Page 7 of Rough Love

Mia knew she was being really dramatic over the whole thing. It wasn't Sage's fault but a part of her blamed him for making her feel the way she did. She knew it was completely irrational and there was no room to blame anyone but the woman, whoever she was. Mia knew in her heart that Sage was over his past. He had told her that and she could tell he meant it but the irrational side of her just kept telling her that she had every right to worry.

The room was cold and all the curtains were drawn. Mia looked around her and noticed a room void of all its furnishings, holding only a few paintings on the walls.

Her surroundings didn't make any sense to her. The room wasn't a room she knew and the paintings seemed to be hers. She could make out her name scribbled in their corners, but none of them seemed to be anything she remembered painting.

There was no pattern to the paintings and there didn't seem to be any deeper meaning to them either. One painting was just different colored circles overlapping each other, creating a never-ending cycle. Mia stood before her paintings, trying to see what the deeper meaning could be, but none of them pulled any emotion from her. They didn't feel like her normal paintings. She usually always felt a connection to them but for some reason, there was nothing that connected her to the paintings in front of her.

These can't be mine, she thought, and why is the room empty? It was all confusing to her. She soon realized what it all meant. It was her life without Sage.

He wasn't in any of the paintings and there were no paintings that symbolized their relationship either. She had painted meaningless and emotionless paintings because she had no meaning in her life. She turned around the room and found herself alone. There was no one and nothing that indicated that she had a family of any kind. Her heart ached at the thought. She tried to make herself wake up, you're only dreaming she thought but as hard as she tried, she continued to dream. It was scary for her to think that her life held no meaning without Sage in it, and it wasn't just because she loved it but it was also because she believed that if he left, Fiona and Grier would rather keep him around than her which also didn't help the ache in her chest.

This isn't real, she said to herself, Sage is still with you and you need to stop thinking like this.

While she slept she tossed and turned on the floor of her painting room, moaning in her sleep as her body started to get covered in a thin film of sweat.

There was one painting that caught her eye in the far corner of the room. It was the painting she had just painted while she was awake. She could see the mountains and valleys she had just drawn. She knew then that she was right about what the dream meant. The shock of it all brought her back to a conscious state as she screamed for Sage.

"Sage!" her body rocketed awake as her eyes shot open. She was panting and sweating as if she had just run a marathon. Her emotions were running wild while she remembered her dream. It was all too much for her as tears started to build up in her eyes once more. Her eyes already felt raw and tender from all the crying she had done the night before, she didn't want to start all over. She already knew her face would be puffy and there would be no hiding the emotions she had, especially if she saw Sage. She would break down all over again and yet she ached to be with him. She didn't like that she had slept without him. Even though there was so much going on and she needed her space, she had gotten used to sharing a bed with him.

She felt pathetic for getting so overwhelmed over something that hadn't happened yet and something that may not even happen. Sage had shown no indication of leaving her for Laura, he hadn't shown any emotion to her whatsoever besides reliving his past which after all was just the past. She tried to remind herself of that as she laid on the floor. She wasn't ready to move and she continued to stay on the floor for a little while longer until she couldn't take the hardness of it against her skin any longer. She wanted her bed and she wanted Sage.

Mia got up off of the floor, stretching her body as it screamed at her. It wasn't a wise decision to sleep on such a hard surface. Her body wasn't prepared for it as it hurt almost at every joint. She would have to soak in a hot bath to hopefully help ease the pain. She searched for Sage, going to his room to see if he was still sleeping only to find the bed empty. She did a quick scan of the house, but he was nowhere to be seen. Had he left to go to Laura? Mia wasn't sure but part of her guessed he would have done. He also had a lot of questions and he wanted answers. He wasn't going to get the answers from anyone but Laura or whatever her name was. Mia still wasn't convinced it really was Laura but it wasn't something she could prove.

She wanted to phone Sage to find out where he was but she didn't want to seem needy or clingy. She had never been the type of person who would act like one of those girlfriends who didn't trust their boyfriends. She had seen how those types of relationships crashed and burned faster than lighting a match. There was no way she would become that person, especially when it could drive Sage away in the long run. She couldn't risk it but she remembered how he looked when he spoke about Laura and it was clear that he had loved her. Mia didn't want to compare her relationship to his past relationship but she couldn't help but wonder if he loved her the same or even more. What she would do to have him love her that much.

Mia’s body ached as she walked through the house and so she decided that she would have a bath after all. She wanted to relax her body and hopefully relax her mind. With Sage out of the house, leaving nothing for her to work with, she wasn't completely at ease. She just wanted to get out of the house but decided not to move in case Sage came back. She wanted to know exactly what he had been up to. She felt like she sounded a bit crazy, she sounded like one of those girlfriends who stalked their boyfriends and wanted to know their whereabouts all the time. She couldn't become that person, she was better than that.

