The door to the bathroom crashed open and he felt a warm, comforting breath touch his neck. Then it was gone, as the door slammed shut and then - THUMP, THUMP, THUMP. She was putting all of her weight in her heels and he pitied the poor sap living downstairs. First he had to put up with the creaking, the groaning, the classic old rattling headboard, and now he had to deal with this.
The window rattled, and he didn't know if it was the spiteful winter wind - or just her.
She shot past him, storming behind the sofa he was slumped into and making straight for her room.
What had, of course, previously been their room, but was now her room.
He didn't bother looking back at her, and she didn't waste a word on him. Until she reached her door.
"Where are you going?"
"What?" He changed the channel, played dumb, made her work.
"You're wearing your good jeans. Are you going out?"
Now he turned, now he twisted and looked back at her. How should he look at her now? Should he enjoy the view, parts of her still sparkling with moisture from the shower, her perfect legs disappearing up into that short, fluffy robe (that he had bought for her)? He watched her towelling her hair for a moment, took in the hard, cold mask that both of them had been wearing for two weeks now, and didn't know what to feel.
"I have a date," he said. He turned back to face the TV.
"Jay, you knew I had a date tonight." On the TV a group of people with very strange hairstyles were gathered around a map of some peninsular. The tall thin window showed the faint interference of a light snow playing against the rich purple of the evening sky. It rattled again. Their apartment was drafty; in winter they cranked the heating up and kept it up.
"Well, yes. But what the hell, Nat?" He didn't turn, but his shoulders rose and tensed. "What the hell does that have to do with anything?"
"It's pathetic - this trying to one-up me. Pathetic, Jay."
He had a retort: it was on his lips, loaded and ready to fire, but he heard the bedroom door slam first. Maybe that was the problem; both of them always had a response to every insult, every allegation, every slur. Sometimes they had to lie, sometimes they had to get really nasty to get their retaliation off the ground but so what? It was all about getting the last word in.
The window rattled and he looked at it, then through it, for a long time. After a while he noticed that the very corner of his face was being reflected back at him, and that the sour, hard mask had yet to come off. He took his feet off the table and leaned forwards, shoulders still hunched as he rubbed his face trying to loosen it up.
If he was perfectly honest with himself (and he was trying to be, he really was) he wasn't all that interested in going on a date tonight. Every day was a pain in the goddamned ass, every conversation was a battle, and he just wanted to get away and spend some time not thinking about him and Nat.
Everyone he knew, knew what was going on between him and Nat, and that, apparently, was all they wanted to talk about. He should move out, they told him, and he knew he should. But every time he reached this rational, noble conclusion, he thought about all the shit he'd sacrificed for her over the years and thought - well, why should I be the one to move out?
He realised that she was having exactly the same conversations with her friends, going through exactly the same process, and that kept them - two weeks after the spectacular break-up - still living in the same, small, shitty one bedroom apartment.
They made it work by working as long and as hard as possible, lingering and malingering in bars and coffee shops, and also by sheer dint of their own bitter, self-entitled wills. Is it a universal truth that people who are so well matched when it all starts out end up locked into this kind of savage hate-pact?
Well, neither of their dates that night were going to be having fun, he thought with sadly characteristic schadenfreude.
He looked up. It was Korea they were talking about on TV. Well, in the end he had lost. He'd booked a ticket back where he came from, and he'd mailed his mother two days ago that he'd be going back for a while. Nat would gloat, but he... well, hopefully this was the start of him learning. Life lessons and all that horrible, horrible Hollywood bullshit.
For a moment he forgot the girl's name, and he almost smiled at what an asshole he was. Then again, who was the bigger jerk: him, or his buddy whose friend she was? Eddie was the one who was setting her up; a lamb for the emotional slaughter that he must know was going to ensue. It was nice of him to try and break Jay out of his funk but... poor girl. She wasn't going to know what hit her.
The door opened behind him with a click. Not a bang, a click. He still didn't bother turning.
"Who is she?"
"Friend of a friend of Eddie's." He didn't turn because the mask had come off and he didn't want her to see how fucking tired he was.
"A friend of Sally's?"
"I don't know," and he couldn't stop the sigh escaping this time, "he asked me to take her out."
There was a pause. That was okay, he was getting very good at awkward pauses. You just turned your feelings off for the duration of each one, and back on again when the conversation restarted and the knives came out.
"Don't you want to know about mine?"
"Not really," every time he spoke he had to analyse his intonation to make sure it wouldn't spark her off in some way. Was it because he couldn't take the rant, or because he actually, still, didn't want to hurt her? Was she doing the same thing?
