I shrugged. “Guess so.”
“Guess so,” he agreed.
He took my glass—which I hadn’t realized was empty—and refilled it.
I swear it was mostly orange juice.
“So Bryce,” he said. “Five years. And he waited until you’d already moved here to tell you he wasn’t coming.”
“To be fair,” I said, because apparently some part of me was still defending Bryce even now, “we’d done long distance before. I thought he just needed time to—“ I stopped. “I don’t know. Wrap things up. In Boston.”
“For two months.”
“When you say it like that?—”
“How would you like me to say it?”
I looked at him. He looked back, one eyebrow slightly raised, and I had the sudden uncomfortable feeling that Nash had very little patience for men who wasted women’s time and absolutely no interest in pretending otherwise.
“He also told me something else,” I said. “We broke up once. Just for like four days, sophomore year. And tonight he told me that during those four days he—” I picked up my glass. Put it down. “He was with someone else.”
Nash grunted.
No other response.
“He said it wasn’t cheating because we weren’t technically together at the time.” I laughed, short and hollow. “Which is true. Technically.”
“That’s not the point.”
“No,” I agreed quietly. “It’s not.”
The bar was very quiet for a moment. The hockey game murmured. The couple in the back corner finally came up for air long enough to ask for their check.
“He told you that tonight,” Nash said. “When he was ending it.”
“Yeah.”
“Why.”
I turned my glass in a slow circle. “I think he wanted me to feel like it was my fault. Like I’d pushed him to it.” I laughed again. “The stupid thing is it almost worked. I’m sitting here insweatpants at a dive bar going through every single thing I did wrong.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” he said. “But I know the kind of man who drops that on someone on his way out the door. And it’s got nothing to do with you.”
I stared at him.
He held my gaze and didn’t look away, and something in my chest that had been wound tight since the phone call—since before the phone call, probably—loosened just slightly.
“Thank you,” I said.
He nodded. Didn’t make it weird. Just refilled my glass and went back to wiping down the bar, and I sat there in my sweatpants feeling, inexplicably, slightly less like my life was over.
TWO
nash