She spent some time in the bath with her eyes closed, trying to make her mind relax. It didn't work and soon she hopped out of the bath so she could make herself breakfast.

After cooking and eating her breakfast, her mind wandered back to Sage. Thinking about him and his past relationship wasn't doing any good for her; she needed to do something to distract herself. There had to be a way to find out more information about Laura. She still had a strong suspicion that the woman was not who she said she was. None of it made sense to Mia and she also didn't want Sage to get his hopes up. Being tricked into believing someone from your past is still alive when in actual fact they aren't could be the hardest thing to deal with, Mia thought. She made her way to her laptop. There was only one way she could help and that was by doing her own research. She typed in the name that Sage had given her. It was the only lead she had and it would have to be the one thing she worked with. An obituary popped up on her screen.

She read through it and her heart saddened at the thought of a young woman's life being taken from her so young. She had been Mia’s age when she had died. It was an awful thought. Thinking of death so young scared Mia because for once she was happy. Mia went back to the main search, reading all the sites and links that had popped up during her search. There were a lot of sites that wanted people to pay a certain amount of money before they could view or access any more information that had been posted. Mia didn't want to pry too much so she decided to stick to the sites that were free and tried to gather as much information as she could. The one thing she had noticed was that there hadn't been any reports of a soldier who had been declared dead who was actually still alive. It was reassuring to her that the story the woman had told Sage didn't have any traction.

There was nothing at all that led her to believe that the story was true. There was nothing mentioned that she had come back and declared herself alive. Mia found the original report of Sage’s incident while she did her research. Her heart broke as she read through it. She even saw a few photos that had been taken of him while he laid in the hospital. A huge bandage had been wrapped around most of his head. He looked so small and fragile in the photos, Mia’s heart ached for him. At the thought of Sage, she wondered when he would be back. She really wanted to share her information with him.

She continued to glance through the reports that came on her screen. She also glanced at the sites that asked for money. She tried to see if there was anything she could take away from the site without having to pay. She then noticed a list of relatives, a sister was listed and that was it. Either her parents didn't want to be involved or they weren't alive either. Could it be her sister that had come back claiming to be her? Why would she do that, why would she claim to be her dead sister? It was a sickening thought and Mia wanted to throw up the more she thought about it. It seemed like a sick game that just didn't make any sense.

She just wanted Sage to come home the longer she stayed at the house by herself. She took to watching the time tick by once again, just like she had at the bar and waited for Sage to come home. She wanted to share her information but she was also worried that something had happened to him. The last time he had vanished he had ended up being stuck in a well for three days and close to dying. Mia freaked that something like that had happened again. She tried to keep herself calm. It was highly unlikely that something like that would happen again. She just had to wait patiently for him to come home.

It was driving her crazy, she was driving herself crazy. She tried to go back to her painting room so she could paint as it wasn't often that she would have the house to herself. She turned on some music and tried to distract herself with her art. But it all fell flat as she stood in front of her canvas, unable to paint anything. It had never happened to her before but she knew why it was happening. Although she was emotional she had gotten most of her feelings out already, there wasn't anything left for her at that moment. She just wanted everything to go back to how it was when everything had been simpler and happier. She felt as if she had a dark cloud hanging over her head as she walked throughout the house, finding anything she could that would distract her from her thoughts and loneliness.

She tried to clean for a while. It usually calmed her when she had been stressed in the past but the more she cleaned the more frustrated she got. Nothing was helping her and nothing was easing her mind. She was irritable and angry the more the day passed by. Whenever she had gotten into a mood like that she knew it was all in her head, even as she looked at the time she noticed that it was still early and Sage couldn't have been gone that long at all. She irritated herself more than anything because she wanted to be herself again, she didn't want to be so frantic and wound up but she also couldn't help it. There was no way she could ignore what was happening. It was not only affecting Sage’s life but her life too. She had fallen in love with a man who had a horrible past and it seemed that together they just had horrible luck. It didn't stop her from loving him and wanting to be with him, of course, it just made their lives a lot more complicated than they really needed to be. Mia supposed that was the biggest problem. Nothing had run smoothly since they had met and all she longed for was some sort of normality. But she thought that to be almost impossible the more time passed. Their lives didn't seem to have anything normal about them.

She then decided to work out a bit while she waited. She thought that exercising would help relieve her of some of the tension in her body and it would also be a good way for her to release her pent up energy. She hadn't worked out in days and it showed as she tried to do her normal routine and slowly started to lose incentive throughout the workout. Once she was done with the workout, she hopped into a quick shower and went back to her computer, hoping that she could spot something else that would help the situation. She scrolled through the websites again, taking her time to make sure that she didn't miss anything. She bookmarked any of the sites that she felt held something they could work with. Any details that could point them in the right direction would be a start. She was so zoned in on her computer that she didn't notice that Sage had arrived back home. She stayed glued to the screen.