Chapter Two
1241 Words
The alarm screamed into the dark, puncturing Owen Cole's shallow, restless sleep.
He blinked blearily at the clock. 6:00 AM.
Like every day.
His hand slapped the snooze button with the indifference of muscle memory. For a moment, he simply lay there, staring at the cracked ceiling, feeling the familiar tightness in his chest that always accompanied the first breath of morning.
Beside him, Leia stirred. She made a small noise, rolled over, and promptly began her morning ritual: complaint before consciousness.
"You forgot the trash again," she muttered into her pillow.
Owen swallowed the acid in his throat. "Morning to you, too."
Leia didn’t respond. She simply pulled the covers tighter around her body like a fortress against the world—and, he thought sourly, against him.
He sat up, running a hand through his thick, tousled hair. His body ached, not with the sharp sting of injury but the dull grind of repetition. His physique was still strong, maintained through decades of stubborn habit, the kind of strength that lingered even when desire had long since evaporated.
Downstairs, the house was still cold. Leia had turned down the heat again, convinced they were hemorrhaging money through the ancient ductwork. Owen padded barefoot to the thermostat and nudged it up a few degrees, knowing full well he'd hear about it later.
The kitchen was a graveyard of half-finished tasks—an open cereal box sagging on the counter, a sink half-full of gray dishwater, a smattering of crumbs leading from the fridge to the table. The coffeepot gurgled, overbrewed, and bitter.
He poured himself a mug, grimacing at the taste. It was like drinking something that resented being swallowed.
Leia appeared a few minutes later, wrapped in her fraying blue bathrobe, yawning dramatically.
"You didn't put your socks in the hamper again," she said, voice still hoarse with sleep.
Owen sipped his coffee. It scalded the roof of his mouth. He welcomed the pain.
"I'll get them later," he said.
"You said that yesterday."
He smiled tightly, the expression barely touching his eyes. "I’ll get them today."
She squinted at him, suspicious, as if weighing whether it was worth fighting over. Instead, she turned to the sink and began noisily washing a single spoon, banging it against the ceramic like it had personally offended her.
"Also," she said, "I’m serious about needing you to call the plumber. The sink's still leaking. And the bathroom door sticks. And you’re supposed to help me clean out the basement this weekend."
The list coiled like a noose tightening with every word.
He leaned against the counter, letting the hot mug sear his palm, focusing on the small, immediate pain to drown out the larger, endless one.
"Okay," he said. A dead man's voice.
Leia turned, drying her hands on a dish towel. She looked at him for a moment, something soft trying to surface in her eyes.
"I just... want us to take care of things, you know? I want this place to feel like home."
Home.
Owen nodded. What else was there to say?
Leia stepped closer, kissed his cheek. She smelled like vanilla and laundry detergent.
He smiled again, the kind of smile worn thin by repetition—reflex, not emotion.
Inside, something curled tighter.
---
At work, the world collapsed into gray.
His cubicle buzzed under fluorescent lights that made his skin feel vaguely unreal. His computer hummed, the screen glowing with endless rows of numbers and maps, shipment routes and optimization algorithms no one outside this building would ever care about.
He clicked. He dragged. He recalculated. He clicked again.
Lunch was a sad ham sandwich eaten alone while pretending to scroll through news headlines on his cracked phone. The office smelled faintly of burnt coffee and human resignation.
"Hey, Owen," his boss, Gerry, said as he passed. "Need those quarterly reports bumped up a day. Think you can swing it, champ?"
Owen nodded. Of course he could. What else did he have to do but shovel another day’s worth of meaningless numbers into the void?
He finished the reports two hours early. No one noticed.
By 3:00 PM, he was refreshing his email every few minutes—desperate for the illusion that something might change.
At 4:57 PM, he stood and packed his things.
He drove home with the radio off, the silence in the car growing so loud it had weight.
---
Leia was already home, standing in the driveway with a basket of laundry balanced on her hip.
"You left the porch light on all day again," she said by way of greeting.
Owen offered a sound that might have been an apology or simply a grunt of acknowledgment.
She followed him into the house, rattling off more updates: she’d cleaned out the hall closet, found an old box of his college stuff, thought maybe they could finally go through it this weekend.
"You always say you'll help," she said, laughing a little to soften it, "but you always find some reason to disappear."
He didn't correct her. He didn't remind her that he spent last weekend fixing the broken fence while she "supervised" from a lawn chair.
Instead, he nodded and toed off his shoes at the door.
Dinner was a secondhand casserole reheated into indifference. The conversation was more of the same—things that needed fixing, people they needed to call, future tasks stacking like unpaid debts.
Owen chewed with the slow rhythm of obligation, each bite turning to paste before it reached his throat.
Leia chatted about her friends engagement, about wanting to repaint the kitchen, about maybe adopting a cat.
Owen nodded on cue, smiled like a marionette wired for civility.
Inside, the knot in his chest grew tighter, hotter.
When they finished eating, Leia handed him a list she'd scribbled on the back of an old envelope. Things to do this weekend.
He folded it carefully and tucked it into his wallet.
"You're not even going to look at it?" she teased, half-joking, half-accusing.
"I will," he said. "Later."
He wouldn’t.
They watched TV on the sagging couch. Leia curled up next to him, her head on his shoulder. She laughed at the sitcoms, nudged him when he didn’t react fast enough to punchlines.
"You’re so serious lately," she said, wrinkling her nose. "You need to relax."
Owen kissed her forehead because it was easier than explaining that he didn't know how.
When they went to bed, Leia fell asleep quickly, breathing softly against his chest.
Owen lay awake, staring at the ceiling.
He thought about the list in his wallet.
He thought about the chipped mug in the sink.
He thought about the leaking faucet, the sticky door, the porch light burning all day, the laundry half-folded in the basket.
He thought about the way her voice grated at him now, not because she was cruel but because she was constant, unrelenting, unstoppable.
He closed his eyes and imagined himself folding into the mist outside, dissolving into it, leaving nothing behind but a note that simply said "Sorry."
But he wouldn’t.
He would wake up tomorrow.
He would smile.
He would say, "Good morning," even when he didn’t mean it.
He would take out the trash and fix the sink and fold the laundry and sign the birthday card and repaint the kitchen, and maybe even adopt the cat.
He would do all the right things.
Until he didn't.
- Writer
