My skin prickled at his words and my breath caught. Then I tamped it all down because I was here to tell him goodbye. I was not here to imagine his lips moving up and down the skin of my neck, whispering words against me.
Before I could respond, he was sitting in his chair across from me, his long legs brushing mine under the table as he folded himself into the chair. Almost instantly, our waiter appeared and Nate was ordering a rum and coke. He looked at me expectantly and I found a way to make the words “Vodka Sour,” slip past my lips. When Nate gave me a wistful smile, I nearly crumbled. I was just seconds from grabbing my purse and leaving, unable to look at him, knowing it was the last time, thinking about everything that we’d never have together, when I heard his voice.
“Stop overthinking this, Lyn. We’re only having a drink. Ordering dinner. I’m not here to pressure you into anything or make you feel guilty or sad or angry. I just want to talk. And, this might be stepping past my boundaries, but I feel like you need someone to talk to. Let me be that person.”
I let out a breath and nodded, a little relieved that he hadn’t planned some big speech about going out with him again.
“Tell me about Devon.” He’d just delivered the most surprising and unexpected request in the history of fucked up relationships.
My eyes darted to meet with his and I must have looked panicked because he held up a hand, almost like he was trying to defend himself.
“I know you probably don’t want to talk about him with me, but I know everything you’re dealing with right now is centered around him.” He stopped talking as the waiter appeared, leaving both our drinks on the table. Before I could stop him, Nate ordered dinner for both of us, then sent the waiter on his way. He’d ordered us steaks, which normally I’d be excited for, but I didn’t feel like eating. As the waiter walked away, Nate reached his hand over the table and gently wrapped it around mine. “It’s okay to tell me about it all, Lyn. If you keep it all bottled up, it’ll just eat you from the inside out.”
Is that what’s been happening to me for the last nine years? I’d been slowly hollowing out? That seemed like an apt description. How much of me could there possibly be left? How much longer could I live like this before I disintegrated entirely?
“Start from the beginning,” he said softly, with so much kindness I wanted to cry. He was so good.
I took a deep breath and decided to give him exactly what he wanted. “I met Devon my freshman year of college. Some guy dumped a soda down my shirt and Devon gave me the shirt off his back. Literally. He was nice and funny and sweet, and when I walked away from him, I was smitten. I looked for him everywhere for the next few weeks. Walked through the same café where we’d first met, hung out in coffee shops, casually asked my friends if they knew who he was. I was consumed with him. I wondered who he was, what he was going to school for, if he had a girlfriend. He became almost mythical to me. Like some magical college-boy apparition.” I stopped and lifted my glass to my lips, needing both the liquid courage and to wet my mouth for the speech I was about to deliver.
“I had nearly gotten to the point where I didn’t believe he actually existed, until one day my best friend introduced me to her new boyfriend, and it was him.”
“Ouch,” Nate said just before sipping his drink. He didn’t seem put off by the beginning of my story, didn’t seem to mind too much that I was telling him about my infatuation with another man, so I continued, feeling like I was already a little lighter after letting some of the words out.
I went on to tell him everything. Every single detail I could recall. We ate. We drank. He listened attentively, almost raptly, asking questions when I left out something he couldn’t piece together, nodding and sincerely paying attention to my crazy story.
“One night, at Liv and Devon’s rehearsal dinner,” I said, trying to gather the courage to tell him one of the most shameful parts of my past, “Elliot proposed to me.” I inhaled, and then took another sip of my drink, despondent to see the glass was empty. Nate raised his hand and gestured to the waiter that we needed another round. I smiled at him, my head a little light and fuzzy from the alcohol, but not lit enough that I wasn’t in control. I knew, even then, that Nate was giving me a gift.
“I said yes, but I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have given him that hope. I just didn’t know how to tell him no in front of the entire dinner party. However, even though I might have had the best intentions, what I did the next day was even worse.” I felt the tears welling in my eyes, the sharp pinching in the back of my throat, and I knew tears were imminent. I dropped my head into my hands and tried to keep the tears at bay. I didn’t want to cry in a restaurant in front of Nate. I’d cried so much in the past few weeks and months, crying should have felt unremarkable and unsatisfying to me, shouldn’t have been the release it was. I should have been immune to crying by that point. But I wasn’t. I was still on the verge of tears and knew the release would feel like a weight lifting off me. Problems weren’t solved by crying, but sometimes the only thing to make you feel better was to let the cathartic tears fall and the sobs break free.
“I watched Devon marry Olivia, lost my shit, and ended the engagement in a bathroom right after the ceremony,” I sobbed the words out, not even trying to maintain any kind of façade of composure. Nate had given me free rein to open up to him, and for better or worse, my floodgate was officially wide open. He let me cry, let me weep quietly, and when I looked back up at him I didn’t get the look of contempt I was expecting. I didn’t wilt under his stare of disdain. Instead, he was looking at me with calm compassion. He looked as though he wanted to wrap his arms around me, but didn’t want to frighten me away.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’ve never told anyone about that before. It was, uh, a little overwhelming.” I reached for my purse, grabbing a tissue, and blotted my face.
“So, you’ve spent the last nine years in love with your best friend’s husband?”
“Give or take a year, yeah.” I nodded and pushed back the tears. Hearing someone else say the words, having someone else acknowledge everything I had been dealing with was a heavy feeling. And the fact that he said the words without judgement, made it that much more difficult to hear. I wanted him to be disgusted with me, to be angry, to tell me that I deserved all the unhappiness I was feeling. I wanted him to help with the hollowing-out process. I nearly handed him a proverbial shovel and said, ‘Here, dig out every good thing I have inside of me, every happy memory, every moment of contentment, and get it out. Then, bury me under it, so all that’s left is a shell of a shitty person, buried underneath everything she ruined.’
“That sounds terrible,” he said sincerely. And it was then I was convinced that Nate couldn’t be a real person. He simply couldn’t be that perfect.
“It was terrible,” I said through a sniffle, and I caught the tiniest hint of a crooked smile pull up on one side of his mouth, but he pushed it back. “But then, the most terrible thing of all happened.”
“She died,” he said with a nod. I frowned, unable to stop them, more tears spilled. Nate got up, moved his chair so he was next to me, and then let me cry on his shoulder as I wept for my friend. I’d not had one person let me cry for her. I’d helped so many other people deal with her death, but no one had ever just wrapped their arms around me and let me mourn her, my best friend.
“Olivia died and we all just ended up in this really weird state of limbo. I stepped in to help because that was the one thing she’d asked me to do. I helped him because it’s what I thought she wanted. But the longer I was there, even before you came into the picture, the more wrong it felt.”