“Shit,” he says. He yanks up his pants, tucks himself away, and has already started on the buttons on his shirt before I wake up enough from my daze to realize what has just happened. I watch, stunned, exposed, and only half fucked, until he reaches for his jacket.
“What are you doing?” I say in disbelief. “Are you…leaving?”
Julian refuses to look at me. His cheeks are still flushed with passion, but his expression is stony. He snatches one of the cloth napkins that I only pull out for special occasions off the table and wipes the sweat from his brow, and that gesture is the one that finally breaks me. I slide off the counter, pull my dress back up over my chest and down over my ass, and grab him by the front of his shirt.
“Are you serious right now, Julian?” I say. “Are you actually about to walk out, just like that, right in the middle—”
Julian pries my hand away, and the callousness of the gesture feels like a slap across my face.
“I have to go, Sean,” Julian says, not looking at me. “Sorry.”
If this were a movie, I would have snatched the earrings out of my lobes and thrown them at his feet, then grabbed a plate to aim at his head for good measure. But it isn’t. I am quite sure I will get a good price on Tiffany on resale and I don’t want to go to jail for assault, and so instead I follow him to the door.
“What just happened? What’s going on?” I’m shouting nonsense now, letting my thoughts flow freely from my brain to my mouth to his fleeing back. “Am I missing something? Did something happen? Is there—is there someone else?”
This gets his attention.
“Stop,” Julian says.
He sounds so cold, like he had with Melody, like Alicia before her. His chill freezes me in place. We stare at each other, chests heaving, but otherwise suspended in this vat of hostility that has no reason to be here.
Julian is the one to finally break the silence.
“You were right. We’re in different life stages. We want different things. I was naïve to ignore those differences, but I can’t anymore.”
This, I think, has to be a nightmare.
“What do you mean?” I whisper.
“I’m twenty-seven years old,” he says. “I should be staying out until three a.m., going to forest raves, making mistakes. I thought I could grow up with you, but the reality is: you’re right. I don’t know what I want yet, but it might include the things you don’t. Marriage. Kids. The fucking picket fence. Someone who isn’t so in love with their job that I don’t figure out they know how to do more than boil water for the five months that I know them. I want that. Not whateverthis”—he waves in my general direction—“is supposed to be.”
I wince. In a matter of seconds, he’s managed to take this magical, special thing we had together and turn it tawdry, wave his hand and turn me from his lover into his fool.
“That was mean,” I say, stunned.
Julian shrugs.
“Radical honesty,” he reminds me, and I am almost sick right there at his feet.
“Okay.” I swallow my nausea and cross my arms, lift my head high. “Sounds like this is it, and you want out. We’re done. Is that right?”
I hate that he is still so beautiful to me. That when he finally looks at me, I can search for the sadness in his eyes and find it.
“Yeah,” Julian says. “We’re done.”
I open the door for him.
There is no fanfare. Julian doesn’t apologize, or tell me good night, or offer platitudes wishing me well. He walks out and closes the door, and with the suddenness of a flash bomb, it is over. From his crate in my bedroom, Onix begins to whine.
The last time I got dumped, I was thirty years old. I had been with my fiancé for eight years, only two of which could be called happy. He lied to me, made me feel like every little thing wrong in his world wasmy fault, cheated on me, got me pregnant. The day I bled out in the cath lab bathroom, he ignored my first twelve calls. On the thirteenth, he told me never to call him again, and I had never felt more useless and unlovable in my life.
This doesn’t hurt like that did. But it comes too damn close for comfort.
Twenty
I don’t cry until I call Winona, but the second I hear her voice I lose mine. It’s replaced by tears that pour militantly down my cheeks, sobs that shock me with their force. It’s just a breakup, I recognize, with a guy I dated for less than five months and with whom I should have known it would never work. But it still feels like my world is ending.
Brandon has Sophie this weekend, and so Winona comes over. We eat my leftovers and top it off with vanilla ice cream from the pint and put on old slasher movies rife with blood and gore and no romance subplots.