Page 108 of Falling Backwards
There’s gotta be a spark between you and the person you’re with.It won’t keep a relationship alive on its own, but it’s still important.
The cold part of me wants to say she and I don’t have a spark either.Which is why that part of meiscold, right?No spark between us—no warmth, no heat, nothing.Just distance and detachment.
Except that would be an outright lie.
“Ugh, bro,” Paxton groans around a mouthful of food.I blink over to him as he sets his fork on his cleared plate.“Thish French toasht ishlife.”
This isn’t new from him, but it still has me chuckling.I finish the mimosa and set it out for the server to collect.
As my eyes drift that way again to see what Marcus is doing, I’m unsurprised to find him zeroed in on someone at the front of the house.I look over and see a girl has entered the restaurant but isn’t facing this direction because she’s talking to an older woman.It’s not Maggie and I know it, but she partly resembles her with the long, dark hair and the similar height—until she twirls in a circle while looking around at Lucent’s elegant interior, and then she resembles her even less.
And Marcus, I find, is outwardly disappointed.
Yeah, it seems to me like he’s hoping the real Maggie will show up while he’s here.
He turns his attention this way and catches me watching him.I give as polite a nod as I can, then refocus on Paxton, who has swallowed his food and is talking to me once more, voice low.
“So how are things with you and the GF?”
I blow a raspberry and say in kind, “Fine, I guess.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, haven’t gotten mad enough to try to rip each other’s head off just yet.Miraculous, huh?”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it a miracle.Ifiguredyou two could act like grown-ups.”
I chuckle again.“You saying we were acting like kids before this?”
“Something like that!”
We laugh together now, and I shrug because he kind of has a point.
At the same time, he kind of doesn’t understand why we are the way we are.
I drum my fingertips on the bar top, unsure if I should say what’s on the tip of my tongue.
Between glancing at her ex, remembering how she reacted to me touching her eyebrow, and work being slow, I decide to go for it, still quietly.
“When I came up with this idea, I knew it’d be complicated in some ways, and it is.There are things about her that get on my nerves, and there are things that don’t.Some of them remind me of when we were young, but others come fromthisversion of her.Annoying and not-annoying alike.”
Annoying andlovelyalike,I silently correct myself.
Paxton is nodding about my out-loud words.“Mmm.”
“It’s weird.”
“I’m sure.You’ve gone a long time with two halves of younger Maggie in your head—the one you cared about and the one who pissed you off—plus the salt-in-wound half of older Maggie.Now the other half of older Maggie is squeezing in there too.”
That’s an accurate way of describing it, since I sometimes feel like my brain is going to explode from how much room she takes up in it.
I admit, “Even though I’m glad to be helping her, the‘her’part of it can be really overwhelming.”
“Well, do you ever think about just…” he gestures away from himself, “…like, putting it out there?”
“Putting what out there?”
“That you wanna mend fences or whatever.”
