Chapter 1
one
. . .
How many romantic comedies open with the protagonist stubbing her toe on a pile of boxes of her ex-boyfriend’s stuff?
The act—the terrible, awful, aching act—felt absurdly cliche, and yet here I was, living it.
For the third time this morning.
As I cursed under my breath, I wondered why, despite feeling like I’m living a cheesy romcom trope at present, my life was not as simple as a TV show. It was the moment in the episode where there would be a voiceover of the protagonist cursing in pain and making a snarky comment about it.
I muttered “fuck” under my breath and kicked the box a centimeter closer to the wall.
I glared down at the boxes, neatly labeled in black sharpie. Today they would be vacated from the hallway and I’d finally have the full width of my front entrance available. And, most importantly, my big toe would not be getting any more unwarranted abuse.
Once the blunt physical pain of the aforementioned toe stubbing subsided a wave of dull emotional pain would slam into me. That pain was always harder to shake off.
The grand finale of Nick and I played in my head like a rerun of an eighties sitcom late at night.
Sometimes I’d correct the lighting or camera angles.
There were different lines of dialogue that could have been said, funnier quips I could have brought up to have made myself seem as fleeting and careless as he was.
I wrote, and rewrote the way things unfolded, but the ending was always the same.
If my relationship had been an actual TV show, there would be half a dozen fanfics where my story with Nick didn’t end that day.
The authors would make me turn around and open the door again and call after him, and he’d actually come back.
We’d have sex and make up and the story would end there.
The author would be satisfied with the “fixed” ending.
The readers would voraciously eat it up and fill the comments praising the writing and calling it the “true” ending to our story.
They would all be wrong.
The audience, try as they might, doesn’t always understand characters and their motivations. When the fanfiction writers diverge from the canon plot, there are always pieces of the characters left behind.
There was nothing that could be fixed between Nick and I, and definitely not in a few thousand words.
As I watched dust particles sparkle in the sunbeams streaming through my windows, I considered if I actually wanted to be in one of those fanfics instead of the stark reality I found myself in.
Life would be remarkably simple if I existed as a two dimensional character in a private browser on a phone screen late at night.
Nick’s and my entire six year long relationship was mired in apathy.
I had wasted months throwing buckets of water out of this sinking ship.
This existence of ours that I’d constantly tried to romanticize had been completely devoid of any true romance.
I let my life happen around me hoping for sparks, just once.
I was trying to build a fire underwater.
I’d still hung on with a glimmer of hope that my own emotions were an overreaction. I gaslit myself into thinking there was something there. Magic, maybe? Now, at the end of all of it, I felt pathetic.
I was mad at how easy it had felt in my rose-colored haze. I mourned a love that didn’t feel like a challenge, because I didn’t let myself think too hard about our relationship.
Even now, two weeks removed from the final fight we had, I reminisced on him with a sweet nostalgia. There was a shiny gloss over everything from the last six years.
I loved how much of a “Masshole” Nick was, how he would pretend to get mad when I drunkenly booed at Red Sox games, how we’d hold hands with one another standing on the platform waiting for the Red Line to take us home.
For every stolen kiss on the T, there was a night spent ignored, and for every laugh, there were passive aggressive words volleyed over the dinner table.
I conditioned myself into focusing on these bad parts, rather than missing the little that was good. My brain had a fictional spray bottle of water it would squirt every time my thoughts wandered.
Be cool. Be detached. Be like him. I’d remind myself in the shower, on the train, in bed. Like a magic spell, it worked. I didn’t care anymore.
After two weeks of relishing in not giving a fuck, I finally had to admit that it hurt. Not in a soul shredding destructive way, but in an achy strained way, like arthritic bones twisting and warping.
The end had been inevitable.
I’d been anticipating it with a bitter-tasting apathy. A six year relationship could grow stale, I knew that. In a halfhearted attempt to keep us from barreling into the ground of mere coexistence, I had tried to force proximity and connection in hopes it would turn into love.
Our entire final season felt like a compilation of me draining everything I had into our relationship.
Why had I tried so hard to resuscitate something that had been dead for so long there were maggots boring holes into its skin?
On day three of separation, when I was fresh in my “not giving a fuck” phase, Nick reached out.
He wrote a half-assed apology for his actions and begged to come back.
It was satisfying to leave him on read for two more days while I changed the locks and texted the neighbors and landlord to tell me if he showed up.
Another text showed up from him. He apologized again, more desperate this time. After getting my continued cold shoulder he finally admitted over a lengthy block of text he had in fact been seeing someone else—a coworker who he hit it off with at a work happy hour two fucking years ago.
The news had sent a searing anger throughout every one of my nerve endings, coupled with a sick satisfaction that I was right all along. I filled the following two weeks by packing up his things neatly into boxes and stacking them by the door like a Jenga tower of a failed relationship.
I overestimated the number of boxes needed to scrape Nick’s existence from the apartment, a stack of unused boxes stood nearly as tall as the ones I used. It was painfully obvious that he was a guest, not only in the apartment, but in my entire life.
Today, he was set to make his less-than-triumphant return. I paced by my bay window, watching for his black Ford Bronco on the street.
A rumbling engine sliced through the quiet residential neighborhood, and I preemptively unlocked the front door. I watched him hop out of his driver seat and amble down the street, balancing a drink tray and bag from MokaMolé, our favorite coffee spot a few blocks over.
“Hi,” I said as I swung the door open. He stood stiffly on the front porch. “Come on in.” I invited him inside as if he was a dowdy vampire who needed permission to cross the threshold. He slumped inside and set down his modest peace offering.
