The Ex Talk

It’s nine thirty by the time we carry our bowls to the couch, along with two bottles of hard pear cider. Rain batters the windows, but Steve seems content to wear Dominic’s undershirt and chew his hippo toy. Dominic flicks on the TV to salt-and-pepper static and lets out a long-suffering sigh.

“Are you trying to get me to break up with you again?” I ask, twirling some noodles with my fork. At least he left some room on the couch this time.

“Sorry,” he admits. “I guess I’m a little on edge.”

I try a softer approach, because he really is, and I’m no longer sure it’s from being forced on this trip with me. “Are you . . . okay?”

He places his bowl on the coffee table and takes a swig of cider. He picks up the bowl before putting it back down again, as though debating whether he wants to tell the truth or put up another shield. Steve waits on the floor for a noodle he knows I’ll probably give him at some point.

“My ex is dating someone new,” Dominic finally says. “It’s all over social media, the two of them together, and it’s been hard to see. And I’ve been a dick all day, haven’t I?”

“A little more than usual, yeah,” I say, and he whacks my arm with the couch pillow. I clutch my arm, feigning injury. “With the exception of making Steve less neurotic. I’m sorry, though. It’s shitty, and I want to tell you as the Token Old that it gets easier, but it really does suck every time. Just in a slightly different way.”

“That’s the thing.” At this, he waits again, spinning his fork through the spaghetti, taunting Steve. “She was my first girlfriend. My . . . only girlfriend.”

“Your only serious girlfriend?” I ask, assuming he’s not counting high school relationships or casual flings.

He shakes his head. “No. My only girlfriend, period. I didn’t date in high school. We met at freshman orientation. We dated all through college, and then we broke up right before I moved out here.”

Oh.

That is an interesting revelation.

And he’s not even being obnoxious about making it a point to clarify they met during undergrad, not grad school, so I know he’s serious.

The house creaks, and Steve whines.

“Steve, no,” I say, and he lies down, wagging his tail. “Dominic. I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

“I should have told you when we were figuring out our relationship, but it still felt kind of raw.” He lets out a sigh, and I get the feeling there’s more to this story. He places his hands on his knees and inspects his knuckles, as though trying to distract himself from the reality of letting me into his private, personal history. “I’m not still in love with her. It’s been about eight months at this point. It’s more that we were together for so long, and we went through so much, that it’s been a strange adjustment.”

“And it was the distance? That ended it, I mean?” I ask, thinking back to the reason he gave me that night we fake broke up.

“Not exactly.” He reaches down to scratch Steve behind the ears. Steve seems to have taken to him immediately, much to my dismay. “We were inseparable, and when you’re together nearly five years, everyone assumes you’ll get married. We were That Couple, the one everyone made fun of because we were always together and so wrapped up in each other, and we pretended to hate it, but we loved it. We loved being that couple.”

My heart twinges. I recall always wanting to be part of a couple like that. The pictures I saw on Facebook—they really did look like that couple.

“So,” he continues as Steve leaps onto the couch to lick Parmesan cheese off his fingers, “when I applied to grad schools during senior year, my goal was to be able to stay at Northwestern. Mia was from Chicago originally. She was premed, and she was taking a year off before applying to med school to gather experience. So it kind of worked out perfectly when I got into Northwestern, both of us sticking around. Except . . .” Here he takes a deep breath. “A couple months after I started grad school, Mia went skiing with some of her friends from high school and—and she was in an accident.”

“Oh my god.”

He’s quick to hold up a hand. “She’s okay now,” he says, and I feel myself relax. “It was bad, but she was really fucking lucky. That whole year, every moment I wasn’t in class or studying, I was with her. Helping her eat, taking her to physical therapy, making sure she was taking her meds. I practically moved into her family’s house. But then a month after I graduated, when I was in the middle of interviewing for jobs all across the country, she said she’d been feeling for a while like she wanted to move on. That she didn’t think she was in love with me anymore.

“It wasn’t that I thought she owed it to me to stay with me after that. I was just completely blindsided. I really thought I was going to marry her. And all that t

ime, she was trying to figure out how to break up with me.”

“You were planning to propose?”

“No, no, but I’d thought about it,” he says, more to the top of Steve’s head than to me. “I guess I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did.”

“I really am sorry. That couldn’t have been easy, doing interviews while that was going on. And then moving back here.” I want to reach out and touch him, the way he did so effortlessly after our meeting with Kent, but I’m not sure how to make it look natural, so I keep my hands in my lap.

“As you can probably guess, she called me Dom, and it just feels hers. It’s hard to let anyone else call me that now,” he says, and I get it. “So you can understand why I wasn’t particularly forthcoming with you before. Especially with someone who, no offense, seemed to really dislike me.”

I hold a hand to my heart. “I don’t dislike you. I find you annoying. It’s different.”

He cracks a smile, but it vanishes in an instant. I want to lean over and keep it affixed to his face. His heartbreak has been etched into him since he started at Pacific Public Radio—I can see that now.