Chapter 8
Nate
I want her to understand. I want to explain everything and have her tell me that she would have made the same decision if she had been talking to the same people and having them say the same things that they said to me.
But maybe she wouldn’t have.
Maybe they would have said the same things to her, and she would have ignored them. Why wasn’t I that strong?
The hostess seats us at what I feel is the best table in the house, one in the corner, by the window, but against the wall.
“This is my favorite table,” I say, remembering that she and I had been here multiple times together and sat at this very place.
“This is the table we sat at on our first date,” she says with a little laugh. We take the seats we’d always taken, me with my back against the wall, her with her back to the room.
I always like to see what’s going on, and she doesn’t like having to make eye contact with other patrons in the restaurant.
We do this naturally without talking about it.
It feels so comfortable, so familiar. “Everything with you feels easy,” I say, remembering our first date. I had saved up for a month in order to be able to take her. She had contributed to it as well, against my protest. I had wanted to be able to pay for it all, and she said that it wasn’t fair for me to have to spend all of my money on her, while she got to do whatever she wanted to with hers.
I’ve never had a date be as considerate as what she was.
Tonight, she’s making me pay. She specified before we left. And I don’t mind, I want to, and I suppose I owe her.
But is she going to make me grovel forever? Part of me thinks then maybe I should quit rather than beat my head against the wall for however long, and part of me thinks it’s worth however long it takes in order to break through to her. She’s worth it.
That’s the bigger part.
“I don’t want to fall into that trap again,” she says quietly. I can hear the pain in her voice. It’s hard to believe that something that happened eight years ago is still hurting her, but on the other hand, if it had been her that had broken up with me, I know that I would have been just as devastated.
“By the time I broke up with you, my parents, siblings, friends, and teachers had me so convinced that it was the right thing to do, that... I guess I just figured that I needed to accept it stoically, and to a man, they all suggested that I find someone else and just date casually. Abby seemed like the best choice for a casual date, and she’d been chasing me for a while. I wish I could go back and do it over again.”
Somehow explaining it to her makes me feel a little bit better, like if she understood that it truly wasn’t what I wanted, maybe it would make it so it wasn’t so bad.
Our server comes over, sets our menus down, and asks for our drink orders.
Jenna orders water with lemon, like she always used to, and it makes me smile, to feel the familiarity. I order my favorite soda, and I see Jenna smile, like it means something to her too. She is sharing the memories.
The waitress walks away, and I wait until she’s out of earshot before I lean forward and say, “I was stupid to listen to them. I wish I wouldn’t have. I would give anything to go back and be able to do it over again.”
Her lips flatten, and she sighs before she says, “Are you going to tell me how you ended up being a delivery person?”
All right. She doesn’t want to talk about that. I can take a hint.
“Well, I went to school for computer science, like I was expecting to.”
“That was always your dream,” she says, almost like the words slip out without her thinking about them.
“That’s right. I thought I would love it, but it turned out that I absolutely hated being stuck in a cubicle all day long, staring at the screen. I enjoy the work but absolutely hate everything else, including the working environment.”
“That stinks. But you always did love to look around, have the changing scenery.”
“I’d skip school when things got a little stressful,” I say, eliciting another smile from her as we remember our skip days. Not that we took a whole lot of them, which is probably what makes them so special. There were just a couple, but they were fun and neither one of us regretted them.
“So... You hated your job...” she trails off, waiting for me to fill in the blanks.
“Yeah. I went to school for four years, and I even started on my master’s while I got a nice, cushy job. It paid a lot.” I graduated at the top of my class in college, but I don’t add that. I just wasn’t interested in the party crowd, and it felt like anyone who wasn’t partying had a leg up on grades, since it’s not too hard to beat people when you’re sober and they’re hung over.
“But I just hated my job. So I quit and came back here, and I originally got a job doing work that was kind of related to my major, but... I hated that too. Just hated being inside all day. I don’t know why I didn’t think about that when I was in school.”
“I might have mentioned that to you a time or two.”
“You did,” I say, nodding my head and thinking, not for the first time, that if we had been together in college, she would have encouraged me to do something else knowing that I might have had the aptitude for computer science, but I didn’t have the personality for it. Jenna was always good at figuring things like that out, where I was much more of a dunce.
“So, this delivery job came up. It pays about a quarter of what I was making, but I am so much happier. I get to see people all day long and drive around, the scenery is always changing, it’s challenging in winter, which I enjoy, and—”
“Dangerous.”