“It was the beginning of dinner. Our food had just arrived, so I don’t think that counts as the middle. If you count the waiting time, maybe we were a sixth of the way through, a fifth maybe, but it really would depend on if we’d had dessert too.”
When what I want to say is: please don’t leave me again.
“Right.” Will peels off his black socks, one by one, and lobs them across the room. I watch them glide through the air. It doesn’t feel like a sexual advance, but he’s getting increasingly naked, so I could be wrong. “My point is that you have to try to communicate a little better. Open up a bit more. You can’t just close down and run away every time you get upset about something.”
Actually, my go-to alternative is to silently freeze like a wide-eyed rabbit, and historically that goes down even worse.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Will rolls toward me and props his chin on his hairy arm. “And on the back of this agreement, there’s nothing you want to say? Nothing you want to share with me?”
His face is so beautiful, like a landscape. His nose is slightly wonky and big, his left canine is snaggled, there are two small moles on his cheek and there’s a patch where his stubble shadow doesn’t grow as evenly. But it’s somewhere I know: they’re landmarks I want to draw a map from and return to whenever I can.
“I like your face,” I contribute desperately.
“That’s not what I meant.” Will sighs with a huge yawn, kissing my forehead and turning off the bedside light even though it’s only nine thirty in the evening.
I lie stiffly on my back with my arms by my sides and stare in confusion at the dark ceiling, accurately scattered with the glow-in-the-dark stars I bought online and spent days configuring. What did he mean? What does he want me to share with him? What was the correct response? I wish people would just tell me what it is I need to say to make them happy with me instead of constantly expecting me to guess.
“So,” I venture eventually. “Are we going to have sex tonight, do you think?”
Apparently not: Will’s already asleep.
A heartbeat; a stripe of warm yellow light. The dull hum of fighting flatmates, like a nest of pissy wasps under the floorboards.
Disoriented, I open my eyes.
At some point last night I must have rearranged myself, because I’m now lying on Will’s chest and he’s staring down at me. Again. Is he going to study me first thing every morning now? I’m not sure I like it very much. It makes me feel like I’m both hanging up in the Tate and being peered at under a rock, like a wood louse.
“I like your face too,” he says, leaning down to kiss the top of my head like I’m a kid on their first day of school. “That’s what I should have said last night. You have an extraordinarily beautiful face, Cassandra Penelope Dankworth.”
I unstick my mouth with a clack. “Huh?”
“And you’re so thoughtful.” He smiles. “When I lost my favorite glove on that Antarctic shoot, you found an identical pair and saved one in case I did it again. Remember?”
Of course I remember: it was three weeks ago. Confused, I scrabble to sit upright. I’m beautiful? Thoughtful? Good at glove shopping?
What the hell is—
“And you’re sweet,” Will continues in a rush, clutching at my hand. “I know a lot of people don’t see it, but I do. You’re whip-smart and so gloriously weird. I genuinely love hanging out with you.”
I lean against the cold wall and stare in alarm at Will’s face. He has the distant, affectionate and scripted expression of a man giving a eulogy, as if my boyfriend has woken me in the middle of a speech at my own damn funeral.
“I need you to know that,” he continues, his voice becoming gravelly, like a car in a driveway. “I need you to know how highly I think of you, Cassandra. I think the world of you.”
No.
No no. No no no no—
And as a lifelong atheist, I do not say this lightly, but:
“Oh my fucking God.” Scrabbling, I grab a secret Pegasus T-shirt from down the side of the bed and pull it over my head so I’m not sitting here, being rejected, with no top on. “Will, are you doing it again?”
“Am I...doing what again?”
“Dumping me. Are you waking me up and saying lovely things about me that you clearly don’t mean so that you can casually segue into breaking up with me again?”
Will winces. “But I do mean them.”
“Focus on the relevant question, please.”
A pause; then: “Yes.”
