Breakup for Two

One

Liem

Did I fuck up, or is this mild sense of impending doom a good thing?

She’s not going to say no. I’m pretty sure.

My beautiful soon-to-be-fiancé sits across from me, the streets of New York City sparkling behind her, the light from the strings of Edison bulbs above us casting an amber glow onto her hair and skin.

I can barely tear my eyes away from her, even when she’s doing something as benign as asking the waiter about cocktails.

“My name is Jeff, if you need anything else,” our waiter says. He takes the menus listing the freshly made pasta, expensive wine, and Natalie’s favorite dessert—all of which we ordered.

Natalie is my calm, my constant, my inspiration.

When she got her dream job here, about as far away from Seattle as you can get, there was never a question of whether she would accept or not.

She told me to stay, keep my job, that everything happens for a reason.

I watched her leave, then it dawned on me what she meant.

If I wanted to be with her, I needed to prove it.

I needed to lay everything on the line and show her that she is my priority.

So, I quit my job, booked the flight, and showed up on her doorstep with a diamond ring burning a hole in my suitcase. My grand gesture to show her I’m ready for forever to start today.

This restaurant would have been the perfect place to pop the question had I realized it would look like this. And before the drama started between the couple at the next table.

“You’re breaking up with me?” the woman shouts, her voice going higher with every word, gaining the attention of the rest of the surrounding tables.

Conversations end, ears pop open, drinks get sipped while waiting for the rest of the tea to spill. The patio is quiet enough to hear Pizza Rat gnawing on his slice. People are nosy as hell—myself included. Lucky for me, I can hide behind Natalie while I listen.

The woman’s eyes are wide and wild in response to the words her man speaks in hushed tones. Then she slams her hands onto the table and screams, “You fucked someone else?!”

An audible gasp leaves the crowd. Damn!

The man glances over his shoulder. We pretend we aren’t watching them like an episode of the newest viral dating show, ready to exchange opinions on social media the minute it’s over.

“Oh, people are watching? No, please. Tell me why I’m the one who should be embarrassed when you’re the one who stepped out. Short-dicked, lowlife, cheating-ass bitch.”

While she is ripping him a new hole, part of me feels bad for laughing.

“This is wild. Breaking up in public like that?” I whisper. My attention returns to Natalie. When I find her staring down at the table, brows knit, my heart races. “What’s wrong?”

She wets her lips, thinking hard about whatever words she plans to speak. When she lifts her head to look at me, I already know what she’s going to say before she says it. “Liem, I’m breaking up with you.”

Time stops for a moment while I decide if I heard her correctly. She’s kidding. Surely. A humorous take on the embarrassing situation happening with the couple nearby. When tears shimmer in her eyes, I change my mind.

“Wait, what?” I try to stop my impending doom. “You’re joking, right?”

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice quavering. “I didn’t want to do it this way, but I can’t keep lying to you.”

“Lying to me?” She’s a writer, not an actress. This is real.

“If you had given me a chance, I would have told you I didn’t want you to come here. I would have told you . . . that I’ve been happier since I’ve been away from you.”

In my peripheral vision, I catch the glances and slow sips shift in our direction. Fuck my whole life.

“You’re a good person, and it’s not that I don’t have love for you, but . . . damn it. How can you be as intelligent as you are and still do something this moronic?” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re young, I get that, but you have to be smarter than this,” she says. “I took a job across the country, didn’t ask you to come with me, and you really thought, ‘She must want me to go too! Let me surprise her by inviting myself to move in with her!’? That’s wild. You see that, right?”

What the fuck is happening right now? “. . . Yes?” No. “You’re breaking up with me? For real?”

“Yes. Five million percent yes.” She sighs as if relieved. “Let me be as clear as possible. I do not want to be in a relationship with you, Liem. I am done. Goodbye,” she says and leaves the table.

