Prelude.

We were just a boy and just a girl. No, that's so much of a lie. It will go down as a collision of practical aristocracy and modern peasantry, at least that's what Shakespeare or someone like him might have called this. What we have here is the fruit of years of sheepish wishing and devilish desire. What was a sort of joke between my friends and his too, now exists as some sort of twisted, nearly unnatural union.

Now, he's the man, the boy really, that I sleep next to. And nobody knows or let's on that they might, though it's painfully obvious to those that surround us in the gleaming office tower where we sit ruling our (his) future, unsuspecting empire.

“So then, I’ll just leave.”

“What do you mean?” He said as the contours of his expression morphed into something dangerous.

“I’ll take my things and I’ll go back home” I declared with more conviction than I knew I had.

"Then, it's over?" he questioned and I wondered if that was what he wanted.

"I never said that. Never even though it. What I'm say is, this isn't working and it hasn't been. You're not yourself and I'm not myself. This is the only solution I could even contemplate."

After having the same fight we'd have a dozen times or more and the same one we'd have many times again, he groveled and he begged and he promised to change, to be is real self instead of this monstrously pathetic one. Reluctantly, I agreed to try again. I imagine myself having to try again probably for the duration of this thing.

Often, I wondered if it would make a difference if we didn't work together, if he didn't have to call me Ms. Moretti rather than lover. If he didn't have to overcompensate by yelling about my professional transgressions and mistakes to make sure that nobody suspected anything between us. But I don't know.

When my mother asks, I tell her some days I want to kill him and other days I think, maybe this will all work out. She tells me that you end up hating your husband no matter who he is. I wonder if that is true and I more than suspect it might be.