Freebie Mondays: The Unfillable Void (Prompt Novel Chapter 19)

For 2024, I decided to devote my prompt writing time to a novel. The twist is that the novel plot will be generated entirely by the writing prompts I chose to use for the project – which were rolled randomly using my trusty dice and a few online prompt lists. You can find the Table of Contents here.

For Chapter 19, the prompt was: “she tried to forget him but never could.”

I tried something a little different with this chapter. That’s what these writing prompt sessions are great for, actually. They allow me to try things that feel too risky to put in a novel until I’m sure they work.

Instead of one or two long sequences, I broke this chapter down into a series of smaller vignettes. I’m using dream sequencing here to play with fragmentation and timing (which is one of my favorite things to do), but I was also testing a looser flow than I usually allow my longer form stories to utilize.

I have to say that there’s a lot of me in this chapter. One of my characters is coming to the realization that life hasn’t worked out the way they anticipated – which leads to a choice they have to make about how to move forward. In the real world, as I get older, I face these situations a lot. And I’d like to believe I’ve made peace with where I am or where I’m going.

I can’t say my character feels the same ;)

If you’d like to see this chapter come together, you can watch the VoD on Youtube!
. . .

“Nala, I’m sorry, I know this call probably comes at an awkward time for you. But I’m just so excited, I couldn’t wait to tell you the news!”

Nala quickly swallowed the words, I had to duck out of a class for this, so you better have won the lottery, and instead plastered a smile on her face. She hoped Delmar couldn’t tell how tired she was or how annoyed to have been pulled away from a pivotal lecture over something that probably could have waited three hours. She hoped she looked excited for a chat with her high school sweetheart instead of just barely tolerant.

She wasn’t sure when communicating with her old love had become an annoyance, but she was starting to wonder if she should stop picking up the phone all together.

“Well,” she prompted when Delmar didn’t burst forth with his revelation right away, “don’t keep me hanging. What’s happened?”

“I met someone!”

The words were like an ice pick driven straight into her heart. Her body went hot and cold all at once, and she momentarily lost track of reality. She felt as if her tether with gravity had been severed and she was floating free in the void, never to drift back to the ground.

“She’s amazing,” Delmar was saying when she tuned back into the conversation. “And fantastic and wonderful… Really there just aren’t enough words to properly describe how I feel when I’m with her.” He paused to breathe, and the exhale instantly turned into a dreamy sigh. “Her name is Ira.”

Nala opened her mouth to say something – anything really. She simply hoped she could make it sound like she was excited for her friend instead of falling utterly to pieces.

But she didn’t get a chance to speak before Delmar announced in his dreamiest tone yet, “I’m going to propose.”

*   *   *

Nala remembered feeling hopelessly numb in the wake of the phone call. She missed the rest of the lecture because she couldn’t bring herself to pass back through the door and pretend to pay attention after her world turned upside down.

Now she stared at the ceiling above her bed and felt a similar sensation. Her limbs tingled, as if trying to return to warmth after a long stint in the cold, but she was well aware the sensation had nothing to do with her physical surroundings. Already she was curled in the heaviest of her blankets with her head propped on her many comfortable pillows.

Thin beams of light swirled across her ceiling as distant cars drove past her apartment. She didn’t live on a main street; that would have been too loud and too expensive for a city of this size. But she lived close enough to a busy center that random vehicles would pass throughout the night.

Each soft passage served as a backdrop or an undertone to whatever thought caught her mind at the moment. But the light from their headlights slinking beneath the curtains served to lull her deeper into her memories.

When she broke up with Delmar, it felt more like a see-you-later than a goodbye. Yet she had been on the verge of cutting contact when Delmar dropped the bomb that he was about to get married to some woman she had never even met.

She had to attend the wedding. There was no possible way she could say no, though she dreaded seeing this strange woman on the arm of her beloved Delmar. It didn’t matter who she was or how pretty or intelligent – she was wrong for him. She would never be worthy in Nala’s eyes. And she was forced to admit now, in the quiet of the darkness, that she hated Ira right from the start. She had never given the woman a chance.

How could she when she had stolen Delmar from her?

He wasn’t yours, she told herself as she rolled over and attempted to bury her head in her pillow for the dozenth time. You couldn’t just reserve him, set him aside and pick him up later. That isn’t how life works.

But in her heart, she had believed it would be. That he would always be there, like a fish caught on a hook, waiting for the moment she was ready to pick up where they left off.

