Read Online Table for Two by Marla Miniano - Free Book Online Page A

everything you’ve put me through, I
still cannot bring myself to hurt you. “Sorry,” I mutter. You shake your head
again, this time to brush off my apology.
    “Anyway, I talked to Eric last
night,” you say. “He’s visiting for a couple of weeks, for his sister’s
eighteenth birthday. I explained everything to him. I think he can forgive me.”
    “Who’s Eric?”
    “My ex-boyfriend.”
    “Oh.”
    You stare at me. “ Oh ? What does that mean?”
      “I thought...” I thought what? I thought we were only speaking
about it in the third person to be cute? I thought you were trying to get back
together with me? I thought you were meeting up with me because you saw me last
night and realized you’ve wanted me all this time?
    Eric, the “brand-new boyfriend”
from last night, was Swimming Champ, the ex who flew off to Switzerland to get
away from you and your commitment issues, the one who wanted to marry you, the
one you were heartbroken over when you first met me, the one I supposedly
deleted out of the picture with the touch of a button. That’s why he seemed
vaguely familiar.
    You look even more embarrassed
than I feel. “Lucas, come on. I wasn’t leading you on. I said I made a mistake
with my ex . You and I, we were never... we were always just
friends.”
    “You think?” I snarl. I wish I
weren’t so angry with you. I wish I could just shake my head and shake you out
of my life.
    You take my hand and my heart
leaps to my throat. You tell me, “I know you think that nobody else will ever
love me the way you can. I know you think you can love me so much more than he
does.” I don’t like where this is going. I want to stop you from talking. You
don’t really believe what you’re saying, do you? You know better, or at least
you should. “But we’ve built a life together. I started loving him in high
school, and I don’t think I ever stopped.”
    But he
was gone for months. He let you go. Doesn’t that discount everything else?
    “I don’t want to start over from
scratch,” you say. This registers in my mind as, “I don’t want to start over
with you.”
    “Just because he’s here doesn’t
mean he came back for you,” I say. I hope this stings, I hope this makes you
feel like you are dispensable and replaceable, unless you exhaust yourself by
trying and trying and trying. I hope this makes you feel the way you make me
feel.
    “He might have,” you say. “We kept
in touch the whole time; I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d want to protect
me.” No, if I
had known, I probably would have wanted to protect myself. “I’m following him to Switzerland. We’ll see how it
goes from there. I’m here to say goodbye.”
    Goodbye is a strange
concept—if the person being left behind resents it and refuses to accept
it, is it still goodbye, or simply a departure? I know now why you left. It
wasn’t because of anything I said or did, or anything I didn’t say or didn’t
do. It wasn’t my fault; perhaps, if I succumb to my unfailing instinct to be
the bigger person, it wasn’t even yours, either. You left because I wasn’t a
part of your past or your future—I was only a part of your present, and
that wasn’t enough. You never saw me as anything else or anything more. You
left because you could. And you’re leaving because you can.
    I say, “I think you should go,”
and this comes as a surprise to you. Your fingers, still grasping mine,
carefully uncurl themselves until we are no longer touching. You nod, like you
can comprehend that this meeting is not about your disclosure about you and
Eric, but about me and this closure I am finally getting. You nod like you
understand completely, and I’d like to believe you do.
    As you stand up, I think, You are always finding
ways to let me down. I am left with
two empty cups and an empty chair and an empty silence—a silence that, if
I fill up at the right time and in the right way, could result in something
close to peace. You