Ketchup Popsicle -13

Sandra and Daniel’s days continued on as usual full of kisses and hugs and tickles. Long walks in the stroller, visits with Marta and trips to the gym and the mall kept them busy and kept Sandra from making any hard decisions. Sandra never mentioned Kate's name to Mike again. She tried very hard to refrained herself from checking Mike’s email account again as well. When she did finally break down one day and opened up his mailbox she was not surprised to find that a little box requesting a password popped up on the screen.

Most nights Mike would come home, have dinner, play with Daniel, and then go back out again to the gym. He would go out with his friends on Friday nights and then play soccer on Saturday mornings. Once a month they would go out for a nice steak dinner and bring Daniel along to fill the silence. On the way back to the car they would sometimes hold hands. It was like they were living in some sort of limbo between strangers and a couple that had been married for so long that they had nothing left to say to one another.

The first time that Sandra met Mike they were at a bar. It was the type of bar that Sandra didn’t usually go to. It was full of beautiful people who were full of self importance – the ambiance there only seemed to feed their vanity with its sleek lines and throbbing lights. She was ordering a drink at the bar for her and her friend Jen, whom she met while working as a cashier at Quick Rent Video. Mike leaned in beside her and quickly and easily got the female bar tenders attention. She was annoyed at first until he asked what she was having.

He paid for her drink, asked her to dance and they were inseparable for the rest of the evening. She was flattered that such an attractive guy would be interested in her in the midst of all the beauties in the room. But for some reason he was. He was aggressive and confident which came off as arrogant to Sandra but he was tall and well built and had unusual attractive green eyes. Jen didn’t care for Mike at all and sort of dropped out of Sandra’s life as they spent more and more time together.

Mike had a good job and was always on the go, dragging Sandra around with him like an accessory. She figured that the women he usually dated didn’t mind but she felt like there were other things she could be doing with her time other than picking up his dry cleaning and visiting his friends all around the city. She would be stuck sitting in a corner waiting for him and his frat-looking buddies to get bored of playing video games before he would take her out to a club for the night, most nights of the week.

The nights were what kept Sandra coming back for more. She never knew where they would end up and it was fun and exciting to enjoy a side of the city's nightlife that she hadn't experienced before. Mike was a young, beautiful, and succesful guy. He hung out with people of the same caliber as him at some of the nicest clubs around. Some nights they would end up at a hotel after wards and some nights at his apartment and other nights it would be at hers. It didn’t matter where they were; once the door was closed she was in paradise. He knew his way around a woman's body and taught her things that she didn’t even know about herself. All those exciting and passionate nights made the monotonous daytime hours spent with Mike bearable.

The excitement was more than long gone for Sandra as another winter rolled around. Mike was still the same carefree guy, hanging out with his friends and going to the bar on the weekends. He hadn’t changed except that he had no interest in Sandra any longer. He never took her along like he used to and she didn’t let him take Daniel to hang out with his friends because she didn’t’ think that they were responsible enough to be around children.

Sandra liked to ski but Mike was not a fan and so Sandra didn’t ski anymore. Instead she walked in the snow pulling Daniel on his sled. She found a good sized hill behind a local school and they spent every evening after dinner going up and down that hill again and again and again. As good as her life was with Daniel, there was a nagging voice in Sandra's mind that was becoming more and more persistent every day. She knew that what she was doing wasn’t right. She should give Mike back his house and his freedom, although she was sure he never actually gave that up. She would talk to her father, she decided. But even if he did say yes, the thought of living under his roof again was nauseating. It would be like when she was a teenager, he was so strict after her mother passed away that she could barely breathe for his interrogations and judgments. That’s why she moved out after she graduated high school. Her father lived in fear of life and devoted most of his time to the church where he felt safe. She didn’t blame him for that, but she couldn’t live with it either.