Delmar’s engagement had been blissfully brief. Ira was a woman of spontaneity, and Delmar was so smitten with her, he was happy to indulge her wild sense of fancy.

Nala spent those weeks furiously composing speeches she would read during the part of the ceremony where the priest said, if any knows why these two should not be wed, speak now or forever hold your peace.

Having always been a creature of reason and logic, Nala had never tried her hand at composing poetry. Those nights she spent furiously scribbling into the wee hours were the closest she had ever come to baring a piece of her soul.

She imagined herself standing from a pew during the wedding ceremony and gliding gracefully into the center of everyone’s attention. She would stand at the base of whatever dais the ceremony was taking place upon and speak of all the love and wonder shared between her and Delmar when they were younger. She would speak of the moonlit walk on their ill-fated prom night. She would speak of the catch of their breath the first time their lips pressed together, and all the times one or the other of them had snuck out of the house so that they could simply sit together beneath an old tree and talk until they knew they would be too tired to stay awake in class the next day.

She dreamed that she would find the words to say they were meant for each other, even though fated love made not a whit of logical sense. And in her mind’s eye, she saw Delmar toss his potential wife aside. Ira always fell when these scenes played out in Nala’s mind. Sometimes she would emit a tiny yelp as she tangled in the skirts of her wedding dress, but usually she wasn’t the focus of Nala’s attention.

She saw Delmar run to her, catch her in his arms and dip her as he kissed her fiercely. Sometimes they rode off together, leaving everyone in the ceremony stunned and staring. And sometimes the priest married them instead.

It pleased her to think of those scenarios now and imagine that one of them had come to pass.

But in the past, while she furiously scribbled her truth onto notebook paper she eventually ripped free of its binding and tossed into the wastebasket, the logical, reasonable part of Nala reminded herself that wasn’t how her gambit was likely to end.

Even in movies, the best friend who stood up to confess love for the groom at the last possible moment never won the day. It was always the pretty, perfect princess of a new love that won the hand of the coveted prince.

Nala had missed her chance – and she accepted that when she tore the last of her potential speeches to shreds.

*   *   *

Nala dreamed of Delmar’s house. Except instead of all the little additions she could tell had come from his wife, the walls were dotted with modern paintings and shelves loaded with programming books. It was easy to erase the overly cottage, country-style trappings of the living and dining rooms and replace them with a modern mantle complete with a high-tech fireplace that emitted clean heat and displayed fake flames instead of the danger of an open fire.

They had no need for plaid blankets and gaudy designs woven onto the fabric of couch pillows or rugs. Instead, the house was decorated with clean lines and solid colors. And in the center of it all, Nala and Delmar curled beneath a massive fuzzy blanket to watch a movie on a large screen TV. Between them they cradled a massive bowl of popcorn and, every so often, the two of them would turn to look at each other and share a giggle of delight over whatever was happening in the film.

She hadn’t walked through enough of the house Delmar shared with his wife to paint a full picture of it. So as she walked through the hall toward the master bedroom, she filled in the blanks with pieces of her dream house. There was the office where she could work from home. There was the hot tub they would have installed in the bathroom to ease their aches at the end of long days. In the kitchen, she erased the hardwood countertops and added sparkling granite.

The back yard, which she had also not fully glimpsed during her brief foray into her old love’s house, she imagined choked with trees as the entire street seemed to back onto a spit of shaggy old forest. In the spring, she could venture onto the covered deck in her pajamas and breathe the fresh air and flower blooms while she performed her daily tasks. When it rained, she could press her face to the thick glass of the wide double doors leading to the deck and watch tiny rivers of water pour from the eves and down the hill out back. In the winter, fluffy flakes of snow would gather along the railings, and she could trace patterns in them while she drank her morning coffee.

It would be a cozy life, no less successful than the one she previously dreamed of. She and Delmar would shower each other with affection in between business ventures. They would set aside one night every week to order a fancy catered dinner and watch whatever they wanted. Sometimes they might play a complex board game or share a discussion about some book they both enjoyed. The wall in her office would fill steadily with certificates of achievement as her inventions finally found the funding they so desperately deserved.

She didn’t realize that, by the time she woke, she had basically transformed one dream into a carbon copy of the other – and if she had, she probably wouldn’t have recognized how sinister such an act could prove to be.

*   *   *

Restlessly, Nala rolled from one side of her bed to the other. She must have drifted off at some point. She recalled snippets of dreams, some of them cozy, some of them foreboding. But she didn’t think she remained under the influence of rest for very long at any stretch.

Her mind was too full to settle down.

