Chapter 4. Author's note - Since this story seems to be WAY less popular than The Child's Father (I don't know why), it would mean a lot to me if those of you who are actually reading this one left a comment and voted. Thanks.

Aaron awoke the next morning, the vicious pounding in his head doing nothing to dampen the elated feeling that had settled itself into his chest. Staring dimly out the window, he tried to recall what had made him feel so wonderful.

"It's sunny," he tried. Then he frowned. That wasn't it. There was no way that a sunny day could repair his damaged psyche.

"It's Saturday," he said. After all, he used to love Saturdays as a kid. But he scowled at that, too. He hadn't loved Saturdays since-

"Anne!" he exclaimed, sitting bolt upright. As though convinced she was hiding somewhere, he sprang out of the bed and whipped his head about, searching for her. After a moment, he felt the wonderful feeling that had started to bubble in his chest die as he realized that she was gone.

Did I just dream about her? he thought morosely, sinking onto the bed. He was about to slip back under the flood of sadness when he saw a note sitting on the bedside table.

He knew he hadn't written it and so he snatched it up from its perch. There, in the slightly messy but undeniably artistic hand of none other than Anne, that gorgeous ex-wife of his, he read:

Aaron. I'm going to give you my number. You can call me any time you want and for any reason; if you're depressed and you want to chat, if you want to see me on a more permanent basis, or if you don't know how to turn on the oven. Really, I'm here for anything. However, should you decide that you want to see me again, we will need to establish some ground rules.

It was signed simply "Anne". After her name, scrawled in her elegant writing, there was a phone number.

Aaron felt a smile growing across his face. "Annie. Annie. Annie!" he cried. "That's my girl! I knew you would come back!" He jumped out of bed and punched the air, laughing with delight. He'd known it all along. He'd always known it. She loved him, loved him more than Jack. She wanted to see him again! Maybe he'd changed her mind for her, maybe she would come back to him!

Then, just as quickly as it had come, his joy was dampened by a reason and sobriety that he had not experienced in three years.

No, he thought. No, that's not it. I saw her with Jack. She loves him, not me. She might care, but she's doing this out of affection, not love.

 He sighed, but his good humour was not deterred entirely. No matter the motives behind Anne's visit, he was still going to see her. He got up and, for the first time in a long time, chose with care what he was going to wear, groomed himself appropriately, and took care to look as handsome as he could.

So he found himself in front of his bathroom mirror - the one with the lights all around it, like one in an actor's dressing room, an effect Anne had adored - he found himself running a hand through his hair, trying to make himself as dashing as possible.

The man in the mirror was admittedly attractive, but looked a little crazy. It likely had to do with the mad grin that was plastered to his face. The evident madness in his face blunted the strong line of his jaw, the chiseled nature of his cheekbones, the sparkle of his eyes, and the sheen of his straw-coloured hair.

Straw-coloured, he thought as he smirked dementedly at himself. That's how Anne always used to describe it.

Brushing his possible insanity off as though it were no more than a cobweb, Aaron went back into the bedroom. He found his cell phone in the pocket of the pants he'd been wearing the previous night. With fingers trembling from either anticipation or fear, he dialed the number on the note.

The three rings until Anne picked up were the most painful seconds of Aaron's life. In the short span of time, he fretted that she would not answer her phone, either not caring about him or regretting her kindness.

But she did answer, and in a most lovely tone of voice. "Hello?" she said.

"Hey," he breathed. He could tell he sounded insane. But he didn't much care. "It's-"

"You don't have to tell me," she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. "I recognize your voice, silly."

Aaron grinned stupidly. "Knew you would."

"So...why did you call?" she asked. In the background, he could hear a man's voice grumbling. He clenched his teeth in jealousy. No doubt it was Jack, that sly, two-timing, bastar-

"I just wanted to talk. And I wondered if I could see you again," he said.

"Of course. Anything you wanted to do in particular?" asked Anne.

