Sixteen
I ’m not trying to defend them in any way,” Krystal explains, raising her hands. “Your cousins don’t deserve the amount of grace you’ve given them throughout the years. It’s just that I understand trying to fill a role other people made for you.”
“I didn’t think you were,” I assure her. “There’s no excuse for the way they treated me when we were younger. But you’re right. I only came out to a handful of people before I made that video because I didn’t want the hassle of coming out over and over again. I wanted to skip to the end. Be the healthy, well-adjusted queer person the internet thinks I am. The truth isn’t nearly as pretty.”
“It never is.” Her smile is dry.
“What role were you trying to fill?” Her shoulders stiffen slightly before she lets out a sigh. “Is this about your ex?”
“Our moms were best friends,” she tells me. “I’m pretty sure they were more ecstatic than we were when we finally got together.”
“What happened?” I’m scared to even voice this simple question. I know what happened, even if it’s only the tight-lipped version she told me yesterday. Maybe now she feels comfortable enough to share the details.
“He was my best friend.” She circles her ring finger with a thumb and forefinger. Her movements are absent-minded, tracing over a remembered weight. “We grew up together. Saw each other at our best and worst, you know? I loved him, but I wasn’t in love with him. And I hate myself for it.”
“Did you think you were better off as friends?”
“When he asked me out our sophomore year of college, it felt like the natural thing to say yes,” she explains. “Our friends always suspected there was something between us, the same way our families did. There was something different about him that year. He was bolder, unafraid to go after what he wanted, and he’d decided he wanted me. I don’t know, it was an attractive quality. It made me want to give us a shot. See if everyone was right.”
“What happened then?” I ask, taking a sip from my beer, swallowing down a wince along with the bitter taste. She notices and grabs the bottle from my hand before turning into the kitchen.
“We went from friends to full-blown relationship,” she says as she turns her back on me, gathering ingredients from the fridge for my usual at the bar. “There was no easing into the transition. It made sense in some ways because of how familiar we already were with each other. I didn’t expect to skip to the end with him when I agreed to try dating, but I’d already fallen into it before I even knew what we were doing.”
“If you loved each other, I don’t see how that’s a bad thing,” I tell her. “Then again, there are different ways to love someone. Romance isn’t for everyone, despite what the world would like us to believe. Not everyone wants to fall in love, get married, and have kids.”
“I’ll cheers to that when I finish making your drink.”
“Have you ever thought you might be aromantic?” I ask as I return to my seat at the bar where our untouched plates are sitting and watch as she twists open a bottle of Malibu. I’m still hungry, so I eat as she makes my drink.
“I don’t think so, no,” she says. “I’ve experienced sexual and romantic attraction. And not always both at the same time for the same person. That wasn’t an issue with Isaac, though. I was attracted to him, but when it came to love—romantic love—he was years ahead of me and didn’t give me any time to catch up. Our relationship was great at first, don’t get me wrong. It was just… fast. As friends, we saw each other every day, spent the night at each other’s place most weekends. After our first date, we were practically living together. Within the span of a few months, we were bickering like an old married couple.”
“So when you say you and Isaac skipped to the end, what you really meant was you skipped the honeymoon phase and went straight to the we’ve-been-together-for-years phase.”
“The honeymoon phase lasted approximately two days before we apparently became official.” She nods, handing me the drink she’s finished crafting. When I furrow my brows, she says, “That’s when Isaac says we became a couple, not that he asked me to be his girlfriend in any official capacity.”
“And that’s when all the excitement died?”
“I guess, but that wasn’t the issue either. It was all the small ways we failed to meet each other’s expectations. I didn’t like staying at his place when his roommates were home, but he didn’t like going to sleep alone the nights I worked, or being woken up in the middle of the night when I came in. I hated coming home to a sink full of dirty dishes he always promised to wash but never did. He hated that I was more concerned about the dishes in the sink than grateful for the meals he left in the fridge for me to heat up when I got hungry during the day. When it was clear our lives didn’t sync, my solution was to slow down—his was to move in together. I let him and everyone else convince me his idea was better. Slowing down would mean an eventual breakup, and neither of us wanted that.”
“That sounds… intense,” I say. “If you had your doubts about the relationship early on, why stick around for so long?”
“I might’ve had doubts, but they weren’t fully formed yet. There wasn’t a real, concrete reason to break up with him. Just a bunch of tiny, nagging reasons that added up to some big-time resentment. But when I said them out loud, those reasons sounded so much smaller than they felt,” she explains. “Anytime I vented to my mom or other friends, they told me all serious relationships were like this. I needed to compromise more, be willing to share my life with another person if I wanted to make it work. Funny that aside from my mom, I don’t have a relationship with any of them anymore. Isaac and I may not have made it down the aisle, but breaking up was like a divorce. He got the friend group; I got the house plants.” She gestures around her, to yet another hanging plant above her head and two more framing either side of the sink.
“We lost so much when we broke up. Decades of friendship. I lost the rest of my friends and my mom’s respect. Breaking up was—” Her palms slap the counter so suddenly, I can swear I feel the force of it on my chest. Her head bows and there’s a long, anguished sound at the back of her throat. “A complete and utter mess we still haven’t recovered from.”
I wonder how long this story has been sitting on her chest, waiting to be told. I want to comfort her somehow, but how can I when I can’t even relate to her? I can’t imagine going through what she went through.
She sits down on a barstool beside me, close enough that our arms brush, and then our knees as we turn toward each other. My skin erupts in goose bumps at the touch, my stomach fluttering with inconvenient butterflies.
