The words felt right up until the moment he spoke them, right even as he spit them out across the room. The venom felt righteous, a lesson Julia had to learn.
But when her face crumpled up, when the hurt rippled across that beautiful face he’d all but memorized, Dave wished that there was some way to undo it all, to skip back a few chapters and rewrite the scene, find a different way to approach the subject, of Gretchen, some way to make Julia understand.
“Please leave,” Julia said simply.
He didn’t dare to move. It felt like they were in some other universe, and if he left her house, the real world wouldn’t ever come back. He feared that leaving would make this permanent, but he didn’t know how to do anything but stand there. He wondered how he could be so mad at her now, how things could take such a turn so quickly. Julia said again, “Get out,” like she was already writing it into their history.
So he left.
PART 2
JULIA
WITHOUT KNOWING
HOW JULIA HAD felt something so deeply for so long without knowing it herself was a mystery. As if love was a fugitive harboring in an attic, hidden even from the people residing in the house. Dave liked Gretchen? Well, Julia loved him. She loved him.
If it didn’t hurt so much, she might have marveled at the way the mind/heart/psyche/whatever worked. How she’d known without a doubt that she was in love with Dave and had been for a very long time only when he told her he’d kissed someone else. How the words I love you had popped into her head so loud and so clear that she’d wondered if she’d really never said them before. How the realization seemed to unwind backward through time, suffusing every moment they’d had together with a love she’d simply failed to notice before. Of course she loved Dave. His humor, his—and she hated to even think the expression, but, trite as it was, it rang completely true—heart of gold, the selfless way he did everything he could for her. His sheepish smile. His hands, big and gentle. How had she loved his hands this entire time and not known it?
Julia was still in the living room when the front door closed softly. She’d been expecting Dave to slam it. She stared at the beer in her hand, didn’t want another sip of it but finished it anyway. Dave didn’t feel like slamming any doors? That was fine. She did.
She walked to front of the house and opened the door only to throw it back against its frame, the windows giving a satisfying rumble. Julia smiled to herself and did it again. There was a crazy freedom in knowing she could blame anyone else if something actually broke. She looked around the house, the stains on the carpet, the faint smell of vomit coming from somewhere not yet discovered, the hole in the drywall. The party’s damage was done, and nothing she could do would hide it. Her smile spread wider.
There was no hesitation when she chucked the beer can through the back window. She thought of this newly discovered love for Dave, her awful, stupid timing in realizing it, and then her anger basically did all the work for her. Breaking glass looked beautiful in the hazy light of drunkenness. The crash scared the couple making out in the backyard and they scurried away. Julia felt a savage pleasure in interrupting them.