Forever Gone, Forever You

Author's notes: Thanks again to everyone to wrote in or commented on November(my Halloween Story) As I promised in my comment there, this story is a bit different for me. No one flying through the air backwards and upside down with their hair on fire. It's a more emotional simpler story. My esteemed editor suggested that there should be two endings, but a lot of you guys hate that so I wrote one and I'm sticking to it. Of course that means that about half of you will hate the ending, but I'll have something really nice for the BTB people soon. Thanks for reading my stuff and thanks to mikothebaby for editing it. without her this whole story would be one long sentence with about 2000 commas SS06

* * * * * *

My supercharger's whine as it pumped pressurized air into my engine's intake manifold was louder than the rapid thumping of my heart. I was surprised that my heart could even beat in its current condition. It was getting hard to see from the tears pouring out of my eyes. I figured that I should slow down before I rolled the only thing in this world that I could really call my own.

As the needle on my speedometer moved back into the readable zone, I heard the sirens again. I guess I thought the cops would have given up when I passed 140 mph. No such luck. Fuck it, I thought. I pulled over to the side of the road. Let them take me to jail. Maybe some time in the pokey would help me to get away from the nightmare that my life had become.

The cop pulled up beside me. Strangely enough, he didn't pull out his gun, he just came over to the car.

"Jeezus Grant," he spat. "Do you know how fast you were going?"

It was Fred Lively. Fred and I had grown up together. We'd been friends for most of our lives until he became a cop. I wondered how the friendship would fare since today I'd become a notorious speeder. I guess I should make that felonious speeder because in some states, mine included, driving over a hundred and fifty miles an hour on a public road is a felony.

"What's wrong?" he asked. Fred had been at the hospital earlier when I got there. It was hard to believe from the way I felt or looked right now that today had started out as the happiest fucking day of my life so far.

I'd been at the hospital all night after the birth of my third or first daughter, depending on how you wanted to measure it. They'd sent me home last night because I'd been there all day and all night. There'd been complications with the birth. Nothing life threatening or life altering, just a few problems they said. The problems might've been brought about by the fact that my wife Bonnie is over thirty five.

It turned out that Brandy, our baby had an inguinal hernia. It wasn't really serious but it did require surgery. And though surgery on a newborn sounds really scary, it happened more often that people believed. This was especially true now since more babies were being born to older mothers. Older being anything over thirty and my wife was definitely over thirty.

She's thirty six actually and she's never been the healthiest person I know, but I love her like there's no tomorrow. I got up and dressed for the occasion today in a T-shirt that I'd had made to show my pride. Now when I look down at it, I realized that it just showed my gullibility and stupidity. The shirt was the same bright yellow as my Mustang. It had a giant smiley face on it with the tongue sticking out. Under the smiley face and on the back the shirt read, "My name is daddy."

Since I was kind of a conservative guy, I'd never normally wear anything that bright. Even the color of my car was unusual for me. I'd been looking for a black Mustang when I bought it. But after test driving the car, I just couldn't give it back.

Any way as I sat there in my car crying, I realized that I, not the shirt was the joke. I was the only thing around here for anyone to laugh at.

"I remember when my youngest was born, a few years ago," said Fred. "I realized that I was locked in for at least 18 more years. I had 18 fucking years of paying for everything and putting my-self last. 18 more years of putting my dreams and the things that I want to do second. I went a little bit crazy." He looked at me as if he knew what I was going through.

"I actually went into a depression and had to see a shrink," he said. "Things between Grace and I weren't the best back then either. I was going through the male version of a post-partum depression. They don't even have a fucking name for it, but a lot of guys get it. I just don't understand you having it though. You've been looking forward to this baby for a long time. You and Bonnie are the two most in love people I've ever come across. I guess it can hit anyone though, can't it?"

I didn't say anything. I just wiped my eyes. It was embarrassing to let another man see me with tears on my face.

"Bonnie is pretty broken up about you leaving the hospital like that," he offered. "Why don't I escort you back there?"