Aaron wanted to tell her he wanted to first profess his love to her on bended knee, then marry her again, then kill Jack, and then rip off her clothes and make love to her (and not particularly in the that order) but he refrained. Instead:

"I was wondering if you wanted to come over," he said.

He heard her heave a sigh. "I will. But Aaron, you know they'll be ground rules. We'll discuss them when I get there. But it's not going to be like it was three years ago."

"I understand," he said softly. He tried to contain the pain, sorrow, and wistfulness in his voice, but couldn't.

"Good," she replied. "Then how about this. Should I help you clean up the dunghill you call a home?"

"Sounds like a deal," he said.

And then she was gone. The moment he heard the dial tone, Aaron dropped the phone on the bed and shot out of the bedroom. He skidded a little on the smooth, wooden stairs as he careened down them, taking them four at a time in long, bounding strides.

He skittered to a stop at the front door. There he stood for a while, feeling for all the world like an obedient dog awaiting the return of its master. After a little while, he chuckled acidly.

That's all I am, I guess. Anne's bitch, he thought, chortling at the pun. However, just as he began to laugh, his mind drifted back to a time where he had not been so owned and dominated by Anne's love, or lack thereof.

They had once been equals in the relationship. Back in that long-distant past, when they had been the happiest of couples, completely in love. Sure, they had had their arguments, and their squabbles, and their problems, but they had been happy.

A nasty litte voice at the back of his head, quite like the one Anne had often complained of when she had been married to him, said:

Are you sure you were that happy? That Anne was as happy as you were? Don't you think it was possible that she was completely fucking miserable?

Aaron started suddenly, wondering if the voice had brought up a good point. He had certainly been happy. The only thing that had ever made him unhappy had been his own infertility - which had made him resent Anne, though he could never tell her that - but he had still hated himself far more than he could ever feel animosity toward her. And, no matter how miserable he'd become, no matter how awful and wretched he'd felt as he saw her drifting towards Jack, he'd always loved her. Always been happy when she was at his side.

But had that feeling always been shared by Anne?

His feeling of misery was interrupted by a genteel knock on the door. Almost completely distracted by it, he sprang towards the door. There was only one person who would knock in such an elegant manner.

Wrenching open the door, Aaron ignored the sharp, stabbing pain that seemed to gouge his eyeballs as the sunlight flooded in, exacerbating his hangover. Instead, he focused only on the lovely woman standing before him.

He could think of all sorts of poetic, sappy terms he wanted to use to describe her. He could easily have called her a nymph or an angel or a sylph (a word he had only learned from the verbose Anne) for the way she stood there, looking so otherworldly beautiful.

Some rational part of his brain - what a small, quiet part that was! - told him that she wasn't as pretty as he lauded her to be. Yes, she was damn pretty, gorgeous even, but she was not the utter fucking paragon of beauty as he usually believed.

When her lovely eyes narrowed, Aaron realized that he had just stood there for a few moments, staring idiotically at her. With a sheepish grin, he stood aside and let her into the house.

"You look great, by the way," he said awkwardly. Internally, he berated himself. Was it his foolish, mannish pride that stopped him from falling to his knees and praising her as a veritable goddess of delightfulness? Or was it the fact that such poetic displays of affection often sickened him?

"Thanks," she said, shrugging. She took off her coat and hung it by the door, as she had always done. Her purse she dropped by the repaired hall table, the one Aaron had destroyed in his fury when she'd confessed to him. "You look good, too. Much better than you did yesterday."

Aaron grinned brightly at hearing her commend his appearance. He ran a hand through his hair. "Thank you," he said.

She eyed him suspiciously as he led her through the hall and into the kitchen.

"Can I get you anything to eat or drink?" asked Aaron. He opened the fridge and was once again confronted with the half-empty jar of maionnaise and the smell of a staleness. He frowned. "There's water in the tap. Or I could offer you a spoonful of mayo."

Anne looked like she wasn't sure whether or not to laugh at his humour or gasp at how far gone he was. And so it resulted in a pained, awkward smile twisting its way over her face.

Aaron chuckled at her expression. "Water?" he offered.

