House of Cards: Prologue

House of Cards

Prologue

Marc Chelios knew it couldn’t last. He had wanted it too much. Needed it too much. But what else could he do? She had fulfilled him. Or so he had thought. Had it all really been an illusion? Had he just wanted it too much? He sighed and rolled over in the large bed, the pillow he grabbed still filled with her scent.

Definitely time to go shopping, he thought, a wry grin settling over his craggy features. Shopping. So much more her pastime. He listened to the foreign sounds of the crickets outside his window. Would he ever get used to the sounds of the country? He had always complained so much about the noise when he lived in the city. The constant horns and tempers, the shouting on the streets below their apartment, the loud engines roaring through the congested streets outside their building had slowly taken their toll. He had gotten to the point were he seriously thought he was going to go insane listening to the noise.

Marc, always one to follow his impulses, had finally had enough. It had taken him exactly four days to find this little cottage in the country only an hour’s train ride away from New York City. Their nearest neighbor was a couple of acres away. No, my nearest neighbor, he corrected himself, his thoughts racing.

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Escape the rat race. Give up the meaningless job that he hated and escape – not to the suburbs as so many of his friends had done – but to go all the way. His friends were delusional; the suburbs held the same demands of the city. There was still the rush, the crush, the grind, but with only the illusion of escape with the tiny parcels of land so symmetrically laid out on perfectly developed property. They were no more in the country than the perfectly manicured greens in front of their houses were fields of wildflowers. No, that would not do. Marc had to completely uproot himself and truly flee to the sanctity that beckoned him.

If only it had been just him.

Was he selfish? Was it so selfish to want to come home and open the windows to a cool, country breeze? To not have three deadlocks, two chains, and a bolt on the door? Was it so wrong to want to dump the hollow job that merely kept him alive but did not allow him to live? The office to which he showed up everyday paid his salary, yes, but as he sat at that desk, day after day, he felt strangled. It was sucking the life out of him. Was the security worth it? Was it worth a paycheck to feel like a whore as he stared at the computer screen, trying to draw every last reserve within him to just simply do the minimum required not to get fired?

No, it was not. In the end, it was worth the insecurity to leave the stranglehold, to spread his wings, to move to a house that rented for less than one quarter of what they had paid for their apartment in the city, with three times the space.

He was free to pursue his dream. He was going to live. He was going to write.

Marc turned in bed again; the whistle of the leaves outside taunting him as he desperately willed sleep to visit him. It was so hard for him now. The empty space beside him in bed served as a cruel reminder of what his selfishness had cost him. How had he not realized what leaving the city would do to her? He had had a job; she had had a career.

A career she loved more than me, he reflected, clutching the pillow like a talisman and inhaling the heady scent of her Chanel No. 5 and the Dove soap that was hers.

He tossed and turned in the darkness, listening to the soft, whispering pines outside his window and remembering a time before he had become so desperate. A time when idealism was his religion and love was his creed.