Absurdity (M&M, Mature, Pt. 1/1)

[April]

Title: Absurdity

Author: April

Disclaimer: Sometimes I think the characters are mine. I feel like I write with them so much. But no, that’s just wishful thinking.

Category: Michael and Maria AU

Rating: Mature

Author’s Note: This was actually an idea that popped into my head literally out of nowhere, and I decided to just write it out and post it for the heck of it. It’s short, but hopefully it’s a decent read. If you feel like leaving feedback, I’d really appreciate it.

Author’s Note (#2): I’m currently writing a story called Passion. Hopefully I’ll be able to start posting it on this board soon! And hopefully some people will check it out when I do!

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

He was beautiful, in a manly sort of way, of course. It was the first thing I thought when I saw him. I thought that he had the most incredible brown eyes and gorgeous meltdown-inducing smile. I thought his unruly brown hair was the craziest, coolest thing I’d ever seen. Most of all, I thought he would never notice me.

But he did. He turned around one day in algebra II to hand me a copy of the quiz I knew I was going to fail, and for no apparent reason, he just stared at me. Our gazes locked, steadfast and determined to not look away, and then he just smiled at me and asked the most absurd question anyone in the history of the world has ever asked.

“Wanna get married?”

Did I? Hell yes.

We were at the altar in a small, quaint chapel just outside of town before we even knew each other’s names. Seriously. It seemed crazy, but it felt so completely right.

We said our impromptu vows laughing, and we fell into our wedding bed that night, our laughter still echoing throughout the air. Our wedding bed was our honeymoon getaway. Our honeymoon getaway was his apartment. It was dirty and messy and a little bit smelly, but it felt like heaven to me.

And technically, since we were married, half of it was mine. Hmm.

I knew my parents would be furious with me when they found out. That’s why I didn’t go home for the next three days. I didn’t even call. We hid out in our little piece of heaven, mainly in the bed, and tried to forget about the rest of the world. But one day, I woke up and I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer.

I told myself it didn’t matter what they said. I was eighteen, age of majority where I lived, and he was an emancipated minor. We were adults, and we were living. We were married.

We were insane.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

His name was Michael, and I thought that was perfect. Michael and Maria. Didn’t it just sound great together, like the kind of thing you might say just for the sake of saying it? Michael and Maria.

When we did finally venture back out into the real world, I was sort of surprised that no one seemed to be looking for me. No police. No searches. I asked Michael while he drove over to my parents’ house if he would make sure the police looked for me if I ever went missing. He said he would search every square inch of the planet himself, and that made me want to kiss him. So I did.

Then he had to pull the car over because I kept kissing him, and that just led to unsafe driving.

By the time we got to my parents’ house, I was feeling confident. Michael and I walked in the front door hand in hand and told them our good news. I said it so simply that I don’t think it quite registered with them at first.

“Mom. Dad. This is Michael. We got married.”

My parents, as emotional as they were, ironically stood like statues in that moment, silent. Then my dad gently cleared his throat and asked, “What?”

I repeated my words, slower this time, but with the same overjoyed smile on my face. This time, my dad roared a four-letter word that I’m much too polite to repeat, and my mom literally tipped over backwards. She had a habit of fainting. I should have expected it.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The next few months, they annoyed me to no end. They tried to physically force me to sign annulment papers, but I wouldn’t do it. They tried to physically force me to stay living under their roof, too, but I wouldn’t do that, either. I wanted to live with my husband.

School was also difficult. People stared at us as though we were lunatics, but we were just in love. (I understand now that love is the same as lunacy, but I didn’t at the time.) The students came right out and said things to our faces. Everyone was so eager to tell us how stupid we were. The teachers, of course, were more subtle about it. They waited until they had retreated to their comfy little lounges to talk about us, to talk about teenagers in general.

“. . . so unimaginably unintelligent . . . governed by their hormones . . .”

Perhaps that was the biggest misconception about Michael and me, that we only got married to have sex, that sex was the only thing we shared. But that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Granted, our intimacy was outrageous, but I never felt the need to brag.

