really means a lot to me.”
George’s gaze lingered a bit longer on mine, but then he nodded as he headed out.
“I’ll take care of this,” I called after him. He turned and looked at me over his shoulder, as if he knew I would. I exhaled a sigh of relief as I watched George head out the door.
I glanced down at Dana’s open office drawer, Dr. Susie’s book, The Dater’s Handbook, staring up at me. Curiosity won and I picked up the hardcover, randomly flipping it open.
“When you are together, you should be the only person he is focused on,” I read aloud to Dana’s empty cubicle. “You’ve agreed to spend your valuable time with him. You deserve his full attention. No distractions.”
Huh.
I shut the book, hard. That seemed like obvious advice, didn’t it? I mean, wouldn’t everybody agree that you don’t get together to ignore one another?
Just then, I got a text from Peter.
Wanna get together tonight?
Well, then. Why not test out the first bit of advice from Dr. Susie on Peter? He’d pass with flying colors, and then I could tell Nadia and Mom they were wrong. I wasn’t single-handedly sabotaging my love life.
Peter asked me to meet him at the batting cages, which I figured meant he didn’t want to wait around at his place for me to get off work. Despite not having played for the Rockies in two years, he still loved baseball. A knee injury had sidelined him from the game permanently, but not from practice, and he enjoyed swinging the bat most afternoons. When I arrived, I expected him to stop batting and maybe go change for dinner. I figured the “getting together” part included dinner.
I’d figured wrong.
Peter kept hitting ball after ball, in no hurry to change out of his sweats, Rockies shirt, and batting helmet. He cracked another ball into the netting.
“When you said we’d have plans tonight,” I began as tactfully as I could as I sat on a bench behind the protective net, legs crossed and wearing a brand-new pair of heels, “I don’t know…I thought we’d be doing something together.”
“We are together,” Peter said, keeping his eye on the automatic pitching machine. “We’re at the batting cages.”
He hit another ball with a crack that sounded as loud as a gunshot and made me flinch.
“Booyah! Did you see that?” He turned to me, excited, a boyish grin on his face.
“Uh…yeah, I did see that.” I cleared my throat and glanced down at my new sleek pumps. Had they been a wasted purchase? “I don’t know if this batting cage thing is really my idea of being together.”
“Why? We are…” But he focused on the ball that had just been spit out from the machine. He swung his bat and connected, hard. I realized he’d barely even looked in my direction since I’d sat down, and his focus was entirely on the incoming baseballs. “We’re totally together.”
“Okay, if by ‘together’ you mean I’m on this side of the fence and you’re on that side…” And, by the way, not paying me any attention. At all.
Peter turned, frowning slightly and appearing a bit annoyed. “Okay, well, what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe we could go somewhere, face each other. Talk. Maybe have dinner?”
He’d already turned away from me and was getting ready to connect with another ball. He smacked it and shook his head. “Wow,” he murmured, clearly enamored with the bat. “Why can’t I connect like this all the time?”
I realized he’d only been half listening to me—the farthest thing from forming a meaningful connection.
“Peter! I need you to focus.”
But Peter kept his attention on the ball machine. “You need…” He hit another ball. “What?”
He readied for the next pitch.
“Peter!” I shouted, growing annoyed. He turned then, missed the pitch, and let out a groan. He glanced at me.
“What is going on?” he asked, frowning slightly.
How many times had I sat right here in these very batting cages? How many times had I waited for Peter to…engage…to do something? To really see me. To really listen to what I was saying. More times than I could remember.
“I’m on this side and you’re on that side and we’re not together, and I don’t just mean tonight.” My words spurted out in a rush. “We’re at the restaurant and I’m with Nadia and Michael, and we go to a party and it’s like you forget that I’m even there, or I go to a wedding of one of my closest friends, and you don’t even come with me, you know? What’s going on?”
And I meant that in a bigger sense—not just about our lack of real dates, but what’s going on with…us. What was this? A relationship? I was dangerously close to asking him to put a label on it because without a label, I realized I had no idea why I should be with Peter.
“I don’t know, Cass.” Peter shook his head. My questions made him think, and he didn’t like to think. Didn’t I know that? He liked things simple and uncomplicated. He liked not to label anything for this reason. He didn’t have to think about it and he didn’t have to feel. “I’m not really sure what you want me to say.”
I want you to tell me you love me, that I’m your girlfriend, that we could be something more… I want you to tell me that you’re in this with me, this relationship…this life!
It hit me like a fastball then. I’d never hear those words from Peter. He wasn’t into anything but himself. He didn’t want a real partnership—or frankly, a real anything—except finding a new sauce for chicken wings.
I sighed then, because I knew it was over. I’d been avoiding this conversation for two years because in my heart of hearts, I’d always suspected that we weren’t good together.
“Nothing,” I told Peter, tears springing to my eyes as I realized this—whatever it was—had just died. Nothing could bring it back to life. “I don’t want you to say anything.”
Peter turned his back on me, not much caring I was upset. But then again, when did he ever care about my feelings? I sniffed, fighting back a tear and stood, grabbing my bag. I heard the crack of his bat as he exclaimed, “See ya! That one had a flight attendant on it. Did you see that?”
But I’d already made it to the door, and I didn’t look back. We were done.
Six
Peter tried a few half-hearted texts and one phone call to reach out to me over the next couple of weeks, but to no one’s surprise, he didn’t pursue me that hard. I couldn’t believe a two-year relationship—if that’s what you could call it—could unwind so quickly and so quietly. We had no big blow-out fight, no drama. I realized I’d been sleepwalking through the last two years, content with skating through life with a sort-of, part-time boyfriend, happy not to have to fend off all the questions about when I was going to find someone.
When I told Mom and Nadia the news—via text—I was eternally grateful neither one of them acted too happy about it. It wasn’t like they were ever real Peter fans. Nadia offered to take me out to dinner to cheer me up—just us two—and I gratefully went.
I knew, on some level, I’d never really loved Peter. What did we have in common? Nadia had been right about that. But, I felt sad. Not because I’d lost Peter, but because, I realized, I’d never really had him in the first place. Maybe part of me had hoped he would come around, or that he’d change, or that he’d