I needed to know if there was still something there. You can't blame me for that." I said nothing. She took my silence as an opening. "Look, I didn't plan for this to happen, okay?
But when I saw him, I just I felt something. And I owe it to myself to explore that. You don't understand what Mark and I had. He was my whole world before you. And what was I?"
I asked. My voice was calm, curious almost. She hesitated. Then she said it. "You were just a comfortable chapter."
The words hung in the air between us. "I care about you," she added as if that helped. But comfortable isn't the same as right. Mark challenges me. Mark makes me feel alive.
You're stable, safe, boring, honestly. And I realized today that I don't want boring. I nodded slowly. Okay. She blinked.
Okay. We're done, I said. Lose my number. Her expression flickered. Surprise, then something harder.
She straightened up, her eyes narrowing. Fine, she said. But don't come crawling back when you realize I was the best thing that ever happened to you. She grabbed her bag from where she'd dropped it on my counter and walked to the door. She paused with her hand on the knob, looking back over her shoulder, clearly waiting for me to break, to beg, to give her the satisfaction of seeing me shattered.
I just watched her. She huffed, opened the door, and left. I sat there for a long time after she was gone. The apartment was quiet, too quiet. The kind of quiet that makes you confront everything you've been avoiding.
I thought about calling my friends. I thought about getting drunk. I thought about a lot of things. Instead, I picked up my phone and blocked her number. Then I blocked her on every social media platform I could think of.
Then I blocked her email address. I deleted our text history. I deleted our photos. I didn't post a sad status or a cryptic quote. I didn't want attention.
I didn't want sympathy. I just wanted her gone. I didn't sleep well that night. My mind kept replaying the brunch, kept showing me that smile. The one she gave Mark, the one she hadn't given me in months.
Every time I closed my eyes, I heard her voice, Move. He's about to sit here. But I didn't reach out. I didn't unblock her. I didn't write a long message and delete it.
I just lay in the dark, breathing, waiting for the morning. Three days later, the voicemail started. The first voicemail came on a Wednesday afternoon, exactly 3 days after I walked out of that cafe. I was at my kitchen table eating a sandwich I'd made without much enthusiasm when my phone lit up with a number I didn't recognize. I let it ring.