Chapter 1 #2
Milo still wore the button-down shirts and bow ties that I’d always thought made him look adorably like a third grade math teacher.
That was one of the first things I noticed.
Then, as my gaze raked hungrily over him as if I hadn’t seen him in years instead of just a couple months, I saw dozens of other little things that made my heart squeeze inside my chest.
Like the slightly disheveled hair that I used to love running my fingers through.
And the deep tan across the bridge of his nose and the peek of gold-framed glasses in his shirt pocket.
That one little freckle right where his eyes crinkled when he laughed.
The ink stains on his pale blue cuffs from his collection of fountain pens.
In the months since our breakup, I had almost convinced myself that the next time I saw him, he would be looking haggard and haunted, with dark circles under his eyes and the realization that life without me was meaningless written all over his face.
How was it fair that he looked exactly the same as always when I felt like I’d gone through a wringer and come out all twisted and inside out?
“Mariel.” My name popped out of his mouth like he was as surprised as I was.
“Milo, hi. What…” I cleared my throat. “What brings you to the neighborhood?”
“I have a meeting in that building,” he said, gesturing vaguely to the large pane of glass separating us from the sidewalk. Or, I guess, at one of the buildings beyond it.
I didn’t exactly care, because I had just been blinded by the sunshine glinting off his wedding ring, a brief flash of light that felt like a knife to the guts. To my credit, I didn’t hyperventilate. Mostly because I couldn’t quite seem to catch my breath.
“I had a break in between classes,” Milo continued.
“Classes?” I echoed, clutching the paperback for all I was worth.
“I got into the doctoral program at Columbia.”
“Oh, that’s—good for you, congrats.” My smile could not have been more strained if I’d pulled an actual muscle on my cheek.
“I’m actually taking a summer intensive,” he told me, without the slightest trace of awkwardness. “You remember that course on Byzantine aesthetics I used to talk about?”
Vividly. Milo had finished his master’s in Classics the spring before. I couldn’t count the number of times I had listened to him fret over his PhD applications, or geek out over that one course taught by the professor he wanted to TA for.
“Yeah, sure,” I replied, aiming for enthusiastic and falling not just short, but flat on my face. “Oh wow, that’s great that you got in. Love that for you.”
At that point in my life, I had given up on the idea that I could ever be a cool, calm, collected ice queen. Did I have to actually babble, though?
Milo rested a hand on my table. The hand with the wedding ring, because of course it was. “Listen, Mariel, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
That short phrase was all it took for my stomach to begin sinking. I probably would have up and run away if I hadn’t been hemmed in by overly caffeinated people on all sides. I held up a hand so forcefully that if I’d been directing traffic, cars would have been screeching to a halt around me.
Not Milo. You’d think someone that smart would find it impossible to be so completely oblivious to the utter panic flashing on his ex’s face. I didn’t want to hear about him getting married. Or his wife. Or how they were probably living in perfect bliss.
He was earnestly pushing his hair off his forehead and leaning even closer. “I know we didn’t exactly end on a good note, and I know that’s entirely on me.”
Understatement of the millennium, seeing as the reason we were no longer together was because the previous fall, he had pretended to move to Greece to work on a dig when all along he had been in Jersey City with another woman.
Not just that—he’d gone radio silent for weeks, ignoring every single one of my texts and calls so that I spiraled so hard that Yaz had to talk me out of booking a flight to Athens because I was convinced that something terrible had happened.
Mostly because I wouldn’t have been able to find him if I’d gone, since I didn’t have an address for him—oh, and also, he wasn’t there.
I was no stranger to being ghosted, but what Milo had done was so much worse.
He’d made plans for the future, knowing the whole time that he was with someone else.
He’d cooked for me and bought me flowers and trekked all over the city helping me find whatever unhinged object my interior designer boss wanted for one of her clients.
He’d made me believe that what we had was real.
Apparently oblivious to all the warning signs flashing over my face, Milo continued, “I could not be more sorry about how things worked out and I’ve been wanting to apologize—”
“Oh, fuck off,” I snapped, barely noticing the flash of motion as about half the people in line at the counter turned to look at us.
“You lied to my face every day for weeks about being in Europe. Then you disappeared on me. And when I finally confronted you about it, you chose to tell me that it was my fault you lied in the first place. You kept telling me I took up too much space, just to make me feel small. I’m so done with you. ”
“Mariel,” he began, and just the way he said my name, with that air of long-suffering patience, made something in me snap. “You have every right to—”
“No,” I said, scrabbling for my things and starting to stuff them haphazardly into my purse.
Even my muffin. Thankfully, I wasn’t so far gone that I tried to do the same thing with my iced matcha but, you know, it was a close call.
“You don’t get to make yourself feel like some kind of good guy by shooting your apology all over my face when I was miserable for weeks thanks to you being the worst kind of garbage human.
So, yes. Fuck you, fuck your I’m so sorry things didn’t work out, and fuck you ever feeling anything but shitty about the way you treated me. ”
My words were met with a round of applause from what felt like everyone in the coffee shop.
I had daydreamed about a moment like this ever since I caught him and his girlfriend—his real girlfriend, which I clearly wasn’t—kissing with their hands linked at the opening of an exhibition on art from Ancient Greece.
Which I’d only gone to because I was so desperately worried about Milo that I was seeking out anything that reminded me of him.
It had been months of me fantasizing about telling him off to his face the way I hadn’t been able to back then.
And now that it was actually happening, I was horrified to feel the sting of tears behind my eyes.
I was still sitting down, and Milo was standing there next to me looking all solemn and brave and like he expected a medal for letting me yell at him in the middle of a crowded cafe.
It was laughable and unfair that I still knew him so well—knew he wasn’t going to push the apology, but he wasn’t going to slink back to his seat, either.
He was going to stand there and take whatever I flung at him, all the while feeling virtuous about letting me have my little tantrum.
So I finished shoving things into my bag, not caring that I was mashing the paperback into my muffin. And then I stood, intending to walk out without saying another word.
But I must have scraped back my chair too hard, because it toppled over. Right into the person who’d just started squeezing behind me with two full cup holders balanced on top of each other.
If this had happened in the romcom I was writing, all eight glasses of whipped cream?festooned iced coffee would have splashed all over the woman at the next table, setting off a chain reaction that would end with Milo getting a pie to the face.
Unfortunately, this was real life, and the only one who ended up covered in whipped cream—and coffee—was me.
“Goodbye, Milo,” I said, trying not to let the icy mess dribbling down my cleavage rob me of whatever dignity I had left. “Enjoy summer school.”