Page 3 of Fate Fiction

M/F

No Archive Warnings Apply

Dani Grant/Evan McLeod, original characters, idiots in love, fluff, mutual pining, sexual tension, forced proximity, angst, emotional baggage, tooth rotting fluff, developing relationship, what if?, sexual content, angst, modern au

one

. . .

How many romantic comedies open with the protagonist stubbing her toe on a pile of boxes of her ex-boyfriend’s stuff?

The act—the terrible, awful, aching act—felt absurdly cliche, and yet here I was, living it.

For the third time this morning.

As I cursed under my breath, I wondered why, despite feeling like I’m living a cheesy romcom trope at present, my life was not as simple as a TV show. It was the moment in the episode where there would be a voiceover of the protagonist cursing in pain and making a snarky comment about it.

I muttered “fuck” under my breath and kicked the box a centimeter closer to the wall.

I glared down at the boxes, neatly labeled in black sharpie. Today they would be vacated from the hallway and I’d finally have the full width of my front entrance available. And, most importantly, my big toe would not be getting any more unwarranted abuse.

Once the blunt physical pain of the aforementioned toe stubbing subsided a wave of dull emotional pain would slam into me. That pain was always harder to shake off.

The grand finale of Nick and I played in my head like a rerun of an eighties sitcom late at night. Sometimes I’d correct the lighting or camera angles. There were different lines of dialogue that could have been said, funnier quips I could have brought up to have made myself seem as fleeting and careless as he was.

I wrote, and rewrote the way things unfolded, but the ending was always the same.

If my relationship had been an actual TV show, there would be half a dozen fanfics where my story with Nick didn’t end that day. The authors would make me turn around and open the door again and call after him, and he’d actually come back. We’d have sex and make up and the story would end there. The author would be satisfied with the “fixed” ending. The readers would voraciously eat it up and fill the comments praising the writing and calling it the “true” ending to our story.

They would all be wrong.

The audience, try as they might, doesn’t always understand characters and their motivations. When the fanfiction writers diverge from the canon plot, there are always pieces of the characters left behind.

There was nothing that could be fixed between Nick and I, and definitely not in a few thousand words.

As I watched dust particles sparkle in the sunbeams streaming through my windows, I considered if I actually wanted to be in one of those fanfics instead of the stark reality I found myself in. Life would be remarkably simple if I existed as a two dimensional character in a private browser on a phone screen late at night.

Nick’s and my entire six year long relationship was mired in apathy. I had wasted months throwing buckets of water out of this sinking ship. This existence of ours that I’d constantly tried to romanticize had been completely devoid of any true romance. I let my life happen around me hoping for sparks, just once.

I was trying to build a fire underwater.

I’d still hung on with a glimmer of hope that my own emotions were an overreaction. I gaslit myself into thinking there was something there. Magic, maybe? Now, at the end of all of it, I felt pathetic.

I was mad at how easy it had felt in my rose-colored haze. I mourned a love that didn’t feel like a challenge, because I didn’t let myself think too hard about our relationship.

Even now, two weeks removed from the final fight we had, I reminisced on him with a sweet nostalgia. There was a shiny gloss over everything from the last six years.

I loved how much of a “Masshole” Nick was, how he would pretend to get mad when I drunkenly booed at Red Sox games, how we’d hold hands with one another standing on the platform waiting for the Red Line to take us home.

For every stolen kiss on the T, there was a night spent ignored, and for every laugh, there were passive aggressive words volleyed over the dinner table.

I conditioned myself into focusing on these bad parts, rather than missing the little that was good. My brain had a fictional spray bottle of water it would squirt every time my thoughts wandered.

Be cool. Be detached. Be like him. I’d remind myself in the shower, on the train, in bed. Like a magic spell, it worked. I didn’t care anymore.

After two weeks of relishing in not giving a fuck, I finally had to admit that it hurt. Not in a soul shredding destructive way, but in an achy strained way, like arthritic bones twisting and warping.

The end had been inevitable.