JACK OF DIAMONDS, REDUX

chapter 4 To be edited

I know this was supposed to go up last week and I missed it. But, well, most of you here know my wife. (A good 90% of you here know my wife.) It’s not that I’m blaming her, but I’ve always told her, and anyone willing to listen, that she’s my favourite distraction. And she is, especially if she has time off from work—even more so when that time includes renovations of any sort. (You know, painting the house, or putting in new floors.) She was so excited about the new kitchen, we forgot it was our anniversary. It’s not a big thing, we’ve done it a few times over the years, in fact, the first three years we celebrated in the wrong month. But we’d been planning to go up to Whistler for a Spa date because our son gave us a gift certificate just before Covid hit and the shut everything down. She has more holidays coming up in another two weeks, pretty well around the time the countertops should be coming in. It’s all a matter of wait and see…

CHAPTER 4

Jenny pulled her dressing gown tight(er) around herself, sitting in the half darkness of her boudoir. It There was a cold chill outside and the French doors were open, but she didn’t care; not tonight. Not now. She was staring stared at her reflection in the bevelled mirror of ther the dressing table, sipping a large glass of whiskey—neat, of course—wondering how everything had gone so wrong in her life. How could she have let herself fallen for a man she knew nothing about?

Sometimes, S she wished it was more than her just being deemed a beautiful woman. Men had always been drawn to her—they had gravitated toward her, to be honest—and as a result, she’d always had an easy time of things. It may have had something to do with her long, dark hair, she told herself, and how it cascaded down the middle of her back in rings and curls. Men had always complimented her and her hair. But S she also had smokey grey eyes her mother said were meant to captivate a man’s soul. Add to that the high, chiselled, cheekbones that cut into a man’s heart while playing with and the single dimple on her left cheek whenever she smiled, and she was almost complete. Her complexion was more than just pale, it was milky white—opaque—with full bodied lips that kissed her glass, leaving a smear of lipstick in the soft light of a waxing moon.

The light came into the room at a slant, while the slats between of the panes of glass blinds casting long shadows that stretched stretching across the parquet floor, as if they were the bars of in a cage—bars do not a prison make, she remembered reading somewhere. So much like the a prison, she felt it was told herself. She searched for a cigarette from somewhere inside the folds of her dressing gown. Straightening the cigarette out once she’d found it, she picked up the lighter beside her. It took more than a moment for it the lighter to ignite catch, and when it did, the flash of light forced her to shut her eyes. But she did it, finally exhaling releasing a large cloud of smoke at the moonlight coming in through the doors, and letting slip a silent tear.