My period started last night, and I’d never had so many contradictory feelings about it before. The first reaction was disappointment, and that was rather infuriating. This wasn’t the right time to get pregnant but over the past week, it became a happy eventuality. It was as if we’d conceded that Iwaspregnant and we were ensuring that confirmation by forgoing condoms altogether.
But then I was relieved. We weren’t anywhere near ready, and this was an opportunity to spend more time enjoying each other before we complicated matters.
And now . . . now I knew it was a stay of execution.
“Listen to me. Nothing happened with Magnolia except for me being too in love with you to notice her flirting. I swear to you on my mother’s grave that I never once entertained an unprofessional thought about her, and Riley will tell you the same thing. And you fucking matter. You’re my everything and I’m taking you home,” Sam said. “We’ll talk about this there.”
He was tender and sweet, and God help me, I wanted to believe him. I wanted to pretend this had never happened. I wanted to run into his arms and stay there until I felt my doubt and distrust slide away. I wanted to replace all my wounds with his love . . . but I knew better than that.
I crossed my arms over my chest and shook my head. “I’m not sure why I thought it would be different with you. I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.”
“Tiel, there’s nothing to see because I’m telling you the truth,” he said, his hands fisted on his hips. “Can we take a moment to acknowledge this is really about your asshole ex-husband? That once again,noneof this has anything to do with me or us?”
I knew I needed to stop and breathe, but I couldn’t see beyond the icy betrayal in my gut. “Don’t you dare put this on me,” I said. “It isn’t my fault that you kissed someone. I wasn’t the one who hid this particularfriendand I wasn’t the one with my hands all over some slut.”
“She’s not a slut,” he said, his voice low and quiet. “So you’re saying you don’t trust me at all?”
It was horribly cold, frigid wind was biting at my face, and my bag’s strap was digging into my shoulder, but nothing outpaced the throbbing pain coursing through my body.
“I can’t trust you because you tell me to, not when you’ve made it perfectly clear that you fuck everything with tits and a heartbeat.”
“AndIcan’t believe you just said that.” He shook his head, his expression turning bitter. “You know that isn’t true. You know that isn’t how it is.”
“I don’t know howanythingis anymore, Sam.” I backed away, desperate for some breathing room. “Here’s what I know. You have a lot of sex with a lot of women and none of it matters to you. This little experiment of ours? We’ve been sleeping together for less than three months and you’re already kissing someone else. I would be an absolute idiot to assume you’d changed, and I never should have tried in the first place.”
A bus stopped at the curb, and when the doors creaked open, a burst of passengers spilled onto the sidewalk. We stared at each other, ignoring the people moving around us, and the hurt and anger grew, multiplying until I barely recognized the eyes gazing back at me.
“Yeah,” he said. I caught a flash of grief in his eyes, but the fight inside him died and his expression morphed into indifference. He hadn’t moved but I sensed his resolve ebbing and him backing away from me, detaching. “You’re probably right.”
“I . . . I need some space. From all of this. I cannot even begin to process tonight. And these past few months. I need space,” I repeated.
“Take all the time you need, sweetheart,” he said, his voice nonchalant. He pulled on that shiny veneer, the superficially perfect smirk he showed the world when he was busy hiding his vulnerabilities, and it was the saddest, most hollow expression I’d ever seen. “Whatever. So it’s over. Like you said, it’s not like any of this matters to me.”
He dragged his unimpressed gaze up and down my body, lifted a shoulder, and walked away.
I stumbled through the rest of the week in a foggy, confused state, aching to call Sam and forgive everything just to feel his arms around me again. I wanted him more than anything, but I still couldn’t reconcile his words, his actions—his willingness to leave me standing on that sidewalk after I found him kissing another woman—with the man I thought I’d uncovered.
This was a mess. A gigantic, horrendous mess, and I wanted to assign blame to Sam . . . but I couldn’t. There was more, something I couldn’t understand.
We were this close to having it all figured out, to moving in together, to—holy fuck—starting a family. And then it was gone, sliding out of our hands before we could grasp the threads and fragments.
We loved each other. Actual, real, hot, messy, complicated, marrow-deep love but I was beginning to think it didn’t matter how much you loved someone.
Some things weren’t meant to last.
When my last class ended on Friday afternoon, I was in the mood for some late eighties Billy Joel. Something dark, like “The Downeaster ‘Alexa.’“
Maybe U2. The angsty shit from “Joshua Tree” and “Achtung Baby.”
The more I thought about it, the darker the playlist became. I could focus on moving tracks around as I waited on the Red Line platform, and I didn’t have to think about anything Sam said or did. None of our sidewalk argument echoed in my mind so long as I kept The Used, Sia, and AFI pounding through my earbuds.
When I reached my apartment, I stripped out of my clothes and went straight for the shelf in my closet earmarked for Sam. I pulled on his flannel pajama pants and gray tank and called up my new playlist. Without a proper title, it defaulted to the first song I selected: ‘Criminal’ by Fiona Apple. I hadn’t cried yet, but when I curled up on the sofa, my entire body submitted to heaving, sloppy sobs. The hurt I’d been pushing down for two days was uncorked and overflowing, and once it was out, I felt stunningly empty.
The music played for hours before circling back to the first track, and I drifted into intermittent fits of watery, hiccupping sleep. I lay there, replaying those songs until they blurred, mutating into one long aching sob.
Ellie called, and though I wasn’t sure I could speak, let alone explain, I answered.
“I fucked up,” I sniffled, not bothering with an introduction. “With the prepster. And he did too, but . . . I said awful, evil things to him. He screwed up but I wouldn’t even listen, and I should have. I tore into him. I don’t know what to do right now, Ell.”