"Fred, I just want to go home and get myself together," I said. "If you'll allow me to, I just want to go home and think. I promise to drive under the speed limit. You can even escort me there if you want."

"No need for that, Grant," he said. "I'll see you later. Drive safely." He put those weird mirror sunglasses that only cops wear back on, got back into his squad car and pulled back into traffic. He turned around and went back in the direction of the hospital. I drove up my driveway and stopped my car. I went into the house I'd shared with Bonnie and our two girls for the past 11 years. I'd been 23 and Bonnie 25 when we moved in.

I've known Bonnie Anne Franklin for 11 years. We were almost total opposites, but we just seemed to fit together perfectly. Even at this moment, I kept waiting for her to come into the house and tell me that everything was going to be fine. But everything wasn't going to be fine. Everything was fucked up. Things were never going to be fine again.

I thought about grabbing a beer and sitting down on my deck, but I'm just not like that. I need movement to think. Sitting down and relaxing was Bonnie's idea of how to think. I could only remain still with her near me.

I went upstairs into the bedroom that until this moment we'd shared. I grabbed a pair of running shorts and changed into them and a t-shirt. Another T-shirt, I threw the yellow one in the trash. I grabbed my iPod and headed out to run the trails behind our house.

* * * * * *

My name is Bonnie Martin and I feel empty. I also feel very lonely and neither of those feelings would make any sense to anyone who saw me right now. My guess would be that the throngs of family, friends and other well-wishers surrounding me right now think that I'm tired or sore from giving birth yesterday. Only my very closest friends and family members think they know why I'm upset.

They are partially correct. They realize that my unhappiness has something to do with the fact that my husband and the love of my life left the hospital unexpectedly. My dad tried to make me feel better by telling me that the birth of a child is a traumatic experience for the father too. He told me that when I was born, he was just overwhelmed and wanted to run out of the hospital and never come back.

My daddy was smiling as he told me that Grant would be back soon, he just needed some time to get himself together. "Grant is pretty tough," said Daddy. "When you were born, I fainted in the delivery room. Grant was there to cut Brandy's umbilical cord. You just watch. He'll be back here at any second."

Brandy, my youngest daughter had been born yesterday. We'd named her Brandy, because it was the perfect combination of both of our names without being one of those weird sounding names they were giving kids these days.

I had two other daughters, Marie, who was 14 and Tara who was 8. Marie was the result of a previous relationship that I'd had before I met Grant. I'd gone a little bit crazy and ended up pregnant. The guy I was with at the time took off so fast it seemed like time went backwards in his wake.

Marie was three years old when I met Grant, but she couldn't remember a time before he was in our lives. As far as she knew he was her daddy and no one could ever tell her any different. Not that Grant would ever let anyone tell her anything different either. Even when Tara came along there was always a special bond between Grant and Marie. My daughter thought the sun shone out of her daddy's ass.

When Grant and I got married, it was the happiest day of all of our lives. Even the wedding was a special day, not just for Grant and me, but for the three of us. I guess you're imagining a wonderful scene with Marie as the flower girl? Nope, Marie said that she wanted to get married too. So she stood there in front of the preacher with us, holding onto Grant's hand tightly.

When we said our "I do's," there she was yelling, "me too." When Grant gave me the traditional first kiss, before we were done, there she was tugging on Grant's pant leg and asking for her turn.

Grant, to the delight of our friends and family picked her up and gave her a peck on the cheek. I knew then that I loved that man more than anything else on the planet. I mean I knew already that I loved him and wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. After all that's what a marriage means, right? But at that moment, all of the feelings I'd previously had for him were simply eclipsed. It was as if my heart and soul just opened up and blended with him. Grant might not have been Marie's sperm donor, but he was more her father than anyone else could ever claim.

We had no problems we just settled down into an idyllic life. We didn't argue, we were financially well off, everything was wine and roses. Our sex life and our life in general, have been just great. There were times when I made Grant stay home from work just so we could have more sex. Even up until the point nine months ago when I got pregnant, we had hooky nookie, as we called it, at least once a month. And that was on top of our already robust sex life.