“Uh, hey,” he said flatly. His eyes darted over at the packed and labeled boxes. Nick was sporting a two-day beard and rumpled pants. Something about his face looked pinched and weathered, akin to a Halloween mask that had been left in a basement for too long.
Was he always this ugly? I thought as I welcomed him inside.
He looked like he’d aged a decade in the few weeks we’d been apart. When we first met, I considered him handsome in a “I’d fall in love if I saw you singing ‘Sweet Caroline’ at karaoke,” sort of way. A perfect portrait of a stereotypical South Boston Italian man in his twenties.
Nick’s brown eyes softened when they met mine, and he stiffly cleared his throat. “Damn even when you hate me you still manage to pack and organize all my shit.” His voice was partygirl raspy, an aftereffect of what I could only assume was another night spent at the bar.
“Cleaned too,” I smirked, relishing in how pitiful he seemed. “I did whatever dirty laundry you still had here.”
And I don’t hate you, but I do think you’re a useless, spineless, cheating piece of shit.
He settled into a chair as though he’d never sat in one before.
I crossed my legs on the couch. He looked around the living room like he was seeing it for the first time and hadn’t spent the last five years here.
We sat silently across from one another, a standoff between two worn out cowboys.
He kept glancing at my thighs on the cushions.
I had decided to mark the occasion by looking as “Princess Diana in her revenge dress” as possible and wore his favorite vintage Levi’s of mine. They were working.
“Well, I guess it’s over for us, huh.” Nick swung his legs back and forth and stared at the floor. He was acting more like a kid at the principal’s office than a grown man crawling back to his ex’s house.
A laugh burst out of me. “You cheated on me for two years, it seems like it has been over for a while.”
These two weeks had flown past with little sadness. Even when my two best friends, Andrea and Caroline, came over to help pack and provide moral support, all I did was assign them tasks to make the work go faster.
Now, looking at Nick and how small and pathetic he appeared, I saw the six years fly between us in a montage.
Appropriately cinematic, he and I met by bumping into one another at a coffee shop after we grabbed each other’s orders accidentally.
I was an intern at the Museum of Fine Arts and he was working part time at Fenway Park, so wonderfully Boston.
We hit it off instantly and sat down at the coffee shop for hours.
We both missed our shifts that day, but when you’re young and stupid, work takes a backseat to budding romance.
“Dani, I’m sorry. I know it means nothing now, but I regret it, truly.
” Nick had been raised in a household of sons that seldom addressed their emotions, either due to the rampant masculinity or lingering Catholic guilt.
Apologies were a foreign language to men like him.
This much was obvious from the way he squirmed in the seat of the vintage rust-colored accent chair.
He was looking at the ground, the wall, the couch, anything but me.
“Haven’t you been staying with her these two weeks?” The question didn’t need any real answer, I already knew he was. Caroline taught a yoga class in the Seaport neighborhood and saw him and the mystery woman walking into an overpriced luxury apartment building.
“Of course she lives in fucking Seaport,” Caroline had said when she called me immediately after the encounter.
Nick sat and slowly looked up, doe eyed. His sad brown eyes tugged at something that told my over-apologetic brain that I should be the one apologizing, but logic swooped in and stopped the sorry before it formed on my lips.
I’d done nothing but put up with Nick and all his accompanying nonsense for years on end, the cycle would finally end.
“Listen, Nick, I appreciate your gift of appeasement,” I rattled the ice in the latte, “and you apologizing, but what did you expect would happen here? You cheated on me for two years. You clearly never liked me—”
“I loved you, Dani. A lot,” he cut in.
“Loved me so much you had a side piece? Or did you trip and fall into her bed over and over?”
He sounded like an old car’s engine sputtering to life as he fumbled over his words.
Another laugh slipped out. I should’ve left his stuff on the curb. “Grab your shit and go,” I said.
“What?” He looked like a trout with his mouth hanging open like that.
In an act that took every muscle in my body, I stood up and gestured to the door. “Respectfully, fuck off forever,” I said slowly. “I’ll help put your stuff in your car.” I crossed the living room and picked up one of the boxes.
Nick jumped to his feet, knocking over his half-empty coffee in the process and cursing under his breath. “I don’t need your help,” he grumbled, “Kaitlyn is in the car, she can help.”
Kaitlyn. The other woman.
Something overtook me. I’d been momentarily possessed by the main character of a romcom, and she wanted her big showy dramatic moment.
“Well, in that case, I’ll make it even easier.” I opened the door with my free hand and tossed the box onto the porch. It tumbled down the steps onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing a couple going for a walk.
“Yo, what the fuck? Seriously?” Nick said as I grabbed another box and tossed that one too. Nick stood behind me, frozen as each box unceremoniously rolled off my front porch.
When my entryway was empty and his things were scattered like a waterfall of clothes, videogames, and ugly sports decor, I turned and grabbed Nick’s shoulders. His curly brown hair was still damp from a shower, and I could feel the heat radiating from his shoulders.
“Bye, Nick.” I cheerfully said as I guided him out the door and slammed and locked it in his face.
Two hundred or so pounds were lifted off my chest immediately. I could breathe again. Shouting came from outside, muffled through the door. I pressed myself against the wood and took deep inhales. It was over.
Then the realization hit. It was over. And it all came crashing on top of me, for the first time in two weeks.
The most I could manage to do was whip my phone out to text Andrea before the weight became too much to bear.
It’s officially over.
I need some time, but you and C can come by tonight.
Actually. Please come by tonight. I’m gonna need a distraction.