Page 55 of Come Back To Me

“What does that even mean?” I ask her.

“If you’re in a relationship with Ethan, you should feel comfortable enough telling him that you’re freaked.”

“If I tell him I’m freaked, he will get freaked,” I say.

“Then he’s not strong enough for you, is he?”

I give her a dirty look as she moves the subject on to something else. Harrods. She’s talking about Harrods. Posey is two extremes. She’s either too deep or too shallow. There is no grey area, no middle anything. It’s exhausting being with her because you’re either listening to asinine shit you don’t care about or she’s tearing your psychology apart and making you cry.

Who is really equipped to deal with someone else’s reality? It’s why we’re all so afraid to show ourselves, the vulnerability of being left once our truth is discovered. Also there is no way I’d date me. If I were a man I’d date another man. Men cry less than women.

Ethan and I are at a cafe one afternoon having lunch when he tells me the agent has left a voice message on his phone. We press our faces close together so we can listen at the same time, and he holds the phone between us. She informs us in her hoity-toity voice that we got the flat.

“Congratulations,” she says. “It will be a lovely place for you to begin your…er…lives together.”

“She sounds quite surprised,” I say to Ethan, pulling away to look at him.

He smirks and shushes me as she rattles off the address where we’re to drop off our deposit check. I laugh as soon as he sets down his phone.

“She thinks I’m a prostitute,” I say. “She hates that we got it!”

“Former, my love. You gave up that lifestyle to be with me. I can’t believe we got it. Fate, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” I say.

I reach for my glass of wine, already imagining where I’ll put my record player and my small collection of potted plants. Ethan is so happy he orders a bottle of champagne to celebrate. I hold my glass and smile, smile, smile.

I’m on autopilot; there are things to be done so I do them. I turn in my notice and carry home an armload of boxes to start packing. Ethan texts me pictures of dining tables and bookcases he finds online. I like white and he likes wood, so we settle in the middle and buy grey. I am euphoric, so into this shit. I imagine mornings in the spacious kitchen, cooking breakfast with a view of central London before me. I can almost smell the coffee brewing around my perfect life. The coffee brewing brings back a long suppressed memory and I move it away. Be gone, memory! I have a beautiful, centrally located flat!

I hum as I tape the boxes and wrap my things in newspaper. I don’t have much, mainly books and a few records I brought with me from the States. You’d think they’d remind me of David, but they don’t, they just remind me of me. Our move-in date isn’t for another four weeks, but I have to shave down my belongings, decide what comes with for my new, domesticated couples life. It’s not a marriage, but it’s close, the joining of belongings and lives, the determination to merge existence with another human being.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m on the verge of committing in a big way—a bigger way than I’ve done in ages—but I find David’s face in my mind. His smile, and his eyes, and his laugh, which always seemed to be directed at me. I’d liked being laughed at by David. He found me effortlessly amusing. I do what a woman in my position shouldn’t do, but often does anyway—I make comparisons between Ethan and David.

They are very different, but also very similar. Ethan’s playfulness and self-deprecating jokes remind me of David. But, Ethan is a businessman. He was a womanizer by choice, seeking out the ones he wanted to sleep with—or in my case—be in a relationship with. Women just fell all over David without him having to ask, and he dealt with it all in good humor. It almost bored him. He was committed to the music, and he’d been committed to me. Perhaps that was the highest praise I’d ever received. Ethan is more set in his ways, a contractual man who likes to have everything in order. David was an artist, there was no order. I love Ethan, but in a different way than I’d loved David. Perhaps it’s because I’m a different person than I was three years ago. As you age, your propensity to love changes and evolves with your personality. You gain in either selfishness or selflessness. What I do know is that I didn’t give David what I could have…I wasn’t able. And now we’ll never know what we might have been together.

That’s why I’m determined to make things work with Ethan. I won’t play games. I won’t flake. I will be good to him. And besides, I’ve never felt quite like this before. Ethan isn’t as good and isn’t as bad as the men I’ve dated before. He lies somewhere in the middle, which cushions all of my needs and gives me some assurance that I’ve broken free of all of my daddy issues. Who did I compare men to before David? There’s been a man I’ve run out on in every city, and yet none of them have been worth a fond remembrance.

I check the calendar for the date. My meeting with David is two weeks away. There’s a distant throb in my heart when I think about it, but I push it away and focus on here and now. My life is good. There is a doting boyfriend and a buffet of possibility spread out in front of me. I will not be arriving at my meeting with David as some lonesome girl, empty-handed and speckled with regret. I am moving forward. No, I am charging forward.

I accumulate wrongs. There’s never one big thing. One big thing could happen and I’d move right past it like it didn’t. But those little wrongs, my God, I collect those. I can look back now and see what a hoarder I’d been in my relationship with David. What we had was almost too good and I needed to sabotage it before it sabotaged itself. At least I kept control that way. Even as I pack my things into boxes readying myself to start a life with a new man, and even as I mentally prepare to see the man I left behind, I replay those last months in Seattle over and over.

In the weeks prior to our wedding, I rose up against David. He never had a chance and that’s the truth. I rose like a wave and he was a ship, and I just kept collecting wrongs and climbing higher. It’s sink or swim when you’re on that ship, and I don’t know if he would have fallen to the bottom of the ocean or showed off his breaststroke because I didn’t stay to see. He talked me down, most days—rationalized, assured, loved. He did everything the right way, but my wave was growing.

I showed up for the wedding, I give myself credit for that even if everyone else does not. I wore my dress with the splash of blood on its hem, and I held my flowers and walked down the aisle in a quaint little church. David was so beautiful he made my eyes hurt. He wore a blue velvet suit over a white shirt. His shoes were black snakeskin. Iridescent when you looked at them closely. I didn’t feel the trepidation until after we were married. Isn’t that something? With the rings securely on our fingers, the contract signed, we went to the hotel after the small party and just looked at each other. David liked to say “my wife.” He said it every chance he got. But, it felt like an accusation to me. How was I to be a wife? How was I to deal with not just one Petra, but thousands of Petras? I didn’t have the strength. And then, about four weeks into our wedded life, I started to wonder if he was up for the taking? When he realized who I was, wouldn’t he turn to another woman for comfort? I collected the looks Petra gave him, and I wondered if I married him to own the looks he gave in return.

“Why did you speak to her after the show? It should be me you speak to first, I’m your wife.”

“You posed for a picture with a group of girls and allowed them to press themselves too close…”

“When I told you I was sad, you hugged me instead of discussing the problem.”

“You went for a beer with the guys when I wanted you to come home.”

“You made love to me with your eyes closed, who were you thinking of?”

“You don’t care if I orgasm, you only care about yourself.”

“You wish I were more like your mother, soft and supportive.”

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