The only problem we had was that I didn't get pregnant. I wanted to in the worst way. It wasn't just about sex, I wanted to...I needed to feel Grant's seed growing inside of me and making a little being that was the combination of our genes.

When I had Marie, the whole pregnancy was awful. First, I was such a disappointment to my parents. They never expected me to be the daughter who got pregnant without being married. They let me live with them and helped out, but the shame on their faces never went away.

Don't get me wrong, they love all of my girls now but it was me they were disappointed in. So now married to Grant I wanted us to share a child and have that experience together. We went to doctors and found out the awful news. We were both extremely healthy but Grant had a low sperm count. It wouldn't be impossible for me to get pregnant, but it would take a lot of luck.

So we tried for another year or so and then adopted Tara. Tara was only 10 days old when she came home to live with us. Grant and I shared all of the joys and pain of raising another child and he got to see this one from the beginning. That was 8 years ago and I look back on it with fond memories. I love both of my girls and Grant is the air that I breathe, I couldn't live without him. As a gift to him and our family, I still wanted to go through the pregnancy experience again.

I guess I wanted to see life the way it was for those pregnant women on TV. When they lay there in bed and the man they love comes over to rub their stomach and feel their child growing inside of them. I wanted us to go to birthing classes and pick out names together. I wanted to walk around town with my belly just bulging and have everyone who looked at us know that he had put a baby inside of me.

Maybe it was my memory of how bad and how ashamed I'd been during the time I was pregnant with Marie. Maybe it was the fact that with Tara we had shared the experience as I wanted but only the part after she was born. To me, that was only half of what I wanted. Shit I'd have a hundred babies with Grant if he wanted. I'd stay pregnant all the time. Maybe I was just a little bit crazy. In retrospect I now see that I wasn't a little bit crazy I was a lot of bit selfish.

I told my mom that I was tired and wanted to get some sleep. She started shooing people out of the room. After they were gone I reached over to the table beside the bed and felt waves of pain so severe that I almost blacked out.

As I gasped in the pain, my mother came back and slapped my hand.

"Bonnie, don't you want to go home?" she snapped at me. "If you tear your stitches, Brandy may go home before you do. What are you reaching for?"

"My phone," I said. "I need to call Grant."

She didn't say anything, she just handed me the phone. I hit the one key and my blackberry dialed Grant's iPhone. Our phones were set up so they automatically connected. We each had our own ring tone on the other's phone to let us know when we were calling so there was no need to look at the screen. Even if Grant was screening his calls, my ring tone let him know it was me.

The phone rang and on the second ring it went to voice mail. That told me exactly how upset Grant was with me. Under normal circumstances, Grant's phone only went to voicemail after the fourth ring. That meant that Grant had manually shifted my call to voicemail to blow me off. He didn't want to talk to me.

I pretended to talk to him to throw my mother off the track. I didn't want her to know that there was something wrong with us. She watched smiling and when I hung up the phone, kissed me on the forehead and told me to go to sleep.

As she turned and left the room, she looked at me. "Why didn't Grant come back here?" she asked. My mother was part of Grant's fan club too.

"Uhm, he's not feeling well," I said. "And the nurse probably told him that since Brandy had a few complications with her birth, he didn't want to risk making her sick."

"Well that's silly," said my mom.

"Why?" I asked. "I think it's great that he already wants to be careful of his newest daughter."

"Well, remember, Brandy had to have that surgery last night," began my mom. "Grant gave blood. And he told the doctor to make sure that his blood only went to his daughter. If being around him could make her sick, surely her getting his blood could?"

I went into shock at my mother's words. I didn't know how truthful her statement was. I wasn't sure that getting blood from someone with a cold could give you a cold or anything like that. But at that moment I realized that there was a chance that my whole house of cards was about to come tumbling down.

"In fact," continued my mother. "It was after Grant spoke to the doctor again this morning that he went running out of here."

