The door to the bathroom crashed open and he felt a warm, comforting breath touch his neck. Then it was gone, as the door slammed shut and then - THUMP, THUMP, THUMP. She was putting all of her weight in her heels and he pitied the poor sap living downstairs. First he had to put up with the creaking, the groaning, the classic old rattling headboard, and now he had to deal with this.
The window rattled, and he didn't know if it was the spiteful winter wind - or just her.
She shot past him, storming behind the sofa he was slumped into and making straight for her room.
What had, of course, previously been their room, but was now her room.
He didn't bother looking back at her, and she didn't waste a word on him. Until she reached her door.
"Where are you going?"
"What?" He changed the channel, played dumb, made her work.
"You're wearing your good jeans. Are you going out?"
Now he turned, now he twisted and looked back at her. How should he look at her now? Should he enjoy the view, parts of her still sparkling with moisture from the shower, her perfect legs disappearing up into that short, fluffy robe (that he had bought for her)? He watched her towelling her hair for a moment, took in the hard, cold mask that both of them had been wearing for two weeks now, and didn't know what to feel.
"I have a date," he said. He turned back to face the TV.
"Jay, you knew I had a date tonight." On the TV a group of people with very strange hairstyles were gathered around a map of some peninsular. The tall thin window showed the faint interference of a light snow playing against the rich purple of the evening sky. It rattled again. Their apartment was drafty; in winter they cranked the heating up and kept it up.
"Well, yes. But what the hell, Nat?" He didn't turn, but his shoulders rose and tensed. "What the hell does that have to do with anything?"
"It's pathetic - this trying to one-up me. Pathetic, Jay."
He had a retort: it was on his lips, loaded and ready to fire, but he heard the bedroom door slam first. Maybe that was the problem; both of them always had a response to every insult, every allegation, every slur. Sometimes they had to lie, sometimes they had to get really nasty to get their retaliation off the ground but so what? It was all about getting the last word in.
The window rattled and he looked at it, then through it, for a long time. After a while he noticed that the very corner of his face was being reflected back at him, and that the sour, hard mask had yet to come off. He took his feet off the table and leaned forwards, shoulders still hunched as he rubbed his face trying to loosen it up.
If he was perfectly honest with himself (and he was trying to be, he really was) he wasn't all that interested in going on a date tonight. Every day was a pain in the goddamned ass, every conversation was a battle, and he just wanted to get away and spend some time not thinking about him and Nat.
Everyone he knew, knew what was going on between him and Nat, and that, apparently, was all they wanted to talk about. He should move out, they told him, and he knew he should. But every time he reached this rational, noble conclusion, he thought about all the shit he'd sacrificed for her over the years and thought - well, why should I be the one to move out?
He realised that she was having exactly the same conversations with her friends, going through exactly the same process, and that kept them - two weeks after the spectacular break-up - still living in the same, small, shitty one bedroom apartment.
They made it work by working as long and as hard as possible, lingering and malingering in bars and coffee shops, and also by sheer dint of their own bitter, self-entitled wills. Is it a universal truth that people who are so well matched when it all starts out end up locked into this kind of savage hate-pact?
Well, neither of their dates that night were going to be having fun, he thought with sadly characteristic schadenfreude.
He looked up. It was Korea they were talking about on TV. Well, in the end he had lost. He'd booked a ticket back where he came from, and he'd mailed his mother two days ago that he'd be going back for a while. Nat would gloat, but he... well, hopefully this was the start of him learning. Life lessons and all that horrible, horrible Hollywood bullshit.
For a moment he forgot the girl's name, and he almost smiled at what an asshole he was. Then again, who was the bigger jerk: him, or his buddy whose friend she was? Eddie was the one who was setting her up; a lamb for the emotional slaughter that he must know was going to ensue. It was nice of him to try and break Jay out of his funk but... poor girl. She wasn't going to know what hit her.
The door opened behind him with a click. Not a bang, a click. He still didn't bother turning.
"Who is she?"
"Friend of a friend of Eddie's." He didn't turn because the mask had come off and he didn't want her to see how fucking tired he was.
"A friend of Sally's?"
"I don't know," and he couldn't stop the sigh escaping this time, "he asked me to take her out."
There was a pause. That was okay, he was getting very good at awkward pauses. You just turned your feelings off for the duration of each one, and back on again when the conversation restarted and the knives came out.
"Don't you want to know about mine?"
"Not really," every time he spoke he had to analyse his intonation to make sure it wouldn't spark her off in some way. Was it because he couldn't take the rant, or because he actually, still, didn't want to hurt her? Was she doing the same thing?
"I-" she started, and instantly stopped. He tried not to think of anything. When you laid out the issues that they'd had, the cuts that had separated them, it was all bullshit. But they'd been together so long that the bullshit had gained weight. It was some kind of quantum momentum of relationships deal that was beyond him. He tried to understand what they were saying about Korea on the TV.
"Jay, I'm going back to my Mom's place next week." Now he turned, and he didn't bother with the mask. He saw that she wasn't wearing hers either. "Just for a week or so, but..."
"Me too," he butted in. He felt that this time she wouldn't snarl and spit and curse him for it.
"Oh!" That was genuine surprise. "Well, I just thought that, y'know..." She paused and he realised she was wearing that crazy plaid mini-dress thing. His mind went in three different directions at once - 'she knows I love that dress, what an absolute...' - 'she is going to freeze her perky little ass off out there...' - 'God, I remember sliding my hands up those hips, lifting that short-short dress off her ass, slipping my fingers into her panties and dragging them down off her butt in the alley behind that house party...'
"I thought we could mail and... sort out who should move out after a little time apart." The money. The fact that they had both paid the rent this month had seemed like such an important point at which to draw a line. Of course, neither of them had given a crap really. And of course he only realised that now.
"To be honest, Nat," her hair - sandy, dirty blonde, still wet but brushed straight - fell across her right eye. She pushed it back as she listened, "I was thinking of moving out already."
"Oh!" softer, but surprised once again. "Me too," she said with what might have been the first half smile to pass between them since it happened.
She took a step towards him, hesitated, then made that final, dramatic commitment to sit down with him. She lowered herself carefully (she had to be careful in that dress) into the armchair. The TV was already low, but he turned it down even more, dropped the handset onto the table that still afforded each of them some kind of barrier - some kind of protection.
"Well," he pulled his lips into what he hoped was a rueful smile, not completely devoid of warmth, "that's that then."
"You're going all the way back East?" A smart-ass retort about that being where his mother lived appeared, spring-loaded, on his tongue. He kept his mouth shut and nodded. "Wow."
"I booked a ticket yesterday, but just... email me or whatever and we can talk. If you want to," he added hurriedly. They were taking it in turns it seemed, this time she nodded silently.
He was trying his best to look at her, to pay attention to her, but also not to pay her too much attention, and certainly not to run his eyes too blatantly up her slim legs. He was absolutely doing his best not to trace them and follow them up under that thin pink and blue fabric, where she had her thighs demurely pressed together and turned away from him. As if there was much demure about that fucking dress. At least she hadn't started on the buttons up at the top that allowed the dress - little more than a stretched work-shirt - to gape open, to give in to the pressure from her small, firm breasts and allow the freckled skin of her chest to breathe.
Irritation bubbled up inside him that she would put him in this situation of not knowing where to look, but he quashed it, pushed it down. She wasn't doing it to him, it was just happening.
"You need..." she started, stopped, "You look tired, Jay." He almost laughed, and let his head hang down again.
"Could be the sleeping on the couch." Everything he said could be seen as an attack he realised, but she didn't seem to be in the mood to pick a fight either.
