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It’s red; the wine in her hands, the flush of her cheeks whenever his name pops up in conversation, the sun on his face the first time she drove him home. There’s a spark somewhere deep inside of her, threatening to set her ablaze at a moment’s notice if he dares to look at her a certain way.
She takes a sip of her wine. It’s not great - merely the cheapest option available at the closest grocery store - but it’ll do. She’ll take what she can get on nights like these.
“That’s the thing,” she says aloud, to no one in particular. Suzie B, Jr. eyes her curiously from where she’s perched on the edge of the coffee table. “We work together, we have the same friends, we live in the same tiny ass town…I can’t fucking escape him, even if I wanted to.”
She wants to say more, but she stops herself. Saying the next part out loud might be what finally destroys her; she’s only trapped because she doesn’t want to escape him.
“If I had a nickel for everyone that’s ever told me he’s not good for me…” she thinks as she stares down into the bottom of her glass. She swirls its contents around, as if doing so will solve this problem that’s proven itself unsolvable for almost a decade.
She used to think she was so smart. She could read him like an open book, and he couldn’t hurt her any more than she would let him. But then, a funny thing happened: she stopped caring whether or not he hurt her. She wanted him to hurt her, because that meant at least he was thinking about her. At least he cared enough to give her his time, his energy, his attention.
“I know that’s not healthy,” she says aloud, like her imaginary audience had been keeping up through telepathy. “But the best I’ve ever felt is with Jeff. The best times I’ve had in the past few years were with Jeff.”
“And the worst you’ve ever felt was because of him,” a little voice in the back of her head pipes up.
“But it was worth it. For all the good times,” the conscious part of her snaps back.
She sighs. It’s pathetic, truly, that she’s a nearly 40-year old woman whose emotions are tied to that of a man who can’t decide if he loves her or if he wants to forget that she exists. Whenever he gives her attention or invites her over for dinner or even stops to chat with her in the hallway between classes, she has a good day. Whenever he ignores her or makes fun of her to others or tells her all about some other girl, she has a bad day.
“It’s so stupid,” she says, looking her cat right in the eye. “It’s stupid, right? He shouldn’t control me like that. He doesn’t even want to control me like that.”
She knows the problem is that sometimes, he acts like he does. He takes her to meet his mom’s side of the family, wants her to watch a football game with them. He offers to cook for her and has memorized what she likes on her salad and how much ice she wants in her water. He tells her things he wouldn’t dare say to anyone else; he tells her how much better of a person she is than him, but he’s always the first one on the scene when something goes wrong. Sometimes, he calls her as he’s driving home from work, seemingly for no reason other than to hear her voice. He says he loves her, introduces her to the few friends he has that they don’t share, shares jokes with her that are for them and no one else. They sing songs that they played for each other in the infancy of their relationship together at the breakfast table as they wait for their tea to steep.
And then there’s times where it all goes away. A switch gets flipped, and he won’t call for weeks at a time. Pretends like she isn’t there during committee meetings, talks over her, won’t acknowledge her unless he needs back-up on something, back-up that he knows she’ll always provide. He won't invite her over or ask her for favors. Acts like they were never even friends, like there’s not a deep history running between them.
And then it’ll change again with no warning. They’ll be back to drinking together and leaning on the backs of each other’s chairs in crowded rooms and laughing in the face of others who could never hope to understand them. And she’ll be happy.
The peaks and valleys of Britta’s life are directly correlated to what she labels as the “good” and “bad” Jeff periods. And she hates it. Fucking despises it.
“It’s like, why did I even like him in the first fucking place?” she says.
She asks this question quite a lot for someone who knows the answer like the back of her hand, like the grooves in her teeth and the hollows under her eyes. He’s kind. He’s a much better person than he gives himself credit for. Naturally, he charms people, expresses interest in them, hands out substantial compliments like candy. She’s decently sure it used to be an act left over from his days as a lawyer, but it’s morphed into something completely genuine. He tells his friends that he loves them (his friends other than her, when he’s going through a period of ignoring her in front of them to seem cooler than he’ll ever actually be). He’s told her that he doesn’t think he’s a good person. But, in the same breath, he’ll tell her that she is. Then in another, he’ll point out all the ways in which they’re the same; they like the idea of being loved in theory, but never in practice. They have the same twisted sense of humor, she just feels worse about it. They don’t care about people, not on a level that requires them to exert energy that they reserve to care about themselves (the constant exception being each other, as she’ll change out of pajamas to drive him to an auto parts store, and he’ll give up his only free day in a week to help her fix her sink). And she knows that if they’re the same, then they both must be good people.
“He doesn’t see it,” she says. “He says he does, but I think it’s just to get me to shut up about it. I don’t think he actually knows how good of a person he is.”
And then she’s at war with herself again. Because he does shitty things. He’s trapped her in this cycle, made her addicted to his attention and time spent with him, then tricked her into thinking everything they are is all in her head.
“Nothing’s black and white. No one’s all good or all bad,” she assures herself.
She knows, deep down, that no matter how much euphoria he’s given her, she needs to break the cycle. But she also knows that’s a decision she could never bring herself to make.
Because in her head, she sees him on car trips to the city; stealing her phone to queue music and laughing when he incorrectly guesses what she likes to listen to. She sees him in the stands during Greendale football games when Troy was still on the team, making up lyrics for the alma mater that made her laugh so hard she nearly started crying. She sees him sheepishly asking if she wanted tea the morning after the first time she spent the night at his place. She sees the first trip they took with the study group, when they snuck away to smoke weed and she had to light the pipe for him; his face glowing orange from the lighter, inches away from her own, grinning like a kid who thought he was getting away with something.
(He was. He was getting away with stealing her heart and acting like he didn’t even know it had ever existed. And he was getting away with it because she loved him. Because no logic or reason ever applied to him. No matter how much she tries to rationalize, no matter how many people give her the same advice, she’ll never punish him for his crimes.)
She’s known for a while that she loves him. Once the pieces began to fall into place, there was no stopping the avalanche of realization. She loves him. And it feels inevitable and terrible and tragic and wonderful and like the greatest joy she’s ever known.
She stopped wishing for it all to go away a long time ago. She wouldn’t want to put these feelings on anyone else or be rid of them entirely, so here they’ll stay.
“It’s not like another conversation will fix anything,” she says, eyeing the bottom of her almost empty glass. They’d tried talking. He’d said he was worried she was becoming obsessed with him. She’d told him that was bullshit. She’s spent every day since trying to convince herself that she never even loved him in the first place.
“If he’s going to convince me that none of this was ever real, I might as well convince myself before he can get to it.”
She knows they’ll do this until one of them moves away; keep pissing each other off by telling stories about their other lovers, make more memories to add to the epic film of their shared lives, brush the backs of their hands together, but never let their fingers intertwine.
She sighs. She leans forward on her beat up green couch to grab the bottle of wine resting on the coffee table in front of her. She starts to pour, noting how her face in the reflection of the glass looks how she feels; warped, blazing red, out of focus.
She places the empty bottle on the couch next to her, too exhausted to lean forward again and place it back on the table. She takes a sip, her lips clinging to the rim of the glass like this will fix her. Like she hasn’t been here before. Like he won’t be afraid to love her tomorrow if she drinks more tonight.
She’s always thought his hands would be nice to hold. They’re much larger than hers, and she’s seen how ferociously he grips the things he holds dear. She wishes she could get away with more than resting her head on his shoulder whenever she’s too drunk or tired to hold it up herself. But her hands have always held their own.
She looks down at them, mentally traces the outlines of the deep blue veins on her wrists. For what has to be the millionth time in her life, she wishes this didn’t have to hurt so much.