Good Pet

His words flow over me like treacherous, dark water, but I don’t move. I just let it wash over me and make me numb.

“You’re breaking up with me? Is that it?” These words come out of me with no emotion. No energy, despite how angry I’ve been.

“If it means I don’t have to put up with you doing this to me when I try to make it right with you,” he says.

“Put up with me? What about you? What about me putting up with you? What about all of that? What about all the time I’ve made things work for you, hm?” I’m back to shouting at him. “None of that matters. None of that means anything to you?”

I pause, searching for some sensible thing to say. Something to make him take back how much he’s just said he hates being in this kind of relationship. Unfortunately for me, I can’t find anything. More unfortunately for me, more and more people are staring. Isabella among them. I move away.

“It must not, since you can’t be bothered to put forward any effort. You can’t show any bit of sympathy for my feelings, even though I have a damn good reason for feeling this way.”

Dennis doesn’t answer me. Instead, he speaks to someone away from the phone. Someone I recognize instantly as the other voice I heard before. And it definitely does belong to another woman. No question in my mind.

“I’ll talk to you later, Melissa,” he says as if he didn’t just partially break up with me. At least, I think he did.

“No, you won’t,” I say. “You’ve just said you hate having to talk to me long-distance. You’ve just said you don’t want to do it anymore, so why would you do it anymore after this?” My words are blistering and bitter.

“Fine,” answers Dennis, “no, I won’t talk to you later. I won’t talk to you anymore if you’re going to be like that. Consider us done.”

More tears flood my eyes and down my cheeks. “Fine. Happy now? Free of me? So you can spend more time with that someone you work with, that someone who hasn’t nearly spent as much time with you, or parted with as much for you and because of you. Fine.” My voice shutters, and I know I’m not fine. “Fine. I guess we are done. You were done during our last video chat, weren’t you, and don’t say you weren’t. I heard how eager you were to get off the call with me,” I growl, letting the words rise in my throat and my chest.

“I was,” he answers flatly. “I was going to try to hold out a little longer. Wait to let you down easier than this. Maybe wait until you came to Paris for a visit or something, so I could discuss this with you in person, but seeing as you don’t have any plans to come to Paris, I figured it was now or never.”

I’m as speechless as a human being can be. I don’t even have the wherewithal to breathe.

But my speechless state doesn’t matter to Dennis in the least. He continues with, “You were supposed to come to visit me after a month, Melissa, not five or six or never. That was our original agreement. As far as I’m concerned, if you have plans to stay on with that company, and stay in the States, I’ve got no reason to stay with you. When I thought of having a girlfriend, it wasn’t having someone thousands of miles away.”

I nod, though I know he can’t see me. I take a breath. “Then why not break up with me then? Why not break up with me the day you left? Why wait a whole fucking year?”

“Because I thought I could do it! I thought I could do this, but I can’t! I won’t,” says Dennis, and this is the first real honest thing he’s ever said to me. “I won’t be made unavailable for anyone else because my girlfriend is in the USA.”

After that, I let the phone drop from my ear. The phone is still in my hand, but I hear Dennis say, “Goodbye, Melissa.”

For the first time in the year since he’s been gone, and the months since we started going out, Dennis sounds legitimately sad or heartbroken. And go figure. On the day he breaks up with me.

He leaves me, when we promised to be together.

I hang up the phone, drop it mindlessly into my pants pocket, and wander off toward my car. I’m not sure what I’m going to do now, but I know I’m not going to finish up the day. I’ll stay out of the office. I’ll call Isabella and let her know whenever I get where I’m going and stay there.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Tommy

I’m not going to lie. When Melissa leaves me unexpectedly at lunch because of a phone call (even though I can tell it’s important and emotionally charged), I can’t help it. I feel sad and frustrated. I was just beginning to enjoy my time with her. I was just beginning to hope that we might be able to finish out the whole lunch hour together.