If they had only been able to see the smile on his face when I opened my eyes every morning and saw the puddle of drool collected on my pillow. I thought it was disgusting, but he thought I was cute. He said everything I did was adorable.

They didn’t know about breakfast, either. Michael was a great cook, and every morning, he would sit me down at the kitchen table and proceed to wait on me.

“Will it be the Western Omelet today?” he would ask. “Or how about pancakes?”

Every day, my answer was the same. “Pancakes. With strawberries, please.”

And he would smile. “I had a feeling.”

And I would smile, too.

My favorite times with Michael had to be stormy nights, though. I always hated storms. The thunder, the lightning, even just the rain . . . I hated it all. So whenever it would storm, I would curl up into a ball on the bed, shiver, and pray for it to end soon. Michael always had a way of making it better, though. He had a way of making everything better.

He would put his arms around me, covering me like a blanket, and talk to me quietly until I fell asleep or the storm passed, whichever came first. Usually, I fell asleep. He made me feel that comfortable.

I loved him so much.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

For six beautiful months, we maintained our heaven. But shortly after I graduated and began considering college for the spring semester, we started to become stressed. It seemed to suddenly occur to us that we had no money. My parents had completely cut me off at that point, and Michael had stopped receiving support from the government once he turned eighteen. We were broke, and for the first time in our marriage, we were worried.

I forgot about college for awhile. Michael forgot about high school. Instead of finishing out his senior year, he decided to get a full-time job as a chef at a restaurant. He was making good money . . . until he got fired. It wasn’t his fault. He was a good employee, but the restaurant was cutting back. He soon became a full-time burger-flipper at Burger King. And he hated that. He came home every night complaining, yawning, telling me how much he wanted to quit. But he always told me how pretty I looked, too, and kissed me on the cheek. He never forgot to do that. And then he would go into the bathroom and take a shower, usually alone. Usually he was too tired for me to join him.

I wasn’t just sitting around the apartment all that time. I tried to find a job, but no one would hire me. (I would later find out that my dad talked to virtually every employer in the area and warned them not to hire me in an attempt to ruin my life. I will resent him for that for all time.)

One night, when my husband was working an impossibly long double-shift, I ventured out to the edge of town, to a place called The Saloon. It was an old strip club, the only one in town. My mom had worked there for a few months after giving birth to me. She had always mumbled things about doing whatever she had to do to keep our heads above water, but I had never really understood her until that night.

I walked into the club, auditioned, felt humiliated, and got the job. I was a stripper.

Great.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I didn’t tell Michael.

Things got quiet between us after that. At one point, I think the only words that were spoken were lies.

“Where were you all night?”

“At work. Remember, I told you I got that job at the movie store. You remember, right?”

And he would nod mutely, recalling the lie I had told him.

Movie store. It was the first thing I had thought of, the only thing that really came to mind. It wasn’t that far of a stretch, not really. The store had an adult film gallery, and what I was doing on stage was practically live action porn.

The longer I “danced” (yes, danced, not stripped, because the other ladies I worked with thought it was too degrading to call it stripping), the more money I got. But in order to keep making more money, I had to keep taking off more clothes. And then I had to start bringing old, sleazy men into the back room to touch them and put my mouth on them and do things to them that I’d rather not describe. I got to the point where I was almost numb to it, to the meaningless sex, the roughness of it all. I just wanted money. I just wanted to help Michael keep our heads above water.

Michael . . .

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I developed quite a fan base over the three months that I worked at The Saloon. Of course, they knew me as Veronica. It was a totally random stripper—excuse me, dancer—name I had picked out so that Michael wouldn’t hear things and get suspicious. I was so popular, in fact, that Friday nights were dubbed Veronica nights. The club was always packed, and I was always miserable.

Michael and I had been married for exactly nine months when I took the stage that night, what I had decided was going to be my final Veronica night. I didn’t want to strip anymore. After the show, I was going to confront my boss, tell him that I was quitting. Just one more show. Just a little more money.

I was dancing, taking my clothes off, working the pole, doing all the things a good little strip-dancer was supposed to do. I liked to have my eyes closed, because I couldn’t stand to see pigs salivating over me, but for some reason, I felt the need to open them that night. So I did.