"Yes please," she said faintly.

And then Aaron realized that he had no clean dishes. Every dish he owned was piled up on the marble counter beside the sink. 

"Oh, shit," he said. Then he laughed again, not knowing why he found it so funny. "Looks like you'll just have to drink out of the tap, then."

Anne continued to eye him warily as she spoke. "Aaron?" she asked.

"Yeah?" he said. God, he loved it when she said his name.

"What's different? Yesterday when I saw you, you were angry and sad and unhappy. Today, you seem really happy. Insanely happy, actually. So what's different about today?" she asked.

It took only two steps for him to close the distance between them. He caught her face in his hands. This time, however, he was gentle. He did not cause her pain the way he had before. As she looked up at him nervously, he stared down into her eyes.

"What do you think?" he asked. And what he meant by it was, Who do you think? The love of my life had agreed to come back to me, even though it's an act of friendship, not love.

By the way her eyes widened, he could tell she understood. Then, he watched as she lifted her hands to his. He felt a surge of joy in his chest, sure that she was going to hold them tenderly, but she moved them from her face.

"Ground rules, Aaron. I said I'd have some of them. That's my first one: no touching. You kissed me yesterday, and I won't stand for that," she said.

Aaron snorted. "Afraid that you'll discover your feelings for me if we touch?" he mocked.

She glared at him, her eyes flashing with anger. Aaron grinned a little. Anne was utterly terrifying when she was angry, yet it did not scare him now. Anne's anger was just as sweet to him as her love.

"No. I'm afraid it will hurt you, or hurt Jack. Besides, I don't usually let men who are not married to me touch me like that. Reasonable, yes?" she growled.

"Okay," he surrendered. For now, Anne's very presence was enought to keep him happy.

"Okay," she said. "Next ground rule: never lie to me. Tell me the truth always."

"Okay," he agreed, meek as a lamb.

"Third and final one: respect Jack. That is incredibly unfair of me to request, I know. But please don't involve Jack personally in anything that happens here. Don't contact him. He's already going to find me doing this difficult enough without seeing or hearing for you," she said. And Aaron could tell she meant business by her tone of voice.

"Okay," he said for the final time.

She smiled brilliantly. "Okay!" she mimicked. "Let's get started with the bottles."

Aaron, at her instruction, went into the garage and fetched a massive cardboard box. Working together, they collected all the bottles that were scattered about the house. The majority of them were in the living room, but Anne discovered a few upstairs, even one lurking under the bed in Aaron's room.

Next, the main problem in the house not being disorder but dust, they both took out brooms, mops, and dust cloths and began to sweep, scrub, and dust away the filth in the house.

At first, they worked in silence, but after a while they began to chatter away. Aaron and Anne, both naturally talkative, naturally compatible, and used to being together, could not help but prattle together.

It was almost like old times as Aaron told Anne about the apopleptic rage of the boss and she laughed so hard she looked as though she were in pain.

"Still the same old situation, I see," she laughed.

"Well, not quite," he said, remembering her rule that he always be truthful with her. "To be honest, I'm about an inch away from getting fired."

"What?" she yelped. She jumped up abruptly, her broom falling to the side as she sprang up from leaning over to sweep under the chesterfield. They had a system. Anne would sweep and then Aaron would mop, before they both dusted.

"I show up late to work every day, and I'm usually hung over," he admitted.

Anne looked so distressed by this Aaron was actually worried that she was about to start to crying.

"Hey, hey!" he yelled, stumbling over to her. Knowing that he could not touch her, he simply waved his hands about in the air stupidly. "Don't cry! Please, don't!"

Her eyelashes batted and he watched her bite her lip the way she always did when trying to suppress emotion. The expression was so sweet and gentle that it was all Aaron could do not to gather her into his arms and kiss the lips that were quivering out of pity for him.

"I'm not crying," she snapped at him.

The very fact that she said it with her eyes glistening, giving away her not-so-flawless facade made Aaron chortle. "Oh, I never thought you were," he laughed mockingly. "So, we've been talking about me long enough. Tell me about you."

