They sit opposite each other. Silent. Their dinner table conversation – argument – had stopped. Neither Nick nor his girlfriend, Amelia, could find any more words. For now at least. Only the sound of the traffic on the busy road outside their home hints at the time passing by.
Nick finally takes a breath and pushes himself up from his chair, maintaining eye contact with the one woman he thought he could trust the most, and surprised by the fact that he could still look at her, even with the immense amount of pure disgust he now only felt.
“Where are you going?” Amelia asks but doesn’t plead.
“Away. From you.” Nick moves around the back of the chair, lifts and drops it to tuck it back under the table.
“If that’s what you want. Fine.” Allowing his carelessness.
Nick puts his fists in his pockets, clears his throat and stares down at Amelia. “I actually think you should be the one to leave, but I’m not sure I could live in this house – what I thought was our home – anymore. I can’t live in a place where I’m reminded of memories that should never have been made. Why should I torture myself? No. This house, and everything in it, is yours. Perhaps that’s what you wanted all along. And congratulations, Amelia! I look like an idiot. You’ve made me look a complete fool.” He shakes his head and moves into the kitchen.
Left behind, Amelia looks at the barely touched dinners on the table in front of her and listens to Nick, out of habit, tidying up in the kitchen. This was the last meal she would have with her boyfriend, and she was devastated about it. But she was also relieved.
It worked.
She turns towards the collection of framed photos, displayed on the sideboard. She wipes away a falling tear and chokes back more as she glances over the happy times with Nick, that were thankfully captured on camera. Her treasured memories.
They’ve been together for two years, and very soon, she knew he was going to ask her to marry him. She just knew. She loved him with everything she had. She didn’t want to hurt him, like that. And feels sick for what she knew she had to do. But she had to. She needed him to hate her.
Before three months ago, Amelia wouldn’t have ever dreamed of doing something like this.
“Six to eight months,” the many doctors told her. “You should perhaps share this with your partner, Amelia.”
She thought about it. She just didn’t think it was fair. She knew Nick would do anything and everything for her if she did. He’d be there, through it all. He’d probably rush her down the aisle, just because. She couldn’t make him a widower in six to eight months. She wouldn’t. In her mind, it was kinder that he hated her for a short time, rather than missed her for a lifetime. So, she chose to distance herself from him, to let him believe she was being unfaithful, before falsely confessing that she was. Even though she has and would never look at another man, the way she does Nick.
And over this dinner, with both her hands placed flat on the table to steady her nerves, and to keep focus, she managed it. She broke Nick’s heart.
And he was right. She fooled him.
Amelia looks up and sees Nick leaning in the kitchen doorway. Before she can speak, Nick interrupts. “I’ll pack a bag and leave tonight.”
“OK.”
Nick looks at his feet and shakes his head, “OK.” As he walks away and climbs the stairs to their bedroom, Amelia looks down at her hands, realising that she’s been holding them so tightly, that they’ve turned deadly white.
“It’s better this way. It must.”
morethanablackcoffeegirl 