And I saw his eyes staring back at me. My husband. Michael. I froze on stage and suddenly remembered that fateful day in algebra II class, the way he had just turned around, gazed at me, and spoke to me for the first time.

“Wanna get married?”

He had been much happier that day. The person he was now was not the same. He was dark, depressed, and, perhaps most disturbingly, relatively unaffected. I had hoped he would jump up onto the stage, wrap his jacket around me, and haul me out of there, maybe yell at me a little later and then kiss me senseless. But he just turned around and walked out. Just like that.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When I got home to the apartment, he was already gone. And all of his things were gone. I ran around, screaming and crying his name for a good hour or so, even though I knew it would do no good. It started to storm shortly after midnight, and I cried harder. It stormed all night, and I had no one to keep me safe, to keep me warm, to keep me unafraid.

I looked for him. I really did. But he was nowhere to be found. I received divorce papers in the mail a week later. He had already signed them, so I did, too. Yes, we had been alive and in love and married, but we really had been insane. We really had been.

After that, I moved back in with my parents, remained unhappy, and tried to get my life back on track. There was a brief moment when I feared I might be pregnant, but I took a test and thanked God when it was negative. Other than that, things were pretty standard.

I got a job working for my dad as a secretary at his office. It wasn’t a fun job, but it was a job. And it was respectable.

I met a few guys. Nothing special. A couple of dates here and there. A few incidents involving alcohol that wound up with me waking up on a stranger’s couch, my head throbbing due to the hang-over.

For awhile, I dated a guy named Cedric who I thought my be a good match for me, but I broke up with him after three months. He was nice. He was cute. But he wasn’t Michael.

So I resigned. I resigned to the idea of this being the end, the end of the story of my absurdity. Yeah, it was definitely the end.

Or so I thought.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It just happened one day. I got into the car and drove down the street just for the hell of it, no real destination in mind, no real purpose. And then I just kept driving. I pressed my foot down harder on the accelerator and took off down the highway at a faster speed than I should have, and I turned wherever I felt like turning. Right at the corner? Why not? Left up ahead? Sure.

I ended up in a fairly modest town somewhere out in the suburbs, and I stopped at a random gas station to fill up the tank before heading home. I didn’t want to go home, but I figured I ought to. I had to work in the morning.

I paid for the gas with my credit card, but just as I was about to open the driver’s side door and get back in the car, I stopped. I wasn’t hungry, but I wanted to go into that gas station anyway. Not to buy food, but to do . . . something. I wanted to go in there.

So I did.

I walked in and looked around. Empty. I didn’t even see an attendant. I wondered what I was doing. I wondered why I had even driven to this gas station in the first place.

Most of all, I wondered where Michael was.

I went up to the counter, and just as I did, an attendant kneeling behind, wiping something up off the floor, stood and turned to face me.

Michael.

We didn’t speak. We both just stood and stared at each other in shock. He looked older. His hair was longer, and he had some slight facial hair now. Not much, but a little. I liked the look, though. But then again, I’m probably the wrong person to ask. He could have been two feet tall and bald, and I still would have been mesmerized by his appearance.

Perhaps it was the time away that had put that spark of life back in his eyes, but he looked like the old Michael again. He looked like the man I had so crazily married and dreamt about every night since I’d lost him. This was my husband. Well, my ex-husband now.

At last, he broke the stunned silence. “Hey.”

And that was the only word I could say, too. “Hey.”

And suddenly, just as he started to smile, thunder rang throughout the air, and I startled as the rain immediately began to pour. I wrapped my arms around myself, having gotten so used to it now, but I didn’t have to. He was there.

He hurried around the counter and embraced me as though we had never been apart, holding me so close to him that I could barely breathe. That breathlessness was an incredible sensation.

He held me as the storm began to rage, and I clung to him in return, reveling in the warmth that radiated from his body, crying tears of joy as I realized just how much I had missed this.

The rain came down, and I thought to myself that this was, once again, the beginning of a beautifully absurd relationship.






THE END