“Totally fucked.”
He pours my coffee first, adds two packets of Stevia and only a splash of half-and-half. Exactly how I like it. He pushes my mug across the counter.
“What’d you do last night?” I ask him. It’s a casual question, a standard conversation starter. But there’s a brief flicker of suspicion that passes across his face. He thinks I’m fishing. He thinks I’m asking, Where were you last night? Whom were you with?
I wasn’t, but now his reaction has me wondering.
“Nothing too exciting,” he says. “Worked late. Made spaghetti. Then, you know . . . my vigilante stuff. Mask, cape, gadgets, catching bad guys, fighting crime.”
“Right, right.”
“Then got some bodega snacks, watched the Cooking Channel and went to bed.”
“Combos and Oreos?”
“Famous Amos.”
“Close. I was close.”
“Yeah,” he says. He’s looking elsewhere. He seems particularly fascinated by a certain point on the ceiling.
“All right,” I say. “Well, I’m just going to be hanging today. So . . .”
“I’ll be out of your hair,” he says. He inhales deeply, squints into his coffee. He’s pondering something. “You want eggs? I was going to make eggs.”
“Fancy Cooking Channel eggs?”
“No,” he says. “Just regular eggs.”
“Then okay,” I say. “Sure.”
I sit at the table and watch him take the eggs out of the fridge, butter the skillet, break the eggs into a bowl, whisk them. We’ve had so many mornings identical to this one. The same silly banter, the streams of sunlight coming through the window creating the same lattice patterns across the kitchen floor.
I replay the conversation. Us sitting on opposite sides of the couch on a lazy, rainy afternoon in late April, a nineties sitcom muted on the TV, me hugging a pillow, him playing with the fringes on the throw blanket.
“I guess I just don’t feel the way I know I should,” he’d said. I honestly can’t even remember how marriage came up, which, in retrospect, is likely because I’d been bringing it up too much. Working it into conversations where it didn’t belong. Dropping hint after not-so-subtle hint. This one just happened to be the one too many.
“Oh,” I said. What was most shocking to me about that moment was that it wasn’t shocking at all. I didn’t know it was coming, so how had I known it was coming?
“I don’t want to have this conversation,” he said, pinching the skin at the bridge of his nose, like he always does when he’s upset. “I really don’t. But we can’t keep avoiding it.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ve been feeling, for a while, that we’re more like friends,” he said. “It’s just . . . do . . . do we love each other anymore?”
I couldn’t answer the question. Any words I could hope to speak drowned in my throat. Words like “yes” and “of course” and “always.”
“That came out wrong,” he said. “I meant, are we in love? Because I feel like the spark we used to have, it’s just fizzled. Over time. It fizzled. And now we’re basically roommates. Roommates who have sex, sometimes.”
The way he stressed the “sometimes.” It was decimating.
“Do you think we could work on it?” I asked, my voice anemic. “We could . . . I could try.”
He sighed. “It’s on me. I should have brought it up sooner. I was scared. I didn’t want to lose you. As a friend. You’re my best friend.”
Eventually, I said the only thing I could think to say. “You’re my best friend, too.”
“We’re good as friends,” he said. “That’s our dynamic. That’s how it’s been, for a long time. And I just think it’s for the best. We can’t keep pretending our relationship is something it’s not. We can’t force it anymore.”
I stuttered.
“And if we’re just friends, if we see what it’s like to just be friends, we’ll know,” he said. “We’ll know either way, right?”
I couldn’t stand the embarrassment of arguing. I couldn’t bring myself to beg for him to want me, to love me the way that I loved him. And I couldn’t risk losing him altogether. I had to keep him in my life, even if it was just as a friend. He was my world. I needed him. I still do.
I nodded, and that was the end.