Late night escape

There were so many days when you didn't stand there at the door, but then one day you did.

You had been drinking, I could tell. It is almost as if I could tell how drunk you were even as I didn't notice you coming up the drive, because I was so intently focussed on my husband's arm which he had lifted in that ballerina-like careless fashion which could only mean it would come crashing down on some bodypart of mine at any second.

Why didn't you come before? Sometimes I found it hard not to hate you because you didn't drag me away from my house and lock me in your basement to keep me away from him. I thought you were too drunk to notice.

But now I realise you were just not drunk enough to step across that limit, to come to my house even as the storm was brewing in a bodum teapot, to catch him at it. To catch me at it. Brandishing your patent leather handbag like a cigarette burn, your red lipstick stuck to your left front tooth as it always is on you any time after midnight, seven days a week.

The doorbell must have rung, I know. Because you stepped in between me and the door to the hallway and shook your head almost imperceptibly, a tic more than a movement.

And you did not heed him.

You barged in.

So that is where my missing house key went last week, and I have the broken arm to prove I really did lose it.

You drove me to your house, pissed as usual but a good drunk driver you always were.

We hid in your basement, the way I dreamt, though you didn't have to tie me up.

The times I put you in a cab and put a tenner in your pocket, the times I held your hair back, the times I told you the first name of the guy you went home with the night before as I picked up what was left of you from the bathroom floor the next morning.

I always thought I would be the one saving you.

But thank you anyway.