Catharsis

She hated that he had blue eyes.

They'd been dating for three months, and everything else about him was perfect. He was the consummate gentleman. He opened doors, brought her flowers, and paid for dinner despite her insistence that they should go dutch. He didn't have any nasty habits – didn't smoke, didn't smell, didn't snore. The only thing wrong with him was genetic.

His name was Christian, and if it had been a different time and place, she might even have fallen in love with him.

Two days ago, she'd called him Michael by accident. Her best friend Monica had slapped herself on the forehead, groaned, and told her she was an idiot. Alyssa didn't need a crystal ball to know that it was over. For once, she could see the future quite clearly.

But surprisingly, he'd taken it rather well.

“Allie,” he’d said, and she’d loved that he called her that, “I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who wants this relationship.”

“It was a slip of the tongue,” she protested.

He shook his head and leaned his forehead to rest against hers. They were sitting on her bed, cross-legged and drowning in the fluffy down comforter. Her knees touched his, pressing against the rough material of his jeans. He had her hands in his as well, his thumb gently stroking the inside of her wrist. She shivered, but wasn’t sure if it was because of his touch or the words she was dreading. His eyes were shut, as though he were thinking, and she swallowed convulsively.

Finally, he sighed. “You should talk to him. Make sure he’s not what you want after all. I can’t be second best.”

And you don’t deserve to be, she wanted to tell him. But in the end, she’d agreed to talk to Michael.

She’d emailed him instead of calling, unsure whether his number had changed or whether he’d kept it the same. It had only been a year, not long enough to warrant a change of address, but maybe the coward inside of her was hoping that he wouldn’t respond, would write it off like the junk mail that filled her inbox daily.

She hadn’t been so lucky.

Instead, he’d actually sounded somewhat happy to hear from her. It didn’t help that they’d never actually said good-bye. Rather, their relationship had faded into a curious gray area of non-existence. It had been a conscious effort on her part and an absent-minded one on his, and so it was no surprise that he seemed far more content with the idea than she did.

They’d agreed to meet at a café not far from where she worked on a Wednesday. She liked the idea of a Wednesday because it gave her an avenue of escape. At the very least, she had to work on Thursday, and so needing to get home at an obscenely early hour felt like a more viable excuse.

She was already waiting at the café when he arrived, which both of them had expected. They’d said six, but he was chronically late.

He hadn’t changed in the last year. He still towered over her, his dark hair cropped close against his scalp, and his chocolate eyes bright with intelligence. When he slid into the booth across from her, she noticed that his watch was far more expensive than what he’d had when they’d been together, that his clothes were a little more tailored.

“Hi,” he said.

She smiled uncertainly at him, the corners of her mouth lifting fleetingly. “Hi.”

“And how are you?”

“Fine.” A standard answer, she thought, like you would give a stranger. Odd how fitting that was. “You?”

“Good.” He removed his cigarettes from his jacket pocket, tossing the pack on the table between them along with the lighter.

“Good,” she parroted.

He tapped out a cigarette with a deft flick of his wrist and offered it to her, long fingers light on the crepe-thin paper. She’d always loved his hands, strong and lean and beautiful. They weren’t an artist’s or a musician’s hands, but they made music of their own nonetheless. He still smoked the same brand, and she could remember sleepless nights on his back porch, a cigarette in one hand and meaningless conversation crowding the air between them.

Swallowing back the nostalgia, she shook her head. “I quit a year ago.”

He raised an eyebrow, but set the pack down on the table. “You quit a lot of things a year ago.”

“Like what? You?” She kept her voice neutral.

One shoulder rose, fell. He picked up the lighter and slipped the cigarette into his mouth, but then he took his time in lighting it. It was quiet enough in the diner that she could hear the cigarette crackle as he inhaled. He blew the smoke out slowly and set the lighter on the table. “So, Lis, did you miss me?”

Her throat clogged. To distract herself, she picked up his discarded lighter and turned it over and over in her hands. “Not you, really. But the thought of you, yes.”

“And what does that mean?” He still sounded so unconcerned that it made her ache. His eyes never left hers as he flicked the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray.

“It means—“ she stopped and let out a long sigh. “It means that it’s not you I miss. I miss who I wanted you to be.”

The cigarette paused, hovered. “And who was that?”