I had to get my mother out of the room before I broke down and started bawling. "Mom, could you send Brenda in on your way out?" I said. "I really need to talk to her about something." My mother just looked puzzled. I'm sure she knew that something was going on but she just nodded her head and walked out of the room.

* * * * * *

I had to be very careful as I ran. In the mental and emotional state I was in, I wasn't really paying very much attention to where I was going or the ground I was running on. Running trails is different from running on a track or on the roads. The surface changes and differs every time you run on it. You have to worry about rain far more. It's not just a case of getting wet; the rain can destabilize your running surface very easily. Anyway, I trucked along at a good pace trying to lose myself and my problems in the music and the run.

I always set my iPod shuffle to shuffle. That way I can just let ITunes fill it up with a random selection of music and it will play the songs at random as well. It's like having a different play list every time I run. My music was as random as the ground I ran over.

Somehow though, especially that day, it made me realize that there are no accidents. Perhaps everything we do has already been planned. Maybe there was a divine consciousness or a supreme being sitting on a cloud up there laughing at me. He or she had probably decided that I'd had enough good luck in my life, so it was time to shit on me.

Somehow in all of that randomness my iPod managed to play the most un-random song in the fucking universe. I listened as Amy Lee, the earthbound Goth goddess of depression sang about my particular relationship. Actually I was sure that Amy Lee had never heard of me but it sure as hell felt that way. Nearly all of Evanescence's songs are dreary but this one seemed to fit my particular depression to a tee.

"I wanted you to be with me, for so long. I don't even know why now," sang Amy Lee over a cacophony of guitars and drums.

The song, "Forever gone Forever You" hit home all too painfully. From the very first second that I'd met Bonnie, I loved her and wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. But at that moment not only were we over. But I had trouble understanding why I'd ever loved her in the first place.

She'd been the one who doubted us. Perhaps because she'd already been burned once, she just didn't want to even give me a chance.

It took two weeks of constantly bothering her, to get her to go out with me. Two minutes into our first date she tripped, I caught her and we knew that we'd never be apart again. Of course, she claims that she was just playing hard to get. I've often told her that she almost didn't get got. I'd been on the verge of giving up on her and dating someone else.

As I've mentioned before, we were total opposites. I'd been really popular all through high-school and college. I played sports and hung out with a crowd that liked to party. I'd always had a selection of girls to go out with and to have sex with but made it a point not to ever settle down with one girl. I simply wanted to have fun. I wasn't ready or willing to be tied down to a relationship with any one woman. There were simply too many things I'd have to give up if I was tied down.

There'd been lots of girls who thought they were going to trap me. Not one succeeded. They'd all tried it. The cheerleaders, the girls next door, the artists, the hot girls, the models, the titty girls, the booty girls, the nerds, they'd all had their shots. And they'd all failed. I knew that someday, maybe when I was fifty I'd settle down but not much before then. It was like that song in one of those fucking Elvis movies my Grandma used to make me watch with her. "I gotta lotta living to do."

Bonnie, on the other hand, was even more fucked up in the head than I was. Where I was afraid or just unwilling to commit to anything, she never even went to college. She joined a convent right out of high-school to become a nun. She trained and served until she was twenty three or twenty four. Before taking her final vows she decided to take another look at the world outside of the convent. She took a three month leave of absence and rented a small apartment. She met some smooth guy and lost her cherry. She immediately went sex crazy, her words not mine. She became a dick seeking missile over-night. It was as if there was a battle for her soul between God and dicks and in the end, God lost.

After she tired of the first guy, or he tired of her, there was another, then another and one day she woke up and discovered she was pregnant. That was a sobering experience for her. She took a look at her life and just started crying. Her life was nowhere near the way she wanted it to be. That was when she moved back in with her parents. After Marie was born, she took a waitress job to support herself and Marie, then swore off of men for life. That's why it was so hard for me to get her to go out with me. At that point in her life, Bonnie was dedicated to giving Marie the best life she could. She had no room in her life for love, romance and especially not men.