Unconventional

“Have you even had their drunken noodles?”

“No,” he said defensively. “But that’s what Yelp says.”

“Do you even know what drunken noodles are?”

He made a face, like he’d just swallowed something sour. I let out a little laugh-hiss, through partially-clenched teeth, then went back to typing, just to look busy.

“So I’ll pick you up at—”

“CHRIS,” I interrupted him sternly, as always. “We are not dating.”

Now it was his turn to scoff. He let out a short laugh of dismissal, as if I were being totally silly.

“We haven’t been dating for what is it… six or eight months now?” I asked.

“We’re still dating,” Chris insisted. “Remember what you said? We’re just taking some time off.”

I sighed in exasperation. “The ‘time off’ thing was to soften the blow. I never should’ve said it.”

“But you did.”

I shook my head. “Well I’m telling you now, our breakup is permanent. You know that already. I’ve told you a million times.”

Chris leaned forward in his chair. He was wearing one of his usual blazers over a red printed T-shirt, probably with some witty, geeky saying scrawled across it. I couldn’t even tell with this one. It was written in Japanese.

“We just need to reconnect,” he said slowly, as if it would somehow help me understand. “We can’t keep doing this. C’mon Brooke, we were meant to be together!”

I closed my eyes in sheer frustration and sank back heavily into my chair. The momentum rolled me a few inches away from him.

So it was going to be one of those days…

“Chris—”

“You love me,” he jumped in. “You said it yourself.”

“Chris, that was a year ago.”

“You don’t just stop loving someone,” he pleaded.

Yes you do. Especially if you never really loved that person in the first place.

It all started over a year ago, with a drunken makeout session at the company Christmas party. I’d taken Chris home, back to my apartment, where I proceeded to have mediocre sex with him. This turned into a mediocre relationship, mostly because I was bored and lonely, but also because he seemed like an okay guy.

But then he’d moved in with me…

And things went from bad to worse.

To say Chris was weird would be the understatement of the century. Every odd quirk, every little idiosyncrasy I’d identified while dating him — it was all magnified a thousand-fold, once we were living together. As a boyfriend he was overbearing yet underwhelming, and had to micromanage everything. From the placement of my furniture to the calorie counts of every meal we shared, he never let up, never stopped pushing for total and complete command of our daily lives.

At first he was more annoying than harmful. There was the time he threw out all our condiments and bought new ones, just because he saw a silverfish in the cabinet. And the time he set all the clocks — including the one in my car — fifteen minutes ahead, just so I’d never be late for anything.

But the final straw was when he went through my closet and threw out anything I’d owned before I met him. Something about ‘not needing a past without him’ he’d said, and then grinned triumphantly as if such behavior were totally normal.

We broke up after only eight or ten weeks together. Yet it took another half year to get rid of him. Six long, ass-dragging months to have him dragged practically kicking and screaming from my apartment, thanks to an expedited eviction notice, served by one of my good friends at town hall.

Even after it was over, he refused to accept it. I’d come home to find Chris sitting on the couch, eating spaghetti like he still lived there. Wondering why the hell I was screaming at him, when he’d gone through all the trouble of cooking us both such a nice dinner.

I changed the locks. He changed them back. Special thanks to his friend Eddie the locksmith for that one, although once I had the police threaten to charge him if he ever did it again, my locks stayed mine after that.