Homecoming Wife (Look for 1 female, pm me if interested)

[Bardiche]

(Looking for 1 female, pm me if interested)

Advantages of being single, number 147: No wife that criticizes your passion for mountain bikes. Nate Wilde made the latest addition to his mental list while he closed his bike shop, Bike and sport, and took on his bike helmet. He had worked on the list every since that snowy evening ten years earlier when Angela left him. Technically he wasn't a bachelor, as they were still married, but in practicality he lived alone.

Nate jumped on his favourite bike, a red Balfa Belair. He raced down the quiet streets of the small town of Whistler Village. If his brother Aidan had known about the list he would had said that Nate just tried to lessen his loss. His cousin Marc, that had grown up with them after his mothers death, would had said that Nate was full of crap., but that it was just as expected when a guy married to young and to fast.

And Angela, the only woman Nate ever loved would had put her nose up in the air and said "typical". If she had stayed long enough to say anything at all. She hadn't believed in him or their future together. Nate wanted children which she had not thought about at all. The evening she left they had argued about when they should raise family and the fight had broken his heart and shattered his pride.

Not a single day went when he wasn't grateful that she was out of his life.

Just as he kept wondering how she was and what she was doing right then.

The truth was that he more or less knew exactly what Angela did all the time, as her sister Janice kept him informed of how well she was after leaving him and Whistler. Angela had studied business in Toronto and then worked at the newspaper, Globe and Mail until two months ago. Then she had returned to Vancouver and a influential job at a business magazine.

During all this time Angela had only spoken with Nate with one short phone call one month after she left to tell him that their marriage had been a mistake. The call had been followed by a letter where she tried to tell him why she wouldn't return. None of it had made him any wiser.

His attempts to contact her through Janice had failed and he had been forced to realise that Angela did not want to have anything to do with him anymore. Still he couldn't understand how she could have left him just because she wasn't ready to have children.

While he biked home he came to think about his empty fridge and he decided to stop and buy groceries at Nesters. Janices latest news had been that Angela would come to Whistler to babysit her ten year old nephew Ricky, while Janice and her husband Bob left for a vacation trip.

In a small community like Whistler it was inevitable that Nate and Angela would rush into each other so Nate had practiced in keeping his feelings in check and to recognise assaults on his pride.

 

[Imoen]

Angela

“Mom always gets these for me.”

Angela’s cerulean blue eyes lifted from the grocery list she had been studying to focus on a box of cereal her young nephew, Ricky, was holding up to her.

“Cocoa puffs, huh?” She grinned as she glanced back down at the list. “Funny. It’s not on here. Maybe your mom just forgot?”

Ricky nodded his head vigorously and tried to look innocent. Tried was the key word.

“That must be it! She always forgets to put them on there.”

“She always gets them for you but she always forgets to put them on the list?” Angela couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh alright, but I’m telling you, they better be gone before your parents get back. Any evidence left and she’ll kill me.”

Ricky smiled hugely and tossed the sugary cereal into the buggy and proceeded to talk his apparently now gullible aunt/babysitter into several other products loaded with refined sugar.

“Oh no, young man, you won with the Cocoa Puffs, but we’re sticking with list for the rest. You’d get off scott free leaving me the one who’d have to face her lectures. So just forget it! Your mom’s too scary to push things too far.”

Ricky laughed and conceded with a grin, falling into step next to Angela as they leisurely trolled through the aisles of Nesters grocery-mart.

“I’m really glad you’re here, Aunt Ang.”

“I’m glad to be with you, Ricky.” She replied, mussing his hair playfully.

But not to be here. She thought to herself. Here carried too many painful memories. She had grown up here, raised by her mother mainly and a father that was never around. Her mother hadn’t let them forget that either. She turned into a very bitter and hate-filled woman. She never had a good word to say about him, and when he did return, what with her mother’s constant nagging and bickering at him for not being there, he left soon after. Looking back, Angela realized her mother was selfish and so wrapped up in her own pain and failed marriage that she didn’t really have anything to offer her children.

Despite growing up in such a dysfunctional home, she did manage to fall in love. T-totally, head over heels in love with Nate. He had been and still was the love of her life. After much coaxing on his part, she finally agreed to marry him. He did love her, she really had no doubt of that, but back then he was so wrapped up in his bikes, in competing, and the traveling that went along with that, he was gone quite a bit. Angela found herself left alone far too often and for far too long. Memories of her escaped family life, her parent’s fights, her mother’s harsh, hateful words festered in her mind til one day she found herself saying the same things to Nate. She remembers so clearly, the shocked, hurt expression on Nate’s face. Her own mortification at the realization that she was acting just like her mother. The mother that she resented and hated. She had panicked back then. Panicked to the point that she had left. Left Whistler. Left Nate. She had tried to explain to him but how could she? She loved him to much to let him live a life with a shrew. He deserved so much better. So she fled, fled far away to study and try to make something of her screwed up life. She sought therapy there, and so far, so good, it seems to have helped.

She had long thought about returning and trying to reconcile with Nate. She knew it had been far to long to be able to mend their marriage, but perhaps she could explain and maybe get his forgiveness. So, that’s why it hadn’t really taken much for her sister, Janice, to convince her to play the act of a dutiful sister and baby sit for her only nephew. Janice and her husband hadn’t had a vacation together since their honeymoon and 10 years seemed like an awful long time without some sort of break. Angela managed to take a couple of weeks off from the magazine with much of a hassle and returned back to Whistler.