It's Not You

A story sort of inspired by the saying "It's not you, it's me," as a break-up line.

 

            It started with flowers.

            They were yellow, the color of sunlight or butter or a number two pencil, and he looked so cute holding them while he stood there on my doorstep. He smiled his perfectly symmetrical smile with all his enthusiastic teeth and it wasn’t a lie. It was a good smile, a real smile, that reached up to tug at the corners of his perfectly blue eyes. I stood there, holding the door open not-quite wide enough for him to come in just yet. I noticed he’d tucked his shirt into his pants, his brown leather belt a subtle testimony to his responsibility, reliability, and good taste.

            “Hey, beautiful,” he said, in his mellow-warm voice. Like honey, I thought, and just like that, I knew it was over.

            Again.

            He didn’t notice. He usually doesn’t. He handed me the flowers and said the lasagna smelled good. I stepped back from the door and he came in, but my smile was 100% Barbie fake. My heart was thudding sickly and my palms were sweating.

            Oh God, my brain was asking me, how are you going to tell him this time?

            He talked consistently over the salad and garlic bread, pausing his work-story patter to comment appropriately on the crispness of the lettuce, the perfect ratio of butter to salt on the bread. I toyed with the damp stem of my wineglass--because, like any true heathen, I like my wine chilled, not room-temperature-cloying--and fantasized about jumping out of my chair and simply leaping out the window. Of course, I couldn’t break up with him that way. Not again. I am many bad things, but unoriginal cannot be said to be one of them.

            It hadn’t been a real window that I jumped out of, just a hole in the side of our treehouse. The treehouse--called that more out of pity and wistful idealism than accuracy--had been the fort we’d built the summer between third and fourth grade, a little stick hut hollowed out in the hedge that separated our houses. We were very, very proud of this. It had a door (a hole in the bushes covered by half an old plastic tablecloth once used for picnics), a carpet (a moldy old remnant from my dad’s leaky shop) and a window. Brian was very proud of that window. He’d built it himself, a strange oblong hole in the tangle of branches that he’d painstakingly formed with his mother’s rose pruning shears while I was at camp. For years, that fort was our hideout, our camping spot, our refuge and our shelter. On warm summer nights we’d sneak out of our respective windows, the moon shedding plenty of light for us to crawl through the familiar obstacle courses of our lawns and into the welcoming embrace of the treehouse. In there we used an old flashlight dimmed by the shirt of whoever got to hold it that night, and we’d talk in hushed whispers so the Gestapo-parents wouldn’t hear us. It was our safe place, shrouded in the sanctity of perfect friendship.

            Until Halloween of our seventh-grade year, when Brian decided to ruin that sanctity by leaning across our freshly-reaped candy harvest bounty and pressing sloppy lips against mine. Then he asked me to go with him to our school’s fall dance that Sunday.

            So I jumped out the window.

            Or, more accurately, I jumped at window. I wasn’t nine years old anymore. Puberty had hit and I was a tall girl. I took out most of the wall on my mad-cap rush to get out of there.

            We never did use that fort again.

            The thing making this night even harder was, I was pretty sure I could see that gleam in his eye again. That gleam, the one with the particular bright clarity of his grandmother’s heirloom engagement ring, the one she couldn’t seem to keep in her damn jewelry box and out of Brian’s pocket. I fidgeted with my fork and Brian asked why I wasn’t eating.

            This is it, I thought. Say it now.

            But I just smiled awkwardly. “I ate while I was cooking,” I said apologetically. Coward. B***h. My vicious brain lashed out at my reluctant tongue.

            Brian just smiled fondly, not even stooping to an eye-roll. He was so good to me. I smiled back, but my hand dragged my fork down off the table, under the white tablecloth, where I began pressing the tines against my jean-clad right thigh. Selfish, I told myself. Coward.

            It was no good, though. I’d tried the grin-and-bear-it routine, the fake-it-til-you-make-it, the stuff upper lip soldier marching forward into a life she didn’t want. Last time, I’d told myself that no matter what, I was sticking with it. Brian was a good man. Brian was a smart, respectable, employed man. Brian was my best friend. Brian made me laugh. Brian held my hand in his just-so, like his hand was the nest and mine the wayward bird. Brian was good in bed. Brian got the job done. So I tortured both of us through two trips to Europe, two years of dating and half a year of wedding plans before my gritted teeth got the best of my good intentions and I dropped his ring on the pillow before packing my stuff and moving to Phoenix.

