My mouth is wide open, ready to squeal out an enthusiasticYes, oh my God! I thought you’d never ask!
But those words don’t leave my lips.
“You…think we should…break up?” I repeat, like the words have no recognizable meaning in English.
Jason swallows, takes a drink from his glass of water.
“Is this a joke?” I ask. My eyes sweep around the restaurant’s dining room, desperately landing on patron after patron. If just one of them laughs, smiles, blinks, I’ll know it’s a joke. One of Jason’s terrible pranks that he thinks are funny but are really just annoying and poorly thought-out, though I’ve never told him this.
But nobody is looking at us. Jason gives me a sad shake of his head. “No,” he says.
“Is there someone else?”
“No, Zadie. I just don’t think this is working anymore.”
“Of course it’s working. We’ve been dating one year. Today is one year,” I say, as if one year is a guarantee of something. Forever, maybe.
And despite the shock, the pure astonishment I feel, I’m still myself enough to be embarrassed by my shrill desperation.
“I know,” he says, quiet, apologetic. “And you can call me an asshole for doing it today, but I just couldn’t stand to pretend anymore.”
Of all the upsetting, surprising, traumatic things Jason has said in the last five minutes, it is this—this last sentence—that undoes me.I just couldn’t stand to pretend anymore.
“Pretend?” I repeat.
I feel like I’ve drifted out of my body. Like I’m standing at the far end of the restaurant’s dining room, watching some unsuspecting girl—with perfectly styled hair, her bold red lip for memorable occasions, and a body-hugging dress—get broken up with by her boyfriend. (Poor girl,I think.How embarrassing for her.) Her voice is loud, growing in volume and pitch each second, unrecognizable to me.
She sounds angry. Heartbroken. Blindsided.
But what do those things actually feel like?
I have to pull myself back into her place to know.
Blindsided is the soft cushion of the chair under my butt and thighs. Angry is the wood of the table beneath my elbows. Heartbreak is the thick padding of carpet under the wobbly stiletto heels I wore for this special occasion. It is the cold emanating from the sweaty jug of ice water by my hand.
I feel all these things, and I feel none of them.
“You’ve been pretending?”
“I mean, no, of course not,” Jason fumbles. He looks smaller, not like the near six feet of boy who routinely blocks balls with his head. His wide shoulders and calves of steel. My Jason is so solid, and this boy is not. “That’s not what I mean.”
“Whatdoyou mean?” And then, to my horror—to his probably too—my voice cracks.
My voice cracks, and suddenly my throat is closing up, and the room gets very, very blurry. I am no longer tables away watching this happen. I am beside myself, pleading with everything inside me toplease God don’t cry, please not now. But the hiccup leaps out of me and then an avalanche follows.
I am crying and sniffing and wanting to die from sheer embarrassment, which makes me cry harder, which makes me want to die even more.
I see Jason steal an embarrassed glance around him as he gets up from his chair and hurries over, putting his hand on my back. He speaks quietly and comfortingly to me. And maybe it’s that self-conscious look around the room he does or the fact that he doesn’t seem to be saying any actual words of comfort, just sort of mumbling andthere-there-ing, but something snaps in me.
I shrug off his arm and catapult away from the table. I race out of the restaurant, past the lobby, and into the cool night air. It’s that idyllic window between summer and fall, where it’s lobster season still but the influx of vacationers has dispersed. I should be having the best night, but I’m sobbing as I frantically pull up a rideshare app on my phone.
“Come on, come on,” I sniffle, willing the app to move faster and pacing the sidewalk until Jason comes out of the restaurant.
“Zadie,” he says, reaching for me.
I fling his arm off with a strength I didn’t know I had. I’m suddenly furious. How could he do this publicly? How could he not spare me the indignity of making me cry where everyone can see? “Don’t touch me.”
“Please, babe. Don’t do this. Let’s just…Let me take you home.”
