5. Collie
Collie
I was the world’s most boring twenty-seven-year-old. First, I’d fallen asleep in the middle of a loud, crowded bar. Then I’d followed that up with a massive nap. It was dark by the time I woke up.
I sat up and turned on my battery-powered chandelier. Kate was curled up at my side, and as I ran my hand over her soft fur, I told her, “You’re the sweetest cat ever.”
Apparently Miller had checked on me at some point. He’d left the shoe I’d used to prop open the door just inside the van. There was also a small ice chest with a sticky note on it that said “Eat Me.” That made me smile.
I took a peek inside the cooler and discovered a fancy sandwich on focaccia bread, along with a reusable ice pack to keep it fresh.
There was also a little container full of carrots and celery cut into tidy sticks, and a bottled organic smoothie, whose label boasted that it contained ten essential vitamins and minerals.
Miller definitely thought I was dying of malnutrition.
I put on my puffy Scooby Doo slippers, picked up the cooler, and climbed out of the van. Kate followed me.
The door connecting the garage to the rest of the house was held open by a wedge-shaped door stop.
When I climbed the stairs to the kitchen, I found a huge bowl of fruit on the island, along with a plastic clamshell container full of chocolate chip cookies.
I grabbed the cookies and a banana, because I was all about balance, and went to find Miller.
It turned out he was sitting cross-legged on the couch in his office, dressed in gray sweatpants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt, and he was playing a video game. When he saw me standing in the doorway, he said, “Hey. How’re you doing, Collie?”
“Good. Is it okay if I eat in here?”
“Of course. I do that all the time.”
“Great. In that case, I’ll be right back.” I heaped all the stuff I was holding onto the couch and hurried into the bathroom.
After I used the facilities and washed up, I collected my bounty again and sat next to him. The game he was playing was displayed across all three of his large monitors. A character dressed like a knight was standing in a field, and there was a partially destroyed castle in the background.
“That’s gorgeous,” I said, as I indicated the monitors. “Is it something you worked on?”
“No. This is Elden Ring, which was developed by an awesome studio in Tokyo. It’s one of my all-time favorite games. They brought in George R.R. Martin to write the worldbuilding and mythology, which I always thought was super cool.”
“The Game of Thrones guy?”
“Yup.”
“Nice. Don’t let me interrupt.”
“It’s fine,” he said, as he half-turned to look at me. “I’ve played all the way through several times. Now I’m just running around and collecting weapons.”
I sat cross-legged like he was and opened the cooler. “Thanks for packing my lunch,” I said. “Nobody’s done that for me since I was a kid.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
I unwrapped the sandwich and said, “This looks delicious.” The focaccia bread was spread with pesto, and inside it were slices of fresh mozzarella, some leafy greens, and two thick slabs of tomato.
When I started to pick off the tomato, Miller asked, “What are you doing?”
“Tomatoes are nasty. They’re only good once you turn them into ketchup, marinara, or pizza sauce.”
“That tomato is delicious. Try it.”
“No, thank you.”
“Just one taste. I promise it’s better than any tomato you’ve had before.”
I turned to him and asked, “Why is this so important to you?”
“Because I grew it.”
“Oh, okay, Farmer John.”
“I’m serious.”
“And where is this alleged tomato farm of yours?”
“It’s a single plant, and it’s in a pot on my back deck,” he said.
“I impulse-bought it when I was at the farmer’s market this past spring.
It was pathetic and spindly, so they’d put it on sale for fifty cents, and I felt sorry for it.
Then it got huge, but I only got my first ripe tomatoes from it this week.
The end of August seemed late to me, but it turns out we have a delayed growing season in San Francisco, because our summers are on the cool side.
Anyway, I’ve only gotten two ripe tomatoes so far, and that’s one of them. ”
“I literally have to eat it now. You told me its entire life story and guilted me into it.”
He grinned at me. “That’s what I was going for.”
I reassembled the sandwich and took a big bite.
It was so delicious that I was forced to admit, “You’re right.
It’s better than any tomato I’ve ever had.
” He looked so proud of himself that it made me chuckle.
“There’s no way I’m eating the celery sticks, though,” I told him.
“I’d just as soon gnaw on strips of cardboard. ”
“I didn’t grow those, so I couldn’t care less.”
“Feel free to go back to your game. I’ll watch.”