            “More wine?” I offered it to him like a conciliation prize. He held up his glass and I thought, that is so exactly Brian. Yes, more, he seems to say, no matter if I’m dishing up lasagna or scathing, unprovoked tirades, and in that moment I felt my resolve weakening. Maybe I’d been hasty earlier. Yellow flowers, in and of themselves, did not make Brian not my soulmate. A voice like honey did not constitute a crime worth breaking a good man’s heart.

            Who are you kidding? The yellow flowers seemed to say, nodding at me from their red vase in the center of the table.

            “Brian, we need to talk,” I said, breathless.

            He put down his fork and looked at me, patience with just the smallest hint of dread.

            “I’ve really been enjoying seeing you again,” I said.

            “I have, as well,” he said, and smiled that warm smile.

            “And I know that you’re new to the area…”

“I love Phoenix. It’s great.”

“So I wouldn’t want you to feel alone, but…” I stopped fiddling with my fork and put it back on the table, beside my full plate. “I think we should stop seeing each other.”

            I held my breath and waited, my face in half-wince.

            Brian stared at me.

            “Oh-kayy…” he said slowly. “You mean, stop seeing each other at all? Like, physically? Should I go get a blindfold?”

“No, I mean…” Deep breath. Rip off the bandaid. “I think we should see other people.”

            Brian put down his fork and propped his elbows on the table. He hid his mouth behind his tented fingers and continued to look at me.

            “Anna,” he said, finally putting his hands down. I was surprised"not to mention confused"to see that he was smiling. “I have been seeing other people.”

            There was a pause filled with what. My eyebrows climbed my forehead.

            “You didn’t think…” Brian sat back. “Anna, did you think we were… dating?”

            I opened my mouth to say something appropriately pithy and scathing, but it just sort of hung there, open, in the silence.

            “No,” I said after too long a pause to convey truth. Then I stopped talking. Everything after this point would just be lame cover-up and awkward fumbling.

            “Anna,” Brian said gently. “you’re my friend. My oldest friend. My best friend.”

“I know,” I said.

            “And I love you.”

“I know,” I said, my shock turning to wariness.

            “As a friend.”

“I know,” I said, relieved.

            “But after what happened last time…” he shook his head with a little laugh and sat farther back from the table. “Did you really think I was that stupid?”

            Alright, that stung a little, but I could see his point.

            “No,” I said.

            “I’ve got to go,” Brian said, checking his watch. “I’ve got reservations.”

“But you just ate!” I protested.

            “Not dinner,” he grinned, standing up and pulling his tailored jacket off the back of his chair. “A boat.”

“You reserved a boat?”

            “Yeah.” His smile grew. “I’ve been seeing this girl.”

“Oh, really,” I said.

            “Laura,” he said, his voice all reverence. “You’d really like her, Anna.”

“I bet,” I said.

            “Anyway…” he jingled his keys in his pocket. I saw that familiar square outline and suddenly I realized that I hadn’t been wrong"he had had that gleam in his eye, that old diamond twinkle. But not for me. Not this time.

            I stood up and came around the table. He leaned down and wrapped one arm around me, squeezing me briefly in a friendly hug.

            “Have a good time tonight,” I said, and I tried to mean it.

            “I will. I hope.” Brian said, and he was gone long before he walked out the door.

            Later, I set the red vase on the windowsill above the sink and looked at the yellow flowers as I washed lasagna remains off of two plates.

            Idiot, they said.

            

Author's Note

My em-dashes got replaced by quotation marks. I tried to replace it where I caught it, but if there are some out-of-place quotation marks... that's why.

Reviews

[Wolfwind]

This was amazingly well put together! The characters and their emotions all came out with crystal clear strength, building the scene into a very emotive, realistic and dynamic scene.
I felt that I could relate to the piece, as I think many people could. Very nicely done!

Aaron