“Natalie! I live with you. How is this good—” I stop myself, realizing I’ve become the woman at the other table, dishing out my business to a patio of strangers like a hot appetizer.

My eyes threaten to fall out of my head while I stare at the empty chair. Blood rushing in my ears barely covers the sound of snickering coming from the mortifying number of witnesses surrounding me.

The waiter reappears, plates in hand. “Will your guest be returning?”

My wide eyes snap to him. Read the room, bro! “No, Jeff. I don’t believe she will.”

“Should I . . . box this up for you?”

“Yeah.” I try to sound calm while answering his fuckass question in a pinched voice. “That would be great, Jeff! Thanks!”

He nods and goes about his business. I glance around, watching people look away quickly. With tears in my eyes, I catch the gaze of the woman from before, feeling the karmic connection to the stranger I was laughing at not two minutes ago. My bad, girl.

I now realize this might be the worst that could happen.

~

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

I caught the waiter inside and paid for the 120-dollar meal at the bar, sniveling the whole time.

As if getting your heart broken isn’t bad enough, adding witnesses is a million times worse.

I want to shrivel up in the box with my pasta and cry myself to death, but sadly, I won’t fit.

Food in hand, I go outside, ready to embarrass myself in front of an Uber driver if it means I can get away from this scene. Do people use Uber in New York?

On the curb, the woman from the other table stands a few steps away, looking as miserable and embarrassed as I am.

“Um . . . hey,” I greet her.

She glances my way with a pitiful face, her eyes red with black smudges around them. When she realizes who I am, her scowl calms ever so slightly. “Hey,” she huffs, seemingly still pissed.

I don’t blame her. I want to run back to the West Coast on foot or crawl into the closest sewer drain and sacrifice myself to Pennywise—something. Anything other than crying in public while trying to figure out how to hail a—

Shit. Why am I waiting for a cab when I have nowhere to go but Natalie’s apartment? My head hurts too much to think straight.

“Is there a place nearby where I can get a room for the night?” I ask.

“I’m not from here.”

“Me either. I mean, obviously. I don’t know why I said that.” At some point, sense will return to me, and I will be able to process basic information like the highly educated adult I am. Until then, I’ll keep trying to see the search results on my phone through my tears.

“You took your food?” the woman asks with a hint of humor.

“Yeah.” What was I thinking? “It’s supposed to be some of the best in the city so . . . crying with pasta sounded better than crying on an empty stomach.” My hiccup was supposed to be a laugh. Luckily, she laughs for me.

Her head drops, her shoulders shaking with a giggle that she tries to hide. When she lifts her head again, I can’t tell if she’s laughing, crying, or both.

A cab pulls up to the curb next to the woman, just like in the movies. She opens the door but stops before climbing in, her finger tapping on the door while she considers for a moment.

She turns back to me. “I’ve been staying in a hotel that my . . .

Anyway, you can ride with me and see if they have any rooms there,” she offers. “If they don’t, at least there’s a bar where we can get drunk.”

We? Her small gesture feels like she threw me a life jacket. I don’t deserve it.

“You just want my pasta.” Another talent of mine, cracking jokes at the worst time.

She chuckles, to my relief. “I could also use some pasta.”

There should be a moment where I consider whether she might kidnap or murder me, but I don’t see how either would make my night much worse. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

I climb in after her, ignoring the flinch from the driver when he sees our faces. We must look like a couple that broke up with each other rather than two halves of a public spectacle paired up in the back seat. We’re sad little guppies in the same fucked-up pond.

“What’s your name?” I ask as if it matters.

“Bri,” she says. Somehow, she looks like a Bri. Tight curls, dark eyes, and warm brown skin. That gives B-name vibes, I guess. “What’s yours?”

“Liem. It’s inconvenient but nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

~

Off the lobby, the hotel bar is just as lux as the restaurant we came from.

Dim lighting shines from a massive chandelier over a room full of people in business attire, pajamas, and everything in between.