“You sure?”
“Yup.” He picked up his controller, and as the character started running toward the castle I asked, “What’s the objective of this game?”
“You know. Explore. Collect items. Fight. Don’t get killed.”
I asked, “What’s trying to kill you?” Then I shrieked as an undead skeleton thing jumped out at him. He turned to me with a raised brow, and I laughed and said, “That was scary.”
Miller exited out of the game and asked, “Which video games do you like?”
“We had a Centipede arcade game in the thrift shop. It was for sale, but no one wanted it because it was kind of beat up. Whenever it was slow, I’d play it. I could keep feeding it the same quarter, because it was missing the door to the coin collector.”
“Anything else?”
I thought about it and said, “A couple of times, I played a racing game at a pizza parlor in Boise. Oh, and one of those dancing games where you have to hit the right spots in time to the music. But that’s probably not the kind of video game you’re talking about.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much.” I finished my sandwich and reached for the cookies. “Is it okay that I raided your kitchen?”
“Of course. I had groceries delivered today with you in mind, so please help yourself to anything you want.”
I took a cookie and offered him one, which he declined. As I closed the container and set it aside, I said, “We never got a chance to debrief, since I fell asleep on you.”
“Debrief?”
“Yeah, you know. You had an unexpected ex sighting out in the wild. Do you want to talk about that?”
“Not really.”
“It stirred up some stuff, though. I saw your face when Daria told you Bruce was at the baseball game. You looked shocked, and kind of upset.” He didn’t say anything, so I asked, “Do you still love him?”
“No. He cured me of that by the way he dumped me.”
“How did that go down?”
“Like I said, it was two days before the wedding. His parents and brother had flown in from Connecticut, and we were supposed to meet them for brunch. I was getting ready when he walked into the bedroom and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ He went on to say he couldn’t marry me because he didn’t love me, and he wasn’t sure he ever really did.
He also felt the need to add that he didn’t particularly like me, either. ”
“That’s awful.”
“There’s more. He kept talking, and according to him, it was all my fault. I was too quiet, too introverted. I was boring, and I never wanted to go out. Well, no shit! I’ve always been like this. He knew that from day one.”
“He’s a dick.”
“I know. He also told me I was immature, and wasting my life with my job. The thing that kills me is that he encouraged me to quit programming, follow my passion, and go to art school! Why? So he could use it against me later?”
“It sounds like anything you said or did was going to be used against you, to try to justify his decision to bail.”
“That’s exactly right,” Miller said. “The bottom line was that he didn’t want to be with me.
But like you said, he felt like he needed reasons for that, so he started listing everything he thought was wrong with me.
This went on for a while, and by the time he was done, I felt like the most worthless piece of shit on the planet. ”
“I hope you told him to go fuck himself.”
“I wish I had. Instead, I told him very calmly that his timing sucked, and that it would have been nice to know all of this even a week sooner. Then I grabbed my phone and laptop, drove to the first hotel I could find, and checked in. I sent all our guests a group email telling them the wedding was off, and then I called and canceled each of our vendors, who reminded me that none of this was refundable on such short notice. After that, I put the do-not-disturb sign on the door, curled up in a ball under the covers, and spent most of the next three days crying.”
“I’m so sorry, Miller.”
“It’s okay. It actually helped to let it out.
Once my tears dried up, I cobbled together a new life for myself.
Fortunately I had the next two weeks off, because I was supposed to be on my honeymoon in Bali.
During that time, I liquidated my stock options and bought this flat.
Since I was paying cash, I managed a ten-day escrow, which was great.
By the time my ‘honeymoon’ was over, I’d moved in here and started the next chapter of my life. ”
I asked, “Did you ever really process what happened to you?”
“I tried to. I gave therapy a shot, but it seemed less helpful than the evenings I spent venting to Daria over countless bottles of wine.”
“I’m glad she was there for you.”
He murmured, “Me, too,” and fell silent for a while before saying, “I knew I’d run into him eventually, and I’d been wondering what it would feel like.
Now I know. There’s definitely still some residual anger, but today I got to show him that he didn’t break me, and that felt good.
I’m glad you were there, and that you pretended to be my boyfriend.
I really wanted to show him I’d moved on. ”
“But have you?”
Miller frowned and asked, “What do you mean?”