Fiction Friday (3)

 

‘No,’ she sighed. ‘It’s not. We can’t stay together, Charlie.’

My stomach bottomed out, ending up somewhere in my socks. I kept my eyes on her as she spoke, somehow willing her to stuff the words back into her mouth so that they simply hadn’t been said. I opened my own mouth then closed it again. I had no idea what to say.

It occurred to me that I had never been the one sat here, the one that was being dumped, it was always me who was doing the dumping or the relationship had simply petered out to nothing and the chat at the end was painless. Or at least that was how I had always imagined it. Now, sitting here, the woman I loved sat in front of me, feet away but a million miles and I felt sick with the pain. A panicky, jittery sick.

‘Charlie, if we were just a bit nearer in age,’ her eyes were wet with tears and I wanted to reach for her but her hands were out of sight and, for the first time, I couldn’t tell if she’d recoil from my touch.

I shook my head, words still failing me.

‘It isn’t that I don’t love you, I just can’t watch you not have kids, not have the life that you should have, with the right person for you. It’s all right now, but think in ten years, you’ll be thirty three, in fifteen, I can’t even think about it. Because you’ll regret it at some point. Regret me.’

I wasn’t someone who cried, never had been, I wasn’t an alpha male type either, but tears weren’t something that came easily to me. I felt like I could cry then, I also felt as if I wanted to leave, just walk for ten minutes, try to clear my head then come back to this. I stood up.

‘Where are you going?’ Emily asked, lifting herself slightly out of the chair. I gestured for her to sit back down and pointed vaguely to the bathroom. Once I got there, I sat on the toilet seat and tried to compose myself. There was surely a way to talk her round, the conversation we had had didn’t need to be the be all and end all. I stood up and opened the door.

Emily was quietly crying in the armchair and I went to her, crouching in front of her. She reached down for me and I stood into her arms, we hugged for a time, it could have been seconds or minutes, I really couldn’t have told you. I felt her shoulders relax and I pulled back slightly. She touched her fingertips to my face.

‘I really wish that I could have met you, back then, when this could have been something amazing.’

‘It was,’ it was the first words that I had managed and they came out almost as a croak. I coughed a little. ‘It was amazing.’

She smiled, a small, intensely sad smile and nodded.

‘Just think about it,’ I was trying to keep the desperation out of my voice, not entirely convinced that I was succeeding. ‘Have a few days, I’ll go and you-‘

‘No, Charlie,’ she leant forward and kissed me very gently on the lips. ‘It’s all I’ve thought about for the last few days. For the last month.’

I touched my fingers to my lips and sat back on the floor, my hands on my knees. Her face was stained with tears, her mascara smudged and her eyes red, but she was beautiful. I felt utterly empty.