Page 5 of Mostly My Girlfriend
2
Two weeksapart
Jules,
There are so many things I want to say to you. Being away from you, I know you think it was a dick move to make but being away to get my head straight wasn’t a totally bad idea.
There are a lot of places to be silent in Japan. Places that Mom and I have been exploring together. Lost in our sadness. Her over my dad, me over my dad, but also you, too.
I wish you were here. I wish I’d been courageous enough to tell you to come with me.
But most of all I just keep thinking of all these things I want to say to you. All the things I stopped myself from saying these past twelve years.
Do you have anything you want to say to me?
Please write back. I know I fucked up and I’m sorry.
Ethan
P.S. My mother thinks you should write back, too. Are you really going to deny a grieving widow?
* * *
Therapy
Ethan
“Julia, I see you decided to come back,” Carol said with a cool smile.
It had been a long, hard-fought battle the previous night. Actually, not that hard-fought after I’d fucked her. One new thing I’d learned about Jules after all this time was that she was remarkably compliant after a few orgasms.
Now that we were here, though, I found myself nervous all over again. What if this didn’t work? What if I couldn’t break through the barriers she’d put up against me? What if this really was the end of us?
No, I couldn’t accept that. Especially after last night. Jules wanted me. She just didn’t trust me. That was something I could fix.
“I did,” she said.
“Can I ask why?”
Jules didn’t look at me, but I could see her cheeks turn pink. “He said that at the very least, this might be good for us to gain some closure. That didn’t happen yesterday. I agreed. So I came back.”
“Is that what you want, Ethan? Closure?”
I snorted. “No, that is not what I want but she’s not hearing me.”
Not that we’d done that much talking last night.
“I’m hearing you. I’m just not believing you,” Julia said without looking at me. “Or at least believing that anything you said yesterday was real.”
“I no longer have a company,” I said, throwing up my hands. “That’s real, Julia. And the biggest fucking gesture I could think of.”
“I can’t believe you did that without…”
“Talking to you?” I asked when she stopped herself. “Go ahead and be pissed. You should be pissed. But I felt like I had to act because you weren’t giving me any choices.”
“It’s your company. You can do whatever you want with it. I don’t have a say in that,” Jules said tartly. “That’s my point. This whole time…it’s like we’ve been in a relationship, but we’re not. Not a real one.”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, feeling the anger bubble up. “You don’t think our relationship is real? We’ve been together, side by side, for the past eight years, and that’s not counting the year in college when we were nearly inseparable.”
