Not because he was in any way against it, but because of a fear that he might be rejected. And a fear of diseases.
He’d never told Emily about that. Never told anyone but Elizabeth. She’d laughed when he’d told her and said it wasn’t very rock and roll.
He wondered what things Emily had never told him, and it made him so tired, he sat right down on the pavement so he could have a rest.
From that vantage point, Stuart came to realize a few things. The first; that he was kind of drunk. The second; that he had given his heart to a woman, and while it was something that she made clear she didn’t want, she hadn’t been able to return it. It was still there, with her, beating quietly, unwanted, apologizing and trying not to cause offence. The third; he was, in fact, quite drunk and wouldn’t be getting up off the ground any time soon.
He was uncomfortable sitting there on the pavement littered with cigarette butts and the dark spots left by people’s gobs of spit. He was even more uncomfortable when he realized he was sitting across from the homeless guy he always meant to buy a coffee for but never had. He waved, got no response and felt like a dick for a minute before deciding it was better to feel sorry for himself than somebody else.
I’m going to end up just like him, Stuart thought, feeling cold and lonely and resentful of the sad looks happy people were shooting him on their way to more important things. They couldn’t see a difference between the two men taking up real estate on the sidewalk. In his self-pitying stupor, neither could Stuart.
“I could just die here tonight,” he mumbled to the twinkling stars, to Emily packing his things as he sat there, to himself. “I should just die.”
“The only way you’re going to die tonight is if I kick your ass for leaving a woman sitting alone at the bar for the past hour,” replied a voice somewhere overhead.
A woman’s face appeared to him. For a moment Stuart let himself believe that she might be an angel. His guardian angel, come to take him home. Wherever that was now.
But when he felt her stick an icy hand under his head, propping him up roughly against a building, Stuart knew who she was. He knew she wasn’t an angel, and he knew that she was pissed. He tried to tell her he was sorry he’d forgotten to meet her. He tried to tell her he had a cold, and he wanted to ask her if she could help him up, because the sidewalk was damp.
What he said was, “It was her condo, but it was MY ring, Liz, and she LOST it!”
Then Stuart started to cry.
“Aw, Jesus. She chucked you,” Elizabeth said as she grabbed his arm. “I knew she sounded weird on the phone. Bitchier than usual.” She watched in horror as he blew his nose on her scarf.
“Oh, fuck. You’re a mess. Okay, let’s get you home.” Stuart’s eyes welled up again as he choked out “Home?” Elizabeth sighed. “Well, my home then.”
“Can we go get a drink first?”
“Do you think you need one?” she asked him.
“Desperately,” he said in a voice so sad, she could easily kill over it.
“Okay, honey, one more drink. If you pass out, I’ll get to tell you all about my news without feeling like a total asshole.” She grabbed his shoulders and pointed him in the direction of her car.
* * *
Kate did not feel well as she stared at the huge empty spaces that now filled her apartment, but she comforted herself with the knowledge that she had done the right thing.
She wished of course that it had worked out with Scott. It would have been so much easier just to be together. One more thing to cross off life’s to-do list. Find a partner? Check.
She would have liked to have been able to hold on to the kind of man she could readily admit was a great catch. Considerate, employed, straight, good teeth. Even the last name was great. Archer. She would have been happy to be Katherine Archer. Katherine Mackenzie-Archer. Mrs. Archer, even.
But he seemed compelled to keep telling her stories that she’d heard before. A thousand times before. “One time in college, my buddies and I…” Took a road trip to B.C., chatted up a hot woman that ended up being a man, shaved a guy bald when he passed out on the couch.
She knew. She knew them all.
Then there was the way he was always grabbing the back of her neck when he drove, even though he knew she hated it when people touched her neck.
“I’m not grabbing it, I’m rubbing it,” he’d say, like he was the one who’d been offended. “…and I’m not people. I’m your man.”
Yes, that’s right. He referred to himself as “her man”. He did this all the time. In public. Alone it was worse, since he had the tendency to call himself “her big man”.
Not only awful, but woefully overstated.
Well, maybe that was unfair. He was fine, definitely not porn star material or anything, but fine. That was not a problem. The problems were much smaller, but they were lethal.
He was a guy who picked her birthday cards out at the drug store, the most recent monstrosity still up for viewing on the entertainment unit. It had an elephant on it, a pink one. What newly thirty-year-old woman wouldn’t be charmed to know her boyfriend looked across a sea of birthday cards, spied one with the biggest, ugliest animal in the world on the front, and said “Aha! Perfect!”?
He was a guy who took his socks off in the living room at the end of the day, then shoved them in his pocket.
And the socks…
Scott wore black ones that snaked up his leg to mid calf, where they were secured by the tightest band of elastic imaginable. It was amazing there was any blood left in his ankles. They were made out of some polyrayon-plastic blend. Kate could see them glisten when they caught the light. They shone like asphalt on a sunny day. At times, she’d been tempted to scream, “What did cotton ever do to you?” but he would have laughed about it. Scott laughed about everything.
He had no passion in him. Even as Kate had sat him down to tell him it was over, he’d just looked at her with a stupid smile on his face. It had stayed, even as she’d told him how miserable she was. How she’d rather be alone than be with him.
When she finished, she dissolved in a puddle of tears. No, not dissolved. Kate wasn’t a graceful crier. She didn’t have much practice at it, and she hated to cry. When she finished, she was red-eyed and snotty, jerking sporadically in her seat. He was still smiling, looking every bit like an indulgent parent.
He told her if she couldn’t be happy with him, she’d better do her best to be happy some other way, because that’s all he wanted for her. It was very wise and very kind, and while it should have made her feel like shit, all it did was mildly irritate her, because he’d said it in what she liked to call his “Obi Wan” voice.
Oh. He was a Star Wars fanatic too, even the new crappy ones.
So the whole time he was wishing her well, Kate found she’d become fixated on the wet spot his beer bottle was leaving on the coffee table. Her coffee table.
Scott couldn’t keep his beer in the fridge like normal people. He had to stockpile his beer in the freezer. Nice and frosty and dripping like hell, even the coasters couldn’t control it. When he remembered to use a coaster. Both times.
Kate couldn’t count the number of guests who’d had to take their beer with a spoon. It was so embarrassing. Or the number of times he’d forgotten they were in there, and they’d exploded all over the ManMeal frozen dinners he insisted on buying.
These were the things popping into her head as Scott offered up the best graduation speech ever. He hit all the key points; follow your path, spread your wings, if you love someone, set them free.
Even as she stood drowning in the nothingness, once stockpiled with electronic equipment and Storm Trooper figurines, Kate