I pull my hand away slowly from her grasp. Panic rises in me, fast and all-encompassing. This feels like it’s coming out of nowhere, and for no reason that I can fathom. We’ve been clear with each other since day one that this was never going to be serious, and now I’m getting blindsided by committed relationship talk.
I preface what I say with a consciously light-hearted laugh, hoping it’ll bring us back to friendly terms, but when the words come out they still sound heavy and hard. “Go forward? Jessie, there is no forward. I don’t think about the ‘forward’ – not when it comes to sex. I think about the now, that’s it. About what’s going to happen here, today, at this—”
“Stop!” Jessie interrupts so loudly virtually everyone else on the patio steals a quick glance at us. She takes a breath and leans in, projecting her voice. “Don’t give me another one of your ‘big man’ speeches. I’m not in the mood for it, and this isn’t the time.”
I try to steady my emotions. It feels like all the lust and passion between us is going sour, turning into a kind of resentment, a sense of dislike. This is exactly why I don’t do relationships. This kind of ugliness is inevitable. I pull back, stop myself from letting the anger rise to the top, from letting whatever the weird turn our relationship took the moment I arrived take me somewhere we can’t return from.
“Look, Jessie,” I say, my voice as gentle as I can make it, “I don’t get it. One minute you’re telling me that we can do this. That we’re two adults who can be responsible for themselves. I thought we were on the same page. Now you’re talking like we’re a long-term couple, like we should be thinking about the future.”
“Things change.” Jessie presses her lips into a thin, hard line, and I can tell I’m not getting through to her, that my words are falling on deaf ears.
“What changed? Tell me. What?”
She looks away, and I see her shiver. She folds her arms again, but this time it’s less a defiant gesture, and more a self-comforting one. I wait for her to talk, but instead she seems to go still, to fall inside herself, until I feel like all I’m looking at is a lifeless shell.
“Jessie,” I say, after a while, and she slowly turns to face me, as if coming awake from a thousand-year sleep. A soft, tragic smile plays itself upon her lips.
“Nate. I always knew you were good at bullshitting, but I never realized you were so good at lying to yourself, too.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that you don’t even understand your own feelings.”
“Feelings? What feelings? Why are you making something that was so simple and clear-cut into something messy?”
“This was messy from the beginning, Nate. All relationships are messy, you just can’t handle that.”
“This isn’t a relationship!” I say a little too loudly, before smiling myself back to earth. I take a moment and laugh a little, shaking my head, the way bad sitcom actors do at the end of a show. Only this time a credit roll isn’t going to save me. “This is not a relationship. We just happen to be old friends – good friends, who started fucking each other and enjoyed it enough to keep doing it. That’s all.”
Jessie laughs derisively. “That’s pretty much a relationship, Nate. We’ve spent every possible moment together for the past few months.”
“That’s not a relationship,” I insist, feeling my blood run hot. “You know why? Because a relationship has a future. A relationship turns into a commitment, turns into a marriage, turns into kids. Turns into misery, obligation, and all the other XYZ. And that is not somewhere I ever want to be in danger of heading. What did you really think this was?”
Suddenly Jessie drops her face into her hands, her body shaking with emotions. All of my anger immediately goes cold, turning into the uncomfortable chill of regret and guilt.
“Jessie…” I say, moving towards her.
“Get off me,” she hisses, as I put my hand on her shoulder, causing me to flinch backwards. She pulls her head up out of her hands, and though she has the trembling lips and redness around the eyes of someone on the verge of crying, her face is stern and confrontational. The face of someone whose pride is bigger than their distress. “You’re an asshole, Nate. You’ve always been an asshole. And my problem is that I’m too forgiving when it comes to assholes.”
“Jessie…”
“You know,” she starts, as if breaking down and losing control is finally allowing her to find the words to express all her pent-up anger, “I had such a crush on you when I was a kid. For so long you were the guy I wanted, the guy I dreamed about. But that’s all you are – a dream. I should have kept it that way. Because none of this is real.”
“Wait,” I say, as she stands up quickly and roughly shoves her backpack over her shoulder, “Jessie…”