Page 37 of Kiss Me, Maybe

“So when you say you and Isaac skipped to the end, what you really meant was you skipped the honeymoon phase and went straight to the we’ve-been-together-for-years phase.”

“The honeymoon phase lasted approximately two days before we apparently became official.” She nods, handing me the drink she’s finished crafting. When I furrow my brows, she says, “That’s when Isaac says we became a couple, not that he asked me to be his girlfriend in any official capacity.”

“And that’s when all the excitement died?”

“I guess, but that wasn’t the issue either. It was all the smallways we failed to meet each other’s expectations. I didn’t like staying at his place when his roommates were home, but he didn’t like going to sleep alone the nights I worked, or being woken up in the middle of the night when I came in. I hated coming home to a sink full of dirty dishes he always promised to wash but never did. He hated that I was more concerned about the dishes in the sink than grateful for the meals he left in the fridge for me to heat up when I got hungry during the day. When it was clear our lives didn’t sync, my solution was to slow down—his was to move in together. I let him and everyone else convince me his idea was better. Slowing down would mean an eventual breakup, and neither of us wanted that.”

“That sounds… intense,” I say. “If you had your doubts about the relationship early on, why stick around for so long?”

“I might’ve had doubts, but they weren’t fully formed yet. There wasn’t a real, concrete reason to break up with him. Just a bunch of tiny, nagging reasons that added up to some big-time resentment. But when I said them out loud, those reasons sounded so much smaller than they felt,” she explains. “Anytime I vented to my mom or other friends, they told me all serious relationships were like this. I needed to compromise more, be willing to share my life with another person if I wanted to make it work. Funny that aside from my mom, I don’t have a relationship with any of them anymore. Isaac and I may not have made it down the aisle, but breaking up was like a divorce. He got the friend group; I got the house plants.” She gestures around her, to yet another hanging plant above her head and two more framing either side of the sink.

“We lost so much when we broke up. Decades of friendship.I lost the rest of my friends and my mom’s respect. Breaking up was—” Her palms slap the counter so suddenly, I can swear I feel the force of it on my chest. Her head bows and there’s a long, anguished sound at the back of her throat. “A complete and utter mess we still haven’t recovered from.”

I wonder how long this story has been sitting on her chest, waiting to be told. I want to comfort her somehow, but how can I when I can’t even relate to her? I can’t imagine going through what she went through.

She sits down on a barstool beside me, close enough that our arms brush, and then our knees as we turn toward each other. My skin erupts in goose bumps at the touch, my stomach fluttering with inconvenient butterflies.

“He was my best friend, the boy I loved. The one person I could talk to about anything without judgment. I convinced myself that he was still in there—disguised as the pushy, judgmental boyfriend I couldn’t for the life of me understand how I wound up with.”

“Judgmental?” I crack my knuckles, readying for a fight the same way she did for me. Krystal merely shakes her head with a small smile.

“I told myself I was being too sensitive, but yeah.” She blows out a breath. “He had this weird insecurity about my job. He used to tease me all the time for sleeping in despite knowing how late I came in the night before. Then there were these comments he’d make implying my job wasn’t as important as his. They always cropped back up during a fight. And we had plenty of them when he started planning these surprise, over-the-top romantic dates that he always scheduled during the nights I worked.”

“That’s so shitty,” I tell her. “He probably did it on purpose. If you were practically living together, there’s no excuse for him not to know your schedule.”

“That’s what I told him,” she says. “I don’t know why I ever thought getting married would fix our problems. Once we got engaged and started making plans for what our life together would be like, I realized we were still on two completely different pages. He expected me to quit Havana Bar and get a desk job so we’d finally be on a similar work schedule and see each other more often. Then we’d buy a house and start a family once he got promoted and started making more money. It wasn’t the life I wanted, and what’s worse is it was preplanned without me. When I made it clear I had no intention of quitting my job, now or in the future, I’m surprised we didn’t break up then and there.”

“What was your vision for your life together?”

She hesitates for a beat.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot—”

“It’s not that,” she says. “It’s just that I haven’t told a lot of people this, and the last time I did, it didn’t go over well. It wasn’t really a vision for our life, butmylife. Another clue that I wasn’t in this relationship as much as he was.” She takes in a breath. “I want to run my own bar one day.”

“Really?” I sit up straighter. “That sounds awesome.”

“Thanks.” She smiles slightly. “I still have no idea if it’s an achievable dream. I don’t know the first thing about securing the loans I need to get a place up and running, because my savings account is lacking to say the least.”

“You’ll figure it out.” I wave away her concerns. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, right? Does this bar have a theme?”

“I’ve cycled through a few ideas over the years. I’ve been on plant apothecary for the past few months, but that just might be all the extra oxygen in here.” She laughs as she waves at the array of house plants again.

“That would make for some cute drink names,” I say. “Belladonna. Wolfsbane. Foxglove.”

“Aren’t all of those deadly flowers?” She raises a brow at me. “Am I opening a bar or a mortuary?”

“Well, you wouldn’tactuallybe poisoning people. Besides, wolfsbane’s only deadly to werewolves, right?” I roll my eyes. “You’re the one with the apothecary theme. I was just trying to give you some inspiration.”

“You do know apothecaries are meant forhealing, not killing, right?”

I give her a blithe look.

“We’ll workshop this later. Besides, we’re off topic.”

“Right.” I nod. “I take it Isaac didn’t like this idea?”

“He thought it would set our relationship back. We’d have to say goodbye to owning our own home, not that that was ever a dream of mine. I’d have no hope of starting a business if I couldn’t get a loan, and even then, there was always a chance it could fail. Plenty of new businesses do. He never outright said he didn’t believe I could do it, but…” She shrugs. “He didn’t have to. And maybe he’s right. I always thought I would’ve started it by now. Instead, I’m almost thirty and still working at the same bar I have since college.”

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