“Someone that you weren’t.”

God, this hurt. She never would have realized how much. And she hated it. She hated every moment that she was honest with him and every moment that she wasn't. She hated that she pretended she hadn’t cared as much as she did. That she smiled and said he hadn’t hurt her. That he didn’t even know.

Even more than that, she hated that a year and a half later, not having spoken to him or seen him, she was still bitter and angry and trapped beneath a wealth of feeling. Because he’d meant far more to her than she’d ever let on.

Now the same old self-righteous indignation was flaring up. She could see it in the displeased twist of his full mouth. “I never made you any promises,” he reminded her.

“No, you never did,” she agreed.

The waitress came then, disinterested as he perused the menu and finally ordered juice and a tea. A coffee for her, black, and frothed milk on the side. The waitresses never added quite enough.

“I think about you,” she said after the lady snapped closed her flip pad and wandered away. “All the time.”

She could see that the statement had disconcerted him. She traced her fingers along the pattern on the place mats and waited for him to respond.

“What do you want me to say?” he asked. She could hear guarded distrust peppered with husky hesitation in his voice.

It always had come to that, no matter how hard she’d tried otherwise. He never responded naturally, always measured and analyzed what she was looking for, how she wanted him to react. In the end, all she’d wanted was spontaneity, and a little bit of selflessness.

The pattern on the placemat wound round and round in endless spirals. She trained her gaze on that to avoid his. “I don’t want you to say anything, really,” she said finally. “I don’t want advice, I don’t want reassurances, I don’t want false hope. I just want you to listen, and maybe understand. I know it’s strange, and I know I shouldn’t, but I still care about you. You were a part of my life for so long that even now, some small part of me can’t reconcile that you’re not anymore.”

She let him fumble for words for a full minute, some polite way to tell her he didn’t feel the same. The frustration in his eyes burned at her, and a few moments after that sixty-second mark, she took pity on him.

“I know you don’t miss people. But someday, you will miss someone. I’m only sad that it will never be me.” She waved away his protest with a flick of her hand. “It’s funny, you know. I want to talk to you at the weirdest times. I think, ‘Oh, Michael would enjoy this story,’ or want to pick up the phone and call you just to chat. To send you an IM. And then pride gets in the way and I won’t.”

“We were always both too proud.”

Her mouth curved wryly. “And it never did either one of us a damned bit of good.”

The waitress came back with their drinks, balanced precariously on a tray with a handful of crackers. Neither one of them had asked for them, but no one said anything as she tossed them on the table. “Can I get you anything else?”

“No, we’re fine, thank you.”

He lit another cigarette while she doctored her coffee and the waitress disappeared. One yellow packet and as much cream as would fit in the remainder of the cup. She knew he remembered.

“I thought you didn’t miss me?”

She shrugged. “I don’t want you here. I don’t want you back. But… I guess everything else aside, you did understand me. Or I thought you did. You just never seemed to care quite enough.”

When he answered her, his voice was just a touch defensive. “What? Did you want me to tell you I cared about you all the time? That I loved you?”

“I never wanted the words. I wanted you to show me.”

He flicked his lighter viciously. “I did.”

She’d known this wasn’t going to be easy. “By sending me a CD you’d ordered online after three months of not having said a single word to me? Of not having made one single, solitary effort to keep in contact with me?”

“Oh, it’s all my fault now, is it?”

She blinked at him. "Michael, I never said it was your fault."

"You implied it."

"Maybe. I didn’t mean to." She hesitated. “I know we were both to blame."

He glared. “Then don’t tell me I didn’t care.”

“To be honest, it was never your sentiment I doubted." She fingered the cigarettes, took one out, tapped it back into the pack. "It was your ability to follow through."

He took the cigarettes off of her, pulling them out of her hands and setting them on the other side of the table. He’d always hated when she fidgeted, unable to sit still. At three in the morning, at five, at midnight – she’d always been bursting with energy and he’d treated her with a sort of amused superiority coloring his actions. She’d never noticed until it was too late.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

She smoothed her hands nervously on the tabletop, picked up her coffee. “We both wanted each other to fit into a nice, carbon cut-out. You loved my independence but hated that I wasn’t content to be your Saturday girl. You appreciated that I didn’t care if you saw, dated, slept with other girls, but never understood that I did care that you held back. You wanted me to gush over the few minutes you deigned to spare me and it frustrated you when I didn’t. And me – I expected you to give me something you couldn’t. And I was always too afraid to tell you what I wanted.”