"You already know everything about me," she retorted, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

With that simple statement, it was suddenly Aaron who was forcing back tears. The very idea that she still thought that....no. He couldn't think like that.

"That way madness lies," he muttered.

Anne paused. "Did you just quote King Lear?" she asked, her voice thick with incredulity, but also admiration.

"You rub off on people," he shot back. As he said it, he realized how natural his exchange with Anne felt. He hadn't felt that much like a normal, sane human being in three years. It was a curious, foreign feeling. Hell, it even worried him a little. If it only took an hour of being with Anne to return his sanity, what would happen if she left for good again?

His comment made Anne laugh. Hearing her trilling, musical laugh, he smiled. He didn't much care about his sanity. "Maybe I do," she said. "What do you want to hear?"

"Everything," he said. "Tell me about...Jack."

"Are you sure you want to hear?" she replied. She'd taken a break from sweeping and was leaning on her broom, looking at him pensively and warily.

He took a deep sigh. "No, I'm not. But tell me anyway."

"Very well, then," she said, pursing her lips. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "It was only about six months after you and I got divorced" - she seemed to flinch at the word, just as Aaron did - "and Jack thought it was too soon, but I didn't, so we got...married."

"What was it like?" pressed Aaron, a sudden desperation in his voice.

Anne turned her wide, sad eyes on him. "It was a just a wedding. Smaller than ours, and not as heavenly. But it was all I wanted. Our families were there, as were our friends."

"I'll bet you were a beautiful bride," Aaron said, his voice grudging but somehow also adoring. As he heard the tenor of his voice, he wondered how such conflicting emotions were even possible.

Anne smiled and shrugged. "I suppose," she said.

"Suppose? I know you were when we got married," he snorted, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Anne smiled, and this time it had more warmth. After a moment of silence, the only sound the wet slap-slap-whish of Aaron's mop and the rustling of Anne's mop, Aaron asked a question that had agonized him since Anne left him:

"So, do you have kids now?"

Aaron knew it was awful of him to feel viciously please when she shook her head. "No," she said softly. He could tell by the gentle pain in her voice that his query had touched a nerve that was exposed to the air, left to fester like a dried sore.

"Why not?" he asked bluntly, either too desperate or too unfeeling to care if the question hurt her. He had to know why.

"After I miscarried that first time," she said, and paused. A huge shudder racked her entire frame. "I imagined how I would feel if that happened again. Every time I wanted to have a child, I remembered the pain of losing that one. I just couldn't go through that, not again."

They were quiet for another little while. Then Anne went on. And to Aaron, her musings sounded more like just that, rather than something she meant to say aloud to him.

"But Jack's not getting any younger. It's now or never, but I can't seem to be able to force myself to come to terms with the miscarriage and try again," she muttered. As she spoke, her voice grew quieter and quieter. But her every word still managed to remind Aaron of his own condition, every little syllable driving a little prick of ridiculous self-hatred for his infertility into his chest. "But if we want to have a child he'll still be young enough to care for, we've got to get a move on."

There was another little pause. Then Anne shook her head, much like a dog with water in its ears, and laughed nervously.

"Let's not talk about that. Let's talk about something else," she said.

"Okay," agreed Aaron. So he picked something he knew Anne could jabber about for ages. "Seen any good plays lately?"

And that was how they passed another few hours. It was at least two pm by the time they finished cleaning. The result of their efforts was something miraculous: the house looked exactly as it had three years ago, when Anne had lived there.

Aaron contemplated this as he watched Anne don her coat and scarf. But mainly, he was thinking of how much he would miss her the moment she ws gone.

"Will you come again?"he asked. He was aware of the mad desperation in his voice as he said it.

She smiled gently. "Of course. Call me, and I'll do what I can."

He smiled back wanly.

"Okay," she said. Without another word she departed, and Aaron was left standing in the open doorway, listening to the breaking of his heart as the love of his life stepped into her car and drove away.