Bri and I are tucked into a booth in the corner, secluded enough to let us inhale the pasta and cry without elongating our list of witnesses.

No part of this night feels real. I lost the plot, and I can’t figure out where.

I understand I look too logically at situations and am prone to misinterpreting the nuance of emotion, but I love Natalie.

Yes, she is hyper independent and not traditionally affectionate, but we were happy, right?

No one stays together for two years if they aren’t actually together, right?

Wanting to marry the person you admire and love the most isn’t weird, right?

And now what I’m doing? I’m a clingy idiot, I just got dumped, and I want to die a little, but at least I have pasta?

To be fair, this pasta is gas. I’m questioning my decision to share it.

“Want to switch?” Bri asks. I must have been staring at her box of bucatini absent-mindedly. “It’s yours anyway.”

“Was I eye-fucking it?”

“Yes.” She laughs.

We trade boxes without thinking about germs. Health and longevity are low on my list of desires right now.

“This pasta is amazing,” she says, pretending she hasn’t started crying again. The reminder makes my vision cloud again.

“It really is.”

We both wipe our cheeks rather than our mouths. When we lock eyes again, I realize how awkward it is to be crying while eating with a stranger. It’s like a blind date with trauma—though I feel closer to her than to anyone else in this city.

She breaks eye contact to ask the waiter for another bottle of wine. While I’m no sommelier, I’m cultured enough to identify that this bottle doesn’t sell for house wine prices.

“This is expensive. You don’t have to—”

“My ex put me up in this hotel and left his credit card on file for incidentals,” she says. “I will be getting anything and everything I can charge to the room.”

Being complicit in vengeance is a mood booster. “Free alcohol? My night just got a lot better,” I muse.

“Really? Because getting dumped in front of forty strangers was the best part of my evening.” Her sarcasm is as refreshing as the red blend she provides.

“Out of the two of us, you shouldn’t be the one embarrassed.

You ate him up,” I say. She brushes off my compliment with a grunt through a mouthful of fettuccine.

“I’m serious. My ex thinks I’m out of my mind for moving here to be close to her, and she doesn’t even know there’s an engagement ring in my suitcase. ”

She hums a laugh. “Love that for you, but my three-year anniversary is next week. I showed up to dinner thinking I was getting engaged tonight. And as everyone in hearing distance found out, he flew me out just to tell me he’s been cheating on me.”

“Amazing,” I say. “Sliding in with a one-up, I gave up my apartment, quit my job, and cashed out my entire 401k to buy the ring, so not only do I not have a fiancé, I’m also unemployed and effectively homeless.”

“Oh my god, same! Except I never had a 401k because my life was in shambles even before I had the joy of having a public crashout, and I’m definitely homeless because the cheating ex I cussed out is my landlord.”

Her dark sense of humor is much appreciated. “Fine, you win. Damn.”

“Thank you.”

We clink glasses, sipping until we both break and start laughing. Maybe we’re tipsier than I thought, but the situation I find myself in is comical, when you think about it.

“I was going to propose to a woman who doesn’t even like me.” Saying it aloud, I have to laugh. “I have three degrees, and I couldn’t tell I was getting dumped until it happened twice.”

Bri cackles alongside me. She taps my arm with a hand until she can calm herself enough to talk. “My anniversary gift is that I have to get an STD test.”

“Oh my god. Fuck him.”

She gasps and smacks my arm. “Someone else already did!”

My stomach burns with uncontrollable laughter, Bri gripping my arm as if she’d tumble out of the booth otherwise. We laugh so loud the table next to us gets annoyed.

Trying to shush ourselves, we drink again. In the quiet, the “laugh or you’ll cry” part comes to fruition, both of us on the verge of tears again.

“Yeah, so . . . more wine?” I ask.

Bri thrusts her glass toward me. “Yep!”

We give up on eating and resign ourselves to moving from tipsy to drunk with the help of another glass. Then another bottle.

Then the night really gets messy.