“Sorry.” He smoothed out a patch of bedsheets by his side. “Off,” he said. “Things have been a little off. Haven’t they felt that way to you?”
Julia leaned down so her forehead was touching her knees. She shook her head that way, slowly, and when she looked up over the ridge of her kneecaps, tears were on the brink of her eyelids, caught on her lashes like divers about to jump. She bit her lip, she put her forehead down again, she shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said finally, managing a smile. “Maybe a little. But this is still new.”
“Julia, we’ve been best friends for five years. It’s never once felt off. Why now?”
She stretched her legs out in front of her. “Because the universe hates happiness?” She wiped at her eyes. “That’s not even true, though. Things have been great between us, haven’t they?”
“The past week has been great, Julia. But there’s something wrong here. I can’t think of things to talk about with you. I don’t know how to act around you. And, yes, Gretchen’s on my mind. Too much for it to not mean anything.”
He was not ready to see her face crumple into tears. He’d seen her get sad once or twice. But this? This was uncharted territory. He thought back to the night of the “BEER” party, how hurt she’d looked when he called her a cliché. This was like that, but worse. She hid behind her hands and wept.
His chest felt emptied out. Outside, the sun was still shining, and it felt weird that moments like these could happen in the daytime. Fights, like phone calls delivering bad news, those only happened in the middle of the night, didn’t they? Shrouded in darkness?
Julia stood up from the bed and went over to the box of tissues on his nightstand. She wiped her tears and blew her nose, then took a seat at his desk chair, composing herself. Dave could only watch.
“I don’t want to be miserable with you, Dave,” she said, scrunching a tissue in her hand. “I want to be with you. More than anything I’ve ever really wanted. I think things have been a little off, yes. But I also think maybe we can fix that.” Another tear started to scurry down the bridge of her nose and she quickly brushed it away, not giving it a chance to interrupt. “But I don’t want to start getting paranoid about whether you want to be with me or someone else. I don’t want to start analyzing your every action. I don’t want us to start hating each other because we don’t know how to be in a relationship together.” She tossed her scrunched-up tissue in the garbage beneath his desk. “I think this can work between us. I really do. But I’m going to let you decide, because otherwise I’ll always have the doubt. Are we going to try this out, or do you think we shouldn’t?”
After a long moment with his eyes closed, his head resting back against his wall, nausea knotting his stomach, Dave let out his breath. When had everything he’d ever wanted changed? “I love you, Julia. But maybe I’m not supposed to love you like this.”
WITHOUT HIM
JULIA WAS ON her side, staring at the map on her wall. The dads came by and tried to convince her to come watch a movie with them downstairs, but she couldn’t bring herself to step away from the bed. She wanted the comfort of the room slowly darkening as the day went on without her. Burying her head beneath her sheets, she imagined the folds of the cloth as caverns, imagined that she was underground, if only to give herself something to think about to ease the pain. For hours, she didn’t move. She tried to empty her mind of Dave, though she had no idea how. She’d been thinking about him for years.
This hurt. In a way she couldn’t shake, in a place she couldn’t pinpoint, this hurt more than anything Julia had ever experienced.