“This can’t be happening.” With zero grace, I roll out of bed and start circling the tiny room in my knickers. “What is wrong with you, Will? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’d like a clinical report that I can print out and hand to all your future partners, because this is unacceptable.”
“Cassandra...” Will runs his hands through his neat, no-sex hair. “I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t sleep. It’s been on my mind for the last few weeks and I thought maybe we could tackle it when I got back from my trip, but we’ve only been together four months and I’m just not sure—”
My insides are starting to hammer. I feel sick. At least he’s not blindsiding me like yesterday. Yesterday, I beamed at him mid-dumping and said, “I love that we’re starting the day with this kind of positive morning report now! When you’re done, can I do one for you?”
There needs to be a word for both heartbroken and humiliated.
Heartiliated, maybe.
“Don’t do that,” I say quickly. “Don’t only four months me. Four months is how long Persephone lives with Hades in the Underworld and it’s long enough to turn the entire world to winter. Four months is not nothing.”
“Wasn’t that six months?” Will says, frowning.
“Seriously? That’s what you’re going to focus on now? It depends on the bloody source, Will. It’s still a significant amount of time.”
“You’re right. Dick move. I’m sorry.”
My eyes are wet, and my hands are shaking, but at least this time I appear to be physically capable of speaking and moving. Last time I went full Frozen Rabbit and stared at Will in unblinking silence until he gave me a tentative hug, told me he’d always want me in his life and left with one black sock still in my wastepaper basket.
“But why?” I manage this time.
“I don’t know.” There are so many colors pouring out of Will right now—he’s a human prism, spinning in the window—but the one I’m going to find hard to forget is the pale blue of relief. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, Cass. It’s just that—”
“You care about me so much but you don’t think you can love me? Not in the way you want to love someone? Not in the way you’re waiting to love someone?”
“Ouch.” Will winces. “That sounded a lot better in my head.”
And yet he said it last time too. My throat is tightening again. It’s so incredibly cruel. I’m not being dumped because I did something wrong, or said something wrong: I’m being dumped because I am wrong. Because Will is hoping someone less wrong is just around the corner.
I’m breathing so hard now I sound like a dehumidifier.
He can’t leave it like that; not again.
“I need a better reason this time.” Remaining self-respect: officially zero. “Give me details, Will. Point me in the right direction. Because it’s not normal to be thirty-one years old and have literally nobody. It’s not normal to have never had a romantic relationship go past four months. Which means that logically, statistically, it has to be me, so I need to know. What is it that’s so unlovable about me? Give me something tangible to work on. Please.”
And I know it’s humiliating—I know you’re supposed to act like the one that “got away” (even while you’re in the process of being consciously lobbed back in)—but I did that last time and learned nothing, so what else do I have to lose? In the last twenty-four hours, I’ve already lost everything.
Will tries awkwardly to wrap his arms around me, but now his touch hurts me and I push him away.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Cassie,” he lies gently.
“That’s very evidently not true.”
“It’s not you. It’s just...” Will looks desperately around the room. “There’s something...missing. I don’t know what it is. A connection? It’s just something I need from a relationship that isn’t quite...here.”
When what he means is: there’s something missing in me.
I watch as Will guiltily pulls on his jeans, picks up one sock and continues desperately searching for the other (I don’t have the heart to tell him it’s sitting in my wastepaper basket again). In one way or another, this is what my relationships always boil down to: a failure to “connect,” as if I’m a broken piece of Lego that no other bits of Lego can click on to.
“Cass,” Will says, pulling on his T-shirt, “I want to talk about this more. I do. I want to keep you in my life if I possibly can. But can we do it later? Maybe this evening? We overslept and I’m meeting the pangolin people in Clerkenwell at ten.”
“Sure,” I say flatly, giving up and sitting on the end of my bed like a plonked doll. “We can talk about it later. Let’s just keep doing this, Will. Every morning you can dump me, and every night you can come back and pretend nothing happened. Over and over and over and—”