After Delmar’s wedding – which she attended in as much sullen silence as she could – Nala put her head down and threw herself into the acquisition of her master’s degree. She sent Delmar several messages in the early days of his marriage, wishing him well. But after that, she cut almost all contact.

Delmar became a person that flitted occasionally across her social media feeds. There would be a picture of him that popped up at some conference or another. She would spy a photo of him and his wife on some vacation. She would learn about another of his business ventures or publications, and she would smile softly to herself about that boy she once knew.

But never did she comment on any of the posts that drifted across her dash. Never did she test his number to see if it still worked. And never did she inquire as to how things were going with the wife – because, in truth, she really didn’t want to know.

Nala rolled again onto her back as she contemplated those early months of Delmar’s marriage during which she made the only decision that seemed plausible for the continuation of her sanity. Instead of investing in her old love’s life and ensuring he remained happy, she cut all ties and tried to forget him.

Work became her life. With each new project, she gave a little more of herself, until she had no time to think about anything aside from her creations. With each stroke of her keyboard, she reassured herself that she was working to build a better world, and that the trophies that proved her prowess would one day adorn her wall.

With each new publication credit and accolade, Nala reassured herself that she had done the right thing. What need had she of the love and adoration of a single individual if she could change even just a small chunk of the world for the better?

It took years for her to admit that no amount of awards or seats on fancy, expensive projects could fill the void that lived inside her chest. It only eased when she finally broke down and asked if he would meet with her one last time, for old time’s sake – just a few weeks ago, here in the city that he lived where she just so happened to now work.

She felt that yawning void now, with each jostle and shift of her body as she attempted to get comfortable. It was like a hard chunk of rock honed to fine points in all its corners that didn’t move quite the same way as the rest of her. Now it dug into her ribcage as her stomach rested against her mattress, now it prodded her hip as she rolled onto her back.

Always it was there, like the hollow sensation in the gums left after a tooth is pulled. A pulsing thrum that never quite dimmed – a desire that simply could not be eradicated.

She could not have the life depicted by her dreams. She could not go back in time and speak the words she always wanted to speak during Delmar and Ira’s wedding ceremony.

But there seemed only one way to banish the void that prevented her from finding peace – and this time she would not fail to speak the truth of her heart.

*   *   *

Nala felt truly wretched when she rolled out of bed to the sound of her alarm the next morning. She hadn’t even really needed the alert, since she was already wide awake well before it was time for her to rise. The first dim light of dawn had clawed beneath the curtains and dug hooks into her eyes, forcing her to admit that she was unlikely to rest again until at least another day had passed.

Yet she allowed the annoying sound to penetrate the haze in her mind for most of a minute before she finally sat up enough to silence it.

Coffee could not penetrate the fog cloud that followed her from her door to her office. For the first time in a long time, Nala realized how much she had been living on sheer adrenaline. The lack of sleep caused by constantly having to run to the office at all hours and later punctuated by fear over the potential harm she may have caused to one of her colleagues had acclimated her to the idea of running on fumes.

But today, her biological batteries were truly empty. She was a leaf buffeted about by the wind – and she expected to stay that way until she completed her grim task.

Alyial’s gaze burned into her head and shoulders while she stumbled through her daily tasks. It seemed he spent more time glaring at her than working on their project.

Normally, Nala would have glared right back, challenging him to make his feelings known instead of stewing silently in his corner. But today she kept her gaze on her screen and drank more cups of coffee than she could count.

She would have to check all of her work again tomorrow. Nothing she wrote in the throes of this fog could be compiled into the main program without risk of another explosion. But they were caught up enough on the project’s timeline that she felt she could get away with one day’s grace.

Or perhaps, though she was loath to admit it even in the silent depths of her own mind, she simply didn’t care anymore. So much of her life had been devoted to the work and the idea that her achievements would eventually dig her out of the mud. But she lived in a shitty one-bedroom apartment. She had spent most of her life moving from town to town. And no matter how many high-profile, high-tech ideas she sold to investors, she never seemed to get beyond the starting stage.

It was time to admit that maybe, just maybe, she had missed the one critical event in her life that might have led her down the golden path of accomplishment – because it had nothing to do with business acumen, computer programming or science.

And when the end of her work shift rolled around, she resolved that she should amend that critical mistake once and for all.

She certainly wasn’t going to sleep until she tried.

It wasn’t until she was midway through the drive to Delmar’s house that it occurred to her he might not be home. She knew his area of expertise because she knew what he studied in college. But she didn’t actually know much about his current job or what hours he kept.

