Claiming The Remnant

Chapter 46

[ Garrett ]

By the time I got back to the Castle, an imposing stone building, recent events had caught up to me and I was exhausted. In all likelihood His Majesty would be engaged with the ever growing conundrum that was ‘Lady Esther’. With that considered I decided to leave airing my grievances with King Leorè until my brain had recovered from it’s sleep deprived stupor.

All things considered, if we were all going to die unless Esther was saved, I would rather spend my time with Jo. Speaking with the King could wait until tomorrow.

After leaving my new horse with a stablehand I headed directly to our quarters. Ye Gods, I hoped Jo hadn’t trashed the bed.

Faced with the door to the space Jo and I shared nerves jangled across my whole body, my mouth became dry and I was afraid. Afraid that Jo wouldn’t be here. Afraid they would have left me. One deep breath later I found my nerve and pushed the door open.

Jo really had trashed the place. The dining table and chairs were destroyed. Splinters of wood littered the whole room as though the furniture had exploded. Pieces of porcelain were mixed with the wood, the plain white shards of the two mugs, two bowls and two plates were only recognisable because I knew what they had once been. My eyes wandered across the destruction - from the kitchenette cupboards that had most likely been beaten into a state of unsalvageable disrepair with a chair to the landscape painting that had been removed from the wall and, by the looks of it, had a foot put through it.

The bedroom door was just about clinging to its hinges. Not ready to face that reality right at that second I plugged the sink and added some water to put the flowers into. I found myself clinging to the countertop in an effort not to collapse onto the floor. It wasn’t the stuff. These things were just that, things. What had my heart burning in my chest was fear, fear that Jo didn’t love me as much as I loved them. This rage seemed beyond unwarranted. Was it directed at me or at themselves? Either way it hurt.

Unwilling to face the bedroom and the brokenness I was sure to find there I decided to find another room to sleep in, that was until I heard a noise.

“Jo?” The unease I felt as the bedroom door creaked open beneath my hand became immediately justified at the sight before me. The chest of draws was tossed onto the floor, clothes strewn everywhere and the bedside tables were in pieces but that wasn’t what had my blood in icy agony and my heart shrivelling in my chest.

Shirtless, Jo was pulling on a pair of loose trousers and there was a woman.

In our bed.

Across the expanse of the wrecked room I locked eyes with my butterfly. Jo’s powder blue eyes were orbs of emotion; emotions that were tangled and fractured like cracks through glass and just as hard. Words escaped me. The entirety of the rest of the world escaped me. All that was left in this soul wrenching moment was an indescribable feeling of hurt.

I wanted to be folded into Jo’s embrace, to feel that overwhelming comfort from the arms of my love, and yet, Jo was the very person who had hurt me. The very person I should want to turn away from considering the horror of the sight before me.

Jo said nothing.

I said nothing.

There was nothing to say right now.

Perhaps it wasn’t real. Ye Gods. Please.

Three steps and I was reaching for the woman in the bed. She shrank back, afraid. Unnecessary. My fingers brushed the heated skin of her shoulder.

Real.

No.

I…

I felt like everything was floating away from me. My body was disconnected from my brain and acted on its own, turning, stumbling from this mess as my heart crumbled and my mind tumbled in denial.

“Where are you going, Garrett?” Jo called after me, words dripping with venom. “Thought this is what you were drooling after, a real woman WITH A p***y YOU CAN f**k!!” Jo screamed viciously down the hallway as I staggered away.

No matter how much I gasped, I couldn’t catch my breath. Pain was drowning my soul. I was shattering over and over again. Ye Gods, no, this couldn’t be. WHY?! And why did it hurt so much? We had both indulged without restraint when it came to s****l partners before, when we were just a fling, just a casual experiance. I had walked in on Jo when they were in the middle of pounding some guy over a year back and that hadn’t bothered me in the slightest but this?

This was like being crushed and stabbed and turned inside out all at once.

Somehow I made it to my secret place; a small room behind a swinging hidden door. Sliding down the rough wall and onto the freezing floor a chasm opened in me. An empty space punched through my chest creating a hollowness that should have been numb but was actually more painful. There was nothing to hold onto. I couldn’t find a reason that held any credibility as to why Jo would do this to me, to us. Despair was swallowing me up, spitting me out and pouring heartbreak over my broken corpse.

There was no pain I had ever known that matched this.

The emptiness, this all consuming feeling that I wasn’t enough; that I could never be enough was eating me alive. After what seemed to me to be an eternity of hollow disconnected hurt that walked a line somewhere between a desperate need to hold them and desire to be as far away from them as possible, the tears began to fall.

Huge salty blobs burned in my eyes, blurring the pitch black of this tiny room. I wept; curled up on my side sobbing with abandon until heavy sleep snatched me from this waking nightmare.