Page 73 of Dreaming of Dawson

“What did he say?” I ask.

“Not very much. He handed me a couple of bags, and when I looked inside, I saw all my things… the things I’d left at his apartment. That was when it hit home that he’d broken up with me. I don’t know why I hadn’t realized it before, but I guess Iwas in shock about the apartment, and didn’t register anything else.”

“So he just gave you back your belongings… at work?”

“Yeah. It was his way of drawing a line, I think.”

“What a guy.”

She smiles. “I thought something like that… although I don’t remember the word ‘guy’ creeping in there. I think ‘asshole’ was the word that came to mind most of all.”

“It seems accurate.”

“It felt that way.” She shakes her head, looking down at our joined hands, and I give hers a gentle squeeze, then get back to rubbing her knuckles with my thumb, smiling at her slight sigh. She keeps reacting like this… gasping when I told her I wished I’d been her first, gazing into my eyes whenever she gets the chance, and shuddering to my every touch. Which is why I’m not giving up. Whatever she says, she wants this as much as I do. She’s just fighting it because of what James did to her. She thinks history is gonna repeat itself. Whereas I know that’ll never happen. Not on my watch.

“Did he sell the apartment?” I ask.

“Eventually,” she says, looking up at me, her eyes filled with sadness. “But not before I lost my job.”

“You what?”

“I lost my job,” she repeats, unnecessarily. I heard her the first time… unfortunately.

“Because it was too difficult to work with him once you’d broken up?” I ask, trying to make sense of it all.

“Yes, and no. I’m not gonna say it was easy, because it wasn’t. We’d been together for a long time, and he was my first serious boyfriend. I know that sleeping with someone on your second date suggests we weren’t taking things that seriously, but I was. I didn’t lose my virginity lightly, and I assumed we’d be together forever, so I never expected the day would come whenI’d have to behave like he meant nothing to me… while trying to do my job.”

“Did he make that hard on you?”

It sounds like he might have done, so I’m surprised when she says, “Not especially. In some ways, things were no different to how they’d always been. We’d had to hide our relationship right from the start. Once we broke up, we weren’t having to hide the fact that we’d been together, but we were having to pretend we weren’t fighting all the time. Which we were… about the apartment. He was dragging his heels, which made little sense to me. He was paying the mortgage. I refused to contribute a dime on the basis that I wasn’t the one who’d backed out of the deal and broken us up. He didn’t argue. He just refused to get off of his ass and do anything about it.”

“I’m sensing things came to a head?”

“They did. A few months after he broke up with me, we had an enormous fight at work. It was unprofessional of me, I know, but I was sick to death of waiting for him to put the apartment up for sale, so I marched into his office and told him I was gonna do it myself.”

“What did he say?” I ask.

“Initially, he told me it was something we’d have to discuss elsewhere. He was probably right, but I was done waiting, so I kept pushing and pushing… until he eventually confessed that he’d already accepted an offer.”

“He had?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why didn’t he tell you? Why make you believe he hadn’t even spoken to a realtor, or done anything about selling it?”

“Because he’d sold it for less than we paid for it.”

I think I know what’s coming, but I ask, “How much less?”

“Seventy-two thousand.”

“Excuse me?” Okay, so I hadn’t been expecting that.

“In the months between us making our offer on the place, and him coming to sell it, property prices had taken a nosedive, on top of which he’d made the mistake of telling the realtor that we needed a quick sale, so they’d priced it accordingly… and he’d taken the first offer that came along.”

“Without consulting you?”

“As it transpired, yes. He argued that I’d told him it was his problem, not mine. And even when I explained in no uncertain terms that I hadn’t meant him to take that so literally, he still couldn’t understand why I was mad at him.”

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