The look on his face told her that he was expecting her to do exactly that – make demands he wasn’t willing to answer. “I told you those girls didn’t mean anything.”

A sound of frustration escaped her. “Michael, it was never about those girls.” She shook her head, pushing down the raw emotion clouding her. “I felt like you were asking for everything but not willing to give anything.”

“If you never asked me, how was I supposed to know what you wanted?”

The response was typical of him. Somehow, he’d managed to place the blame squarely on her shoulders yet again. And she couldn’t deny that he was right. But…

“You made it clear from the beginning that mutiny was not to be tolerated. If I had said something, would it have made any difference?”

“We’ll never know, will we?”

“I guess not.” She smiled wanly. "It seems kind of ironic now, but I never wanted to be 'that' girl. You know, the one in those sappy chick flicks we used to make fun of. Whiny, weepy, crying that her true love didn't want her." This time the sweep of her lashes was cynical. "I knew you'd never bother sweeping me off my feet."

Surprise flickered in his eyes, dampened, and fled. "I thought you were too practical for that bullshit."

"What girl doesn't want the fairy tale? Try to find one. You won't. And if she says she doesn't, she's probably a liar. Some of us talk a good game, but in the end, all we want is to be loved. Even me."

The waitress came back then with a steaming pot of coffee. She refilled Alyssa’s mug to a murmured ‘thanks.’ She noted the surprise in his eyes – before she would have stopped her, kept her from changing the coffee-sugar ratio. Now that was the least of her worries.

But still, he’d noticed.

The waitress disappeared. He took a sip of the tea and winced at the heat. “What makes you think I didn’t love you?”

They both heard that he’d used the past tense and it surprised neither of them.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” she said. He never had understood, maybe because he hadn’t wanted to. “It didn’t matter. Even if you did, it wasn’t enough.”

“I really did care about you.” His voice was hesitant, but she could hear the honesty in it as well.

She smiled sadly. “I know. That’s what hurts the most. There were so many ways we were perfect for each other and so many things I would have done for you. But in the end…”

“Why does it have to be the end?” he asked. “Why can’t we be friends?”

Now she laughed. “We were never friends, Michael. I hated you, I loved you, I told you things I’ve never told anyone else, but I never considered you a friend.”

His dark eyes were disappointed. “I used to consider you one of my best.”

“That was your mistake. We can hang it up next to all of mine.”

She hadn’t meant to sound quite so bitter; he didn’t seem to know what to say to that.

She was back to tracing the pattern on the placemat. “It really hurt,” she said. “There were so many times I wanted to talk to you, to ask you what happened between us, because I sure as hell didn’t know. Maybe you thought it was a game? And in a way, I guess it was.”

“A game?” Disbelief coated his voice.

“What would you call it?”

“You stopped talking to me,” he accused.

She acknowledged that with a slow nod of her head. “I did. I felt like I was doing all the work. Like the relationship was one-sided. And so I quit. If you wanted to talk to me, you could have.” She hesitated. “It sounds so ridiculous now, but it made sense at the time. And when you never made an effort, it suddenly felt justified.”

His mouth twisted in disapproval. “Don’t you think that was a bit immature of you?”

“Maybe,” she agreed. “I never claimed to be perfect. But you know, a little effort wouldn’t have killed you, either.”

“I don’t think it would have changed anything,” he said.

And that’s where you’re wrong, she thought. It would have changed everything.

He would never see that, though. It was why she’d quit him in the first place. She knew he’d never change, and as much as it had hurt, as painful as it had been, she’d decided to cut her losses while she still could. Call it self-preservation or sanity. It had been the smart thing to do.

She’d realized that before, of course, but it had never felt right until now. “I have to get going.”

“That’s it?” he asked. “You just leave?”

"You could have had me if you'd wanted me," she said. "You didn't."

He watched as she shrugged on her coat, started to slide out of the booth. "And now?"

Regret never quite reaching her eyes, she stopped to look at him. Then, tossing a ten on the table, she walked away.

---

This is oh, so near and dear to me. Feel free to rip it to shreds.

Much love,

-K