag she carried with bits and pieces of their past.
‘Can’t we at least be civilized about this?’ he tried.
She spun around so fast he didn’t even see her do it.
‘Civilized? Civilized?!’
She was giving him the best pissed off look she could manage.
‘I tried to be civilized about it. For three years, I put up with all your quirks and strange mannerisms. I ignored warnings from my parents and friends. I ignored my own feelings some times. I ignored everything I didn’t want to see about you. How you would rather go gallivanting with your friends than be with me, how you would rather work all night than spend an evening on the couch with me, how you would-’
‘I spent more evenings with you than with anybody else, you will not accuse me of anything like that!’
‘I never said you didn’t! I just said you’d rather have spent them with your friends of work! If you’d had the chance, you would’ve been out with your friends every night!’
‘Don’t be foolish, you know that’s not true!’
‘Well, it certainly felt like it!’
Tears came to her eyes.
‘You never cared how I felt about anything! Sure, you’d ask, but you didn’t care about my opinion! So what if I felt strongly about being together on holidays, you didn’t, so why bother staying?’
‘You’re focusing everything on that little thing!’
‘See! You’re doing it even now! It’s not a little thing to me, get that through your thick skull!’
She started trembling.
‘And it’s not just that ‘little thing’, it’s a whole lot more! You never noticed when I tried to make an effort to look nice, all you did was tear everything off as quickly as possible. Did you ever stop and think I just wanted to feel pretty and have you say it?!’
‘I have told you on multiple occasions what my opinions about your body were, and- ‘
‘Another thing! Always the romantic one, aren’t you?! ‘Opinions about your body’, boy, that makes a girl feel loved!’
‘Stop this nonsense, Kagome, we are getting nowhere with this.’
‘No! I won’t stop until you understand! You may be okay with a relationship with only the odd teaspoon full of romance, but that’s just not enough for me! It’s not like I need gallons of the stuff every single day, but a cup a month, a few sprinkles a week would have been nice! It’s not like I was asking you to fly me off to Paris every weekend, but once would have been nice. All you had to do was show me that you cared, even it was in your own demented way, and it would’ve been enough. But you couldn’t even manage that, could you?’
Tears streamed down her cheeks now.
‘You just couldn’t… listen to what I said… you couldn’t… tell what I needed.’
‘You have seen too many romantic movies. Things do not work that way in real life.’
She sniffled once before shooting him a glare he wasn’t expecting.
‘You’re right. Things don’t go that way. Not when you’re concerned.’
She stormed past him, slamming the door behind her. She was gone again.
***
She just needed to blow off some steam, he decided when she had left. She would come back again.
Or so he thought.
He didn’t hear from her all through February. He had expected her to at least send a card on Valentine’s day, she always did, even though she knew he though it to be frivolous sentimentalities. Because she did care about it.
He didn’t send her a card either. Why should he? She was gone, anyway.
***
The next time he saw her, was in March. He was walking from his office to the little café where they sometimes had lunched together when she passed him by.
She was with some of her friends, apparently having gone on a shopping spree. They were laughing amongst each other. She looked good.
One of her friends whispered something at her, and she glanced his way.
There was a look of sadness and disappointment in her eyes for a moment, before her eyes became unreadable. She nodded at her friends, who then proceeded to glare at him until they rounded a corner.
He stared after them. He wondered what he could do to make her stop acting so foolish and come back to him.
He picked up his phone.
She may be gone now, but she would be coming back very soon.
***
He was used to having things go his way. If he wanted something, he got it, one way or another. If he had to fume, scream and stomp his feet in the process, so be it.
But there was one thing he would never do.
‘Beg me.’
The words had sprung from her mouth like flees from a wet dog.
He had taken care of everything that evening. He had booked a table at the restaurant where they had dinner together for the first time, had booked a room at the little bed and breakfast where they went together on their first weekend away from home together, had sent her an invitation, had arranged for her to be picked up with a carriage, and had dressed his best.
And now, here he was, standing outside her place, holding the little door to the carriage open for her, and she was telling him to beg her.
‘Kagome, will you stop making a scene, and get in?’
She raised her eyebrow at him, crossed her arms and remained where she was, giving him an incredulous look.
How he hated it when she imitated him.
‘Kagome, I went through a lot of trouble arranging everything for tonight, and it would be a shame to let it all go to waste.’
Trying to appeal to her practical side always worked.
Not this time.
She made to go back into the building, tears in her eyes and her shoulders shaking, when she felt him grab her arm.
He was staring at her with those golden eyes of his, silently begging her to just come back to him.
‘I want to hear it,’ she said in a quiet voice.
He hesitated.
She pulled loose and turned around.
‘Please…’
It was so quiet she hardly heard it, but it made her stop dead in her tracks none the less. She turned back slowly.
There he stood, the proud man of her heart, his head bowed in submission. He suddenly stepped forward, grabbed her wrist again, and went down on his knees.
‘Kagome, please, come back to me. I need you.’
She stared at him as he stared back, tears falling from her eyes.
‘That’s all I needed to know,’ she whispered as she fell to the ground to embrace him.
He sighed in relief. She came back. And damned if he ever let her go away again.