“He was my best friend, the boy I loved. The one person I could talk to about anything without judgment. I convinced myself that he was still in there—disguised as the pushy, judgmental boyfriend I couldn’t for the life of me understand how I wound up with.”
“Judgmental?” I crack my knuckles, readying for a fight the same way she did for me. Krystal merely shakes her head with a small smile.
“I told myself I was being too sensitive, but yeah.” She blows out a breath. “He had this weird insecurity about my job. He used to tease me all the time for sleeping in despite knowing how late I came in the night before. Then there were these comments he’d make implying my job wasn’t as important as his. They always cropped back up during a fight. And we had plenty of them when he started planning these surprise, over-the-top romantic dates that he always scheduled during the nights I worked.”
“That’s so shitty,” I tell her. “He probably did it on purpose. If you were practically living together, there’s no excuse for him not to know your schedule.”
“That’s what I told him,” she says. “I don’t know why I ever thought getting married would fix our problems. Once we got engaged and started making plans for what our life together would be like, I realized we were still on two completely different pages. He expected me to quit Havana Bar and get a desk job so we’d finally be on a similar work schedule and see each other more often. Then we’d buy a house and start a family once he got promoted and started making more money. It wasn’t the life I wanted, and what’s worse is it was preplanned without me. When I made it clear I had no intention of quitting my job, now or in the future, I’m surprised we didn’t break up then and there.”
“What was your vision for your life together?”
She hesitates for a beat.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot—”
“It’s not that,” she says. “It’s just that I haven’t told a lot of people this, and the last time I did, it didn’t go over well. It wasn’t really a vision for our life, but my life. Another clue that I wasn’t in this relationship as much as he was.” She takes in a breath. “I want to run my own bar one day.”
“Really?” I sit up straighter. “That sounds awesome.”
“Thanks.” She smiles slightly. “I still have no idea if it’s an achievable dream. I don’t know the first thing about securing the loans I need to get a place up and running, because my savings account is lacking to say the least.”
“You’ll figure it out.” I wave away her concerns. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, right? Does this bar have a theme?”
“I’ve cycled through a few ideas over the years. I’ve been on plant apothecary for the past few months, but that just might be all the extra oxygen in here.” She laughs as she waves at the array of house plants again.
“That would make for some cute drink names,” I say. “Belladonna. Wolfsbane. Foxglove.”
“Aren’t all of those deadly flowers?” She raises a brow at me. “Am I opening a bar or a mortuary?”
“Well, you wouldn’t actually be poisoning people. Besides, wolfsbane’s only deadly to werewolves, right?” I roll my eyes. “You’re the one with the apothecary theme. I was just trying to give you some inspiration.”
“You do know apothecaries are meant for healing , not killing, right?”
I give her a blithe look.
“We’ll workshop this later. Besides, we’re off topic.”
“Right.” I nod. “I take it Isaac didn’t like this idea?”
“He thought it would set our relationship back. We’d have to say goodbye to owning our own home, not that that was ever a dream of mine. I’d have no hope of starting a business if I couldn’t get a loan, and even then, there was always a chance it could fail. Plenty of new businesses do. He never outright said he didn’t believe I could do it, but…” She shrugs. “He didn’t have to. And maybe he’s right. I always thought I would’ve started it by now. Instead, I’m almost thirty and still working at the same bar I have since college.”
“There are no age limits on life achievements, you know,” I tell her. “Relationships aren’t supposed to hold you back. Your lives didn’t sync, but that was far from the only problem. You spent an awful lot of time with someone who rushed you into something you weren’t ready for, had no respect for what you do for a living, and let you do all the compromising rather than do any himself.”
“He’s not a bad guy,” she says. “Running my own bar is just a dream. It’s so wildly far out of my reach, it can’t even be called a goal. And I didn’t do nearly as much compromising as you think. Ask anyone. Ask my mom. It’s bad enough that I didn’t love him as much as he loved me. I had to go and break his heart in the most devastating way. I did that to him by being half in and half out for years.”
Her eyes are glassy, and I can’t help but think this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. She’s been holding so much of herself back, at least until now. This is why she doesn’t think she’s capable of love. She didn’t just lose Isaac when they broke up—she lost an entire group of friends. Her family doesn’t understand how smothered she felt by their expectations. It’s not that she doesn’t believe in love. She’s been made to believe she isn’t capable of it by other people. Because if she didn’t love Isaac the way she was supposed to, who could she possibly fall in love with?
“Sounds to me like you’re still trying to fill a role other people made for you,” I tell her. “You couldn’t fill the role of Isaac’s wife, so they made a new one for you.”
“And what role is that?” she asks, tired.
“Villain,” I say. “Incapable of love, romance, and serious relationships. And you’re letting them, aren’t you? You broke Isaac’s heart, and everyone convinced you that you’re a terrible person for it. That’s why you told me love isn’t for you, right? That idea didn’t come from you. It came from other people.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.”
The first tear falls, streaking down her cheek before stopping at her chin. The Woman in Waiting comes to mind, the singular tear track down one cheek, eyes shut in anguish. For the first time, I wonder what Krystal wrote for her commission essay for Natalia to have clocked her so well.
“Let’s talk about something else.” She clears her throat, wipes at her cheeks with the back of a hand. “Preferably not something so emotionally heavy.”
“Sure. Of course.” I nod. “What do you want to talk about?”
Her gaze settles on me. “You.”