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Fuck. I need to calm down.
“No, I didn’t leave anyone at the altar. I called off the wedding a month before. And I handled everything myself. I contacted every single guest to tell them the wedding was off. I didn’t put that on anyone else. This is a massive difference from what you went through.” She defends. But I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.
“What did this poor guy even do to have you call off the wedding?” I mock.
She glares at me. “Are you kidding me right now, Theo? You are so blinded by your anger that you assume I’m the one in the wrong here. You know me.”
“I thought I knew you,” I snap.
“You fucking know me, Theo,” she yells. If I weren’t so mad, I would be stunned that she had it in her to yell.
“All I know about you is that I can’t be with someone like you.”
Her mouth gapes open.
“You don’t know what happened. How can you say that to me?” Her voice is dripping with pain, but I ignore it.
I shift on my feet, shoving my hands in my pockets to keep them still, and jerk my head. “Well? Tell me then.”
She huffs. We face off. She’s in the middle of the room, her own arms crossed, but she drops them to her sides.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry Howard. We had only dated about nine months before he asked me to marry him. I was excited, but as we started to plan the wedding, he began to behave differently.”
“Maybe he realized that weddings and marriage are the fucking worst.” The snide remark hits hard. Her eyes widen and I ignore the stab of regret for saying it.
She stands her ground, though, her hands in tiny fists at her sides, and adds, “Howard cheated on me. Multiple times. And I found out a month before our wedding. So I called it all off.”
I stare at her.
“Am I still the bad guy in this story, Theo?” Her words are full of venom. “I stopped by his place after he missed the cake tasting appointment to find him screwing his neighbor on his couch. I walked right in the front door and he had her bent over the couch and he made eye contact with me as he finished.”
I continue to stare at her and I don’t even know what to say. I don’t know what I’m even feeling right now. I mean, I know I’m feeling pure rage, but I don’t know what I’m more pissed off about. The fact that this woman did the very thing I despise about my ex or that she was treated so poorly by someone.
“He had been screwing her for months. Right after he asked me to marry him. It’s why he wanted me to move into his apartment and sell my condo. So he could keep screwing her. Honestly, I was mad as hell that I’d been cheated on, but I was more relived that I wasn’t committing to a man who clearly didn’t understand commitment.”
All I can manage is a grunt. But she’s on fire now and the words that tumble out of her mouth hit their mark.
“But look at me now, hung up on a man who doesn’t do commitment. I’m such a dumbass for not learning my lesson the first time,” she spits.
“Hold the fuck on right now. I understand commitment. I would never cheat,” I say forcefully.
“Bullshit. You want a fuck buddy, not a wife. There’s a difference between being with someone for the rest of your life and being with someone for just right now.”
“No shit, but you can have a long-term relationship and not get married.” We talked about this. We were on the same page.
“No, Theo. Any man who holds onto a good woman long-term but refuses to marry her is a man who wants to keep his options open.”
“Fuck. That’s not true. That’s not what my plan was,” I spit out.
“Then what was your plan? Keep me around until you got bored? Or I got too many wrinkles? Or until someone better came along?” She’s worked up, her hands flying in the air as she yells at me. “What about what I want? I want to be someone’s wife. I want to have kids someday. What was the plan, Theo?”
“Fuck. I don’t know. Why does everything have to be figured out right now? Why can’t we just worry about the now?” I hiss.
“Because I’m in my thirties and I want a family. The future matters to me. The fact that it doesn't to you should have been a big red flag,” she mutters.
I shake my head, my jaw tight. I say to her, “Well, I guess the future of us doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”
I don’t let the tears dripping down her face soften the blow. This can’t go on.
