The next evening, she curled over herself on the couch in her apartment, her thumbs over her phone. Nicole’s face scrunched up in a tearless sob. She hated every inch of what she was about to do. She hated it, hated herself, hated every part of her own brain.

She typed, I’m sorry, and then kept her thumbs hovering over the screen.

What was shooting through Nicole’s mind wasn’t the gross stuff she’d heard all her life: “You’re a man?! I’m not fucking gay!” et cetera. No, it was the unemotional responses. “Sorry, I’m not comfortable with that.” “Don’t think that’s what I’m into. Apologies.” On their own, sure, whatever, but the cascading, enveloping totality of them, metastasizing in the screen of her ego over the years to scratch down and down into the numb hurt of undesirability she thought she’d accepted, to fully examine its subterranean psychic consequences and line it up with the rejection she was about to hand to Ant now, it would be—what would it even be? She finished and sent the message, and then turned off her phone and threw it on the couch. “FUCK! FUCK! FUUUUUUUCK!” Her neighbour from next door.

Nicole sat with a closed fist to her mouth. A hate rose in her. She put on shoes and went down the stairs to the Double-Q one building over, ordered dinner and one beer, and sat at the plastic laminate bar nursing that one beer for hours, staring at the TV. It was true: she didn’t like sports. Every bar in this town had on sports, just sports, just sports.

When she finally went home, all was quiet and her hate was subdued, sleeping, restfully waiting its turn. She turned on her phone, which had one message. Ant said he understood, that he hoped she knew she’d always have a friend in him, see you around, bella! It was so sweet. Really, he was a sweet boy.

She thought, I didn’t want to know what this felt like. She disrobed. I really didn’t. Slid open the curtains to her bed. There’s only so much you can do with empathy. Put on the slip she liked to sleep in. Enough.

OBSOLUTION

It was more discovery than epiphany: David wasn’t into Iris anymore.

He still loved her. But.

Yeah.

Just a few weeks after Thanksgiving, a mid-December night, that discovery: Iris had rented a movie, was gonna make tacos, but David felt restless and stifled. He begged off: “I might need a night to myself?”

“Sure, you’re allowed to abandon me for once,” Iris joked, and a cavern opened in David’s guts. Just once? He knew then it was over.

(In his short life, David had comforted many women untying messy relationships. With crappy men, nice men, horrifying men. Many of these women hadn’t been happy for a long time. Hadn’t been happy since month four, month five, as they put it. They wished they’d broken it off sooner. David wasn’t going to be like them. Fuck that.)