Page 4 of Finally Loved

“What is it?” Alba asked, unable to stop herself.

“It doesn’t really work that way when the person who upset you is someone almost nobody in your life knows about.”

Alba’s mind swirled as she attempted to put the pieces together. Something secret, something hurtful, something that clearly made this woman feel worthless.

Even without knowing the woman or anything that was happening in her life, Alba knew she deserved better.

“Or,” she continued, “when you can’t bear the idea of having to listen to the people whodoknow telling you again that…thatreally can’t be too bad, and what’s the harm in it?”

Something in her quiet, resentful voice and the way she avoided what she was talking about felt like a vice clamping around Alba’s ribs. She could only imagine what it must feel like inside the woman.

“Well,” she said carefully, “I am not someone in your life, but I am here right now, and I’m available to listen if you want to tell someone about it. I promise not to belittle you or tell you there’s no harm done.”

The woman breathed another bitter laugh and Alba’s heart ached for whatever it was that had weighed this woman so far down it felt like she would drown under the weight of it.

For several moments Alba simply watched her in her peripheral vision as the woman fidgeted with her hands in herlap, her side still pressed against Alba with seemingly no urgency to get away. But, eventually, she let out a heavy breath, glanced at Alba, and said, “I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable.”

Alba paused. She’d said it like an introduction, like a primer to a bigger reveal, but, when she didn’t go on, Alba shook her head. “I promise I’m really not that easy to make uncomfortable.”

Her expression quirked and Alba couldn’t decide whether she was amused or doubtful, but she took a deep breath and continued. “I just got dumped.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“In the middle of Best Buy.”

“Oh, no.” Alba worked to find an expression that conveyed a socially appropriate amount of horror at such a revelation from a stranger. Inside, though, she felt the same burning rage as if her best friend had just told her that same thing.

“Yeah. With the same words other exes have said to me when the reason is just so apparent to all of them and I’m the idiot for not understanding it was coming.”

Alba blew out a heavy breath. That was low. She didn’t even need to ask if the latest ex knew others had used those same words, it was apparent they did.

“And, to make things better, she’s the one who drove me here and a weekend bag of my stuff is locked in her car because she’d insisted she wanted me to stay over at her place this weekend.”

Alba winced. Who did that? If you knew you were breaking up with someone, wouldn’t you do it… literally anywhere else? And anywhen else? Not when you’d seemingly picked them up for the weekend?

“Must have been one hell of a fight about refrigerators,” Alba said, looking for anything that might make the woman feel the slightest bit better, while also conveying that Alba was happy tohear more, but absolutely not pressuring her. The last thing she needed was pressure.

She made a noise that started as a laugh and ended as a choked sob. Something about her expression as the noise trailed off looked too tortured to only be about this breakup. Alba couldn’t help but think that along with their relationship, the woman’s ex had taken something bigger from her, some dream of a future she now felt would never come. That was probably what happened when your partner broke up with you using words plagiarized from your exes.

“Chance would be a fine thing…” the woman muttered, mostly to herself, and Alba’s heart broke for her.

“It’s her loss,” Alba said firmly. She didn’t need to know either of them to feel that way. Even breaking up via text would have been kinder than this.

The woman shook her head, her eyes filling with tears again. “I don’t think that’s true. If I could be… better then none of this would be happening.”

Alba frowned slightly. Whatever had happened, it was clear that the sobbing woman blamed herself. There was something unbelievably heavy and broken in her words, like she knew exactly what the problem was but didn’t have a way to fix it, and not simply because she didn’t want to. And wasn’t that worse? It was one thing to break up with someone because you wanted different things, but repeatedly being left over the same thing—as seemed to be the case here—was a unique form of torture, especially if it was something foundational about you that you just couldn’t change, no matter how hard you tried.

Alba squeezed her shoulder. “You deserve someone who loves you for exactly who you are. Those are the people who won’t leave you feeling like this. And this is just a temporary stop along the way to that. Even if it hurts like hell right now, it won’t always.”

“It will,” she gasped, sounding low on air. “It keeps happening and there’s nothing I can do about it. I thought I found someone who understood, but it was just an illusion. Nobody is going to want to live that life.”

Whatever it was, Alba was certain she must know she wasn’t alone in the world, but she was also certain it must feel like she was. Breakups were always like that. It didn’t make them any easier, even if you didn’t add the extra layer that was at play here.

“I hear you, and I’m here with you,” she replied quietly, shuffling a tiny bit closer to the woman to hold her tighter again. Sometimes, all you could do for someone was hold them together physically while they fell apart emotionally.

She laughed wetly, burying her head in Alba’s shoulder. “As if I wasn’t being embarrassing enough. Now, I’m falling apart on a complete stranger and ruining their whole day.”

“We already went through this. It’s totally okay. We all deserve to have someone there for us when the world is falling apart, and, if the universe provides a stranger, so be it. There’s a reason for that too, even if we don’t understand it.”

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