For all she knew, his wife could have drifted home since the last time she saw him, and she could be wandering into a confrontation instead of a revelation.

But she couldn’t turn back now. Fatigue mixed with resolve to form the most unexpected sort of cement. It glued her hands to her steering wheel, her eyes to the road and her mind to her designated task.

Nala breathed a stark sigh of relief when she pulled into the driveway of Delmar’s house and noted that his car was present. It made her feel a little lighter when she waltzed across the ordered stones of the path leading to the front door to knock.

Surprise flickered across her old love’s face when he saw her standing in the doorway, but he didn’t hesitate to step back and sweep his arm toward the interior of his home to invite her inside.

The house Delmar shared with his wife was warm and inviting even if it didn’t match the altered vision from her dream. She swept the living room with her gaze as her host led her into it and smirked slightly as she imagined the changes she could make. She could turn this place from cozy into chic with just a few accents, and she felt quite pleased about it.

She smoothed her pants as she settled onto the couch and tried her best not to wriggle with anxiety as Delmar poured them each a glass of water and deposited one of the vessels into her hand. The cool temperature permeated her skin as she raised the liquid to her lips, and the chill further seeped down her throat as she sipped, anchoring her more firmly in the present than any other event or activity from the day.

For the first time since she rolled out of bed that morning, she felt awake, alive and refreshed.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your return?” Delmar asked on the heels of a light chuckle. “Almost fifteen years we go without seeing each other, and now we almost seem to be joined at the hip!”

“It was a mistake,” Nala blurted. It wasn’t what she meant to say or, indeed, how she meant to say it. The words simply rushed free of her before she had a chance to halt them. She drew a deep breath, braced herself and forced a smile to her lips. “Staying separate from you for so long,” she clarified. “Being near you again reminds me how much you enriched my life. And how much I forgot that while you were gone.”

He offered her a warm smile in return and set his hand lightly against hers. It was such a sweet gesture, she was instantly transported back to the night they walked beneath the moon because their car broke down.

She wanted to say, I lied. The mistake was that I refused to marry you. But she had to focus on the present if she wanted to mend the mistakes of her past.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she said as she met Delmar’s curious gaze. “It will be hard to hear, but I don’t think I can possibly live with not telling you.”

Delmar’s brow furrowed with confusion and concern, and his fingers tightened around her hand. “You’re scaring me, Nala,” he murmured. “Given my luck lately, I feel like the next words out of your mouth are going to be, I’m dying.“

She was dying inside. She had been since the day she turned him away.

But that stopped now.

Nala drew herself up, squared her shoulders and set her jaw. Then she said, “I’m pretty sure your wife had an affair with one of the guys in my office.”

And just like that it was done. Within seconds, she should be able to embrace the magical future so long denied her. When Delmar broke down, she would gather him into her arms. Together they would clear Ira’s clutter from his life. And after she helped him pick up the pieces and get back on his feet, his heart would belong to her once again – as it always should have.

She waited for the soul-crushing realization to crash over his features, waited for his face to fold and his eyes to water. She lifted her hand, getting ready to reach out and embrace him.

But he smacked her arm away as he shot to his feet.

His face did transform – but not into horror and sorrow as she expected. Instead, his face folded with outrage and his arms shook as he folded his hands into fists at his sides. His skin turned red from his cheeks to his forehead – and she thought the fire might have spread further if the tension in his body hadn’t kept it at bay.

In an instant he transformed from the sweet boy she remembered walking by her side to a  hedgehog with all its hackles raised – ready to unleash its spikes into the heart of the thing that hurt him.

“What the fuck, Nala?” Delmar exploded, his voice so thick with outrage it trembled. “I know you’ve always hated Ira, but this? I never expected you would make something up to try to come between us.”

Nala’s jaw fell open. Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined this would be her reaction.

But his face said he should have. And the small voice that had spoken to her all those nights when she abandoned wedding speeches said, what else did you expect? They never run into the arms of the person trying to change their reality.

“But…” she managed to stammer after several seconds of stunned silence. “It’s true. Just ask-“

“Get out!” he roared and pointed back toward the door. “Do you think I don’t trust my wife? That she doesn’t tell me everything? Get the fuck out and don’t ever come back.”

Her old love’s voice shook with such anger – and such sorrow – Nala had no choice but to comply with his order. She fled the couch, darted through the door and drove halfway up the street before she managed to catch her breath again.

By then, she didn’t have the brain capacity to wonder what in